A ruin on the Beara peninsula
It was a tithe cottage, perched on its own hillside, five or six acres of land spilling down to a rugged stretch of shoreline. A small wild, beautiful, isolated ruin dating to pre-Famine times, late 18th century at least, with foundations that likely went back much further.
The road in from Reentrisk to Allihies was narrow and full of twists, a boreen built with horses in mind, and when the house came into view below and on my right the noon-time light seeped momentarily chalky through the bluish knots of rain-cloud, and the ocean beyond the fall of land stretched off into the distance as a soft, dusky blanket pocked with the dapple of an entire submerged galaxy.
