Come fly with me

UNTIL we begin issuing citizenship papers to the birds, Kevin Dwyer will remain one of a small, select band of Irishmen as familiar with Ireland from above as they are from the ground.

But it was from terra firma that Dwyer took his first ‘aerial’ shot. Chasing a commission in 1989, he was required to submit an example of aerial photography. The only problem was he had none. So, he sent a photo of Derrynane and the Kenmare River taken from a nearby mountain top, 1,500ft above sea-level. It was enough to get him the job but even more so, it led to 20 years spent surveying this country from a ‘bird’s eye view’.

“In sunny weather,” Dwyer says, “Ireland is one of the most beautiful places in the world.” Certainly, his latest book, Dwyer’s Ireland, is a sumptuous collection confirming that assertion but equally it fascinates as a pictorial document of human life on this green island on the fringes of Europe: from Iron Age ringforts to monastic settlements of the early Middle Ages to pre- and post-Famine smallholdings right up to the brash, modern development of the Celtic Tiger.