Sunday, January 1, 2012

Ireland, Malin Head

Main Well, Ireland
Today was County Donegal - northwestern Ireland. Headed out early wanting to make Malin Head, the farthest northerly point in Ireland. As usual in Ireland, if you don't like the weather just wait 5 minutes and it changes.....there were a minimum of 10-12 weather changes today from rain, to sun to hail to winds around 50 miles per hour........I can honestly say being pelted with sleet really stings......

PS: Both photos on this page were taken within one half hour of each other.....

At any rate we stumbled upon a rocky beach around three miles from Malin Head....the car was actually parked just behind where this image was made...This rock was just in front of Malin Well (the sleet adn rain came in so hard I never got that image) which contains both a natural spring as well as a natural cave. Since pagan times locals have viewed these as holy....The spring water was though to cure disease. Legend has it that a hermit once lived in the cave and no matter how many people entered there was always room for more....If only the weather had held up..but at worst a wee bit of a history lesson...

Not sure about anyone else but I see a fairly well defined face in this rock formation.....

The image below is an iPhone4s panoramic image looking east from the top of Malin Head... luckily there were some old military structures still standing to block the wind....

Malin Head is on the Inishowen Peninsula... According to Wikipedia during WWII the Irish Government allow the British to site two radio direction finders on the head. This was a top secret operation - The RDF equipment was to to monitor U-Boat and aerial activity in the North Atlantic. After the war it became a weather station..Several of these structures are still standing today...
Looking East from Malin Head






2 comments:

  1. This is absolutely amazing!
    Guess one really needs a good spirit to live in Northwestern Ireland.

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  2. The looking east image is really lovely. The term "rugged beauty" could have been coined to describe the northwest corner of Ireland.

    I was interested to read that the Irish Government allowed the British to site two radio direction finders in Donegal. Officially, Ireland was neutral in WWII, a position which infuriated the British Government, particularly Churchill, who had been a member of British Government team which had negotiated with the Irish in 1922 on the partition of Ireland and still considered Ireland to be little more than "West Britain". He pressurized the Irish Government to allow the British navy to use Irish ports and, when the Irish refused, he had plans drawn up for a military invasion of Ireland. However, those plans were never put into practice, thank goodness.

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