Near Mannin Castle, Co. Galway

Another fanboying over Manannán mac Lir in the making

Experimenting on lemons 1 - academic pencil lemon 2 - my normal lemon 3 - painterly lemon 4 - suprematist lemon 5 - expressionist lemon 6 - pointillist lemon

Tochmarc Étaíne in a nutshell

The Sun King’s goblet 🐍

The Navigator

Have you ever walked the lonesome hills and heard the curlews cry? Or seen the raven black as night upon a windswept sky? To walk the purple heather and hear the westwind cry To know that's where the rapparee must die... (The Pogues - Young Ned of the Hill)

A birthday present for a friend who is not on Tumblr - her OC, Pani Agnieszka, a magician in an alternative-universe magical 1920s Poland

The Wren Prince VII - The Snail Druid

A character from the dark fantasy book I’m writing. Spoiler alert: sapphic romance incoming

Tonaroasty (Tóin an Róistigh, something along the lines of 'The bottom end of de Roche lands') is a medieval ghost village in Co. Galway I accidentally came across when out to shoot a stone circle on a barrow (I did take photos of it too). Judging from the onomastics (and from the satellite photos clearly showing rectangular foundations and what seems to be a cross-shaped church) it was an Anglo-Norman settlement, so built no later than 12th c. This also gives us a clue about how and why it ended. When the Black Death reached Ireland, the Gaels were in a more advantageous position than the Normans as they lived in less crowded conditions and did not have any religious prejudice about cats (hence, less rats and less fleas carrying plague). The Norman settlers were traditionally living in a more compact way, were in frequent contact with people from crowded castles, and the relationship between cats and folk Christianity soon turned to be rocky at best (to put it very mildly). Therefore, the plague was feasting on them at will, and it was one of the factors that contributed to the subsequent Gaelicisation of the surviving Anglo-Norman nobility. The plague hypothesis also explains quite neatly why the site has not been used for settlement again ever since.