About this photograph
A ruined castle keeps watch over the strand as an Atlantic squall sweeps in across the bay. Rain, sun and old stone, all in the same breath.
This is Ballybunion Castle, built in the early sixteenth century by the Geraldine Fitzmaurices on the site of a far older promontory fort. It was destroyed in 1582, and today little more than a single tall wall survives, standing on the cliff between the Ladies Beach and the Men's Beach. It has been protected as a national monument since the 1920s.
Below it, the north Kerry coast does what it does best. A squall is coming in off the Atlantic, rain already falling at sea, while the sun still holds on the sand and the long grass in the foreground. This is the Wild Atlantic Way as people actually live it: four seasons in an afternoon, on one of the finest beaches in Ireland.
Most photographs of Irish castles wait for blue skies. This one keeps the weather in, and the ruin looks all the better for it: a wall that has stood through more than four centuries of Atlantic storms, and looks ready for a few more.
