Posts Tagged ‘the Burren Way’
Walking the Burren Way
Photograph taken on the Burren Way February 2009
I love being somewhere in nature where I turn a full circle and don’t see a house. This photograph was taken during one of these times, I had a few of these moments along the Burren way. A couple of weeks ago I walked the Burren way from our house to Ballyvaughan and back again, it took three days and each day I walked 20kms or slightly more, I never like to say I have walked less then I actually have!
I slept in a tent for the two nights, the first night when I set up camp in a field with a bull and family and had to move just as it was starting to get dark! I found another place to camp, I think it might have been a fairy ring, it was full of cow poo but I found an area just big enough for the tent in between them!
This photograph was taken after a very steep climb from the road out of Ballyvaughan. A dog decided to be my guide, a bit like the self employed guides in Marrakech who pretend they are not guiding you but keep turning up casually as if you both just happened to be going the same way!
The Burren Way is a wonderful walk apart from the bits on the busier roads, and the fact that you have to buy expensive bottled water. Apart from there being a lovely water fountain in Ballyvaughan I could not find any where else to get water. This was one of the great things about the Camino de Santiago, there are “fuentes” (fountains) every 2 or 3 hours walk apart, so you don’t have to carry much water. If only the Burren way took a month to walk too!
Growing and a Big Birthday!
Oil on canvas “Growing” Marianne Potterton February 2009
After a while of using pure pigments and enjoying how freeing it is to paint in a looser way with them I have brought this enjoyment back to the oil paints too. it looks quite different because it is a different material but it feels more fluid like the paintings I did with the pigments. In this painting the face is merging with the landscape as if it was growing out of it, like the flowers. Alan Watts describes the earth as peopling like an apple tree apples, that we grow and are not made.
I have just come back from three days of walking The Burren Way and back, I slept two nights in a tent, it was good to sleep on the earth and spend so much time outside in nature, I was also very happy to come back to my family and have a hot bath lovingly run for me. The Burren Way is a beautiful walk especially the tracks and paths where you can not see any houses from. Having walked the Camino de Santiago a few times, seeing the yellow or white arrows on a stone that was part of a style/seat, there were three of them on the way to Ballyvaughan, they were beautiful, thank you who ever made them for the walkers!
I had a wonderful Birthday yesterday, we ate mussels on Fanore beach and watched a beautiful sunset! I was able to take this amazing Birthday present of a Net Book from James to blog from the beach, or I could have written if I had not been having such a nice time! My old lap top was killed by an earwig! That is why I have not been writing recently, hopefully now I will be writing from lots of weird and wonderful places!
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