North Atlantic Skyline - - Photographs from the west of Ireland (Galway, Mayo, Clare, Limerick, Roscommon and even Leitrim)

Sailing to Byzantium

An aged man is but a paltry thing,
A tattered coat upon a stick, unless
Soul claps its hands and sing, and louder sing
For every tatter in its mortal dress,
Nor is there singing school but studying
Monuments of its own magnificence;
And therefore I have sailed the seas and come
to the holy city of Byzantium.*

Like a petrified sea, the stone coastline at Tiraun Point** mimic the waves that have carved and polished them over millenia. Beyond this shore lies Inishkea North. Fifteen hundred years ago, purple dye was harvested from dog whelk for use in garments. The cost of extraction meant that only the most regal and noble (ok, the richest) could afford to such garments. According to Mary Mulvihill***, the Inishkea dyes coloured the garments of noblemen (and women too, no doubt) across Europe all the way to Byzantium itself (which the Celts had once conquered, almost a thousand years earlier)

* W. B. Yeats, Sailing to Byzantium

** Mullet Peninsula, North Mayo.

***Ingenious Ireland.