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Sunday 28 September 2014

The North Bull

I finally got round to walking out to the North Bull Island and getting a look at Dublin Bay from the other side. I parked up by Alfie Byrne Rd which gave me a 10km round trip walk out to the Star of the Sea and back.

The light was pretty poor at the start but got quite interesting as the day progressed. This is the only shot I took in the first hour that was worth keeping, and only because it has some inbound traffic and both the North Bull and Poolbeg Lighthouses in it.

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Once I was out on the North Bull itself the light finally started to work. It was still hit and miss, mostly miss but it was fun trying to catch just the right moment as the sun peaked in and out of the clouds.

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I love this sign. It’s huge, and totally bonkers. It has the correct proportions for a normal street sign but it’s probably 20ft high. Made me feel like I was a hobbit wandering around. There’s a wider shot later that shows it in context but I wanted to get the detail too, it’s very evocative of a time when people actually made things by hand.

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Coming up to the end of the wall the beach stretches off on the north side. I think the rocks are there to help encourage the sand to build up and stabilise but I’m not sure. The island has pretty much built itself up on this side of the wall without any other help since Captain Bligh built it as far as I know.

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And so to the end of the walk, marked by the Star of the Sea. It’s not the prettiest of monumental things but it’s a fair enough marker I suppose. The North Bull Lighthouse is actually at the end of the wall but the last few hundred metres are covered at higher tides. You can see that it’s pretty shallow along a line out from the walkway. The cormorants seem to quite like it too.

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There were some folks sailing out past the Poolbeg Lighthouse. The spinnaker crew on this boat were not having a good day, it took me many minutes to get a picture where it was reasonably well filled.

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And I got a shot of the North Bank Lighthouse while I was here. I never got a good one from the south side.

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With the Howth Lighthouse in the distance wrapping up this tour of some of the Dublin Bay lighthouses.

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On the way back I was trying to get a better context shot of the Telegraph Cable sign. I need to practice this sort of thing. The HDR option on the camera kind of worked this time but I’m not really a fan of how Nikon implements the effect. It does show just how ginormous the sign is at least. I think the granite post in the second shot is some sort of distance marker. There were two or three and they seem to mark out 1000 foot sections. 

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And finally some clouds and the Maui Sculpture on the Clontarf Promenade. 

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