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

Parklife

UPDATE 27/10/2005. Ok, the original crop is beginning to bug me too.

Maybe I'm giving away my hillbilly roots by greeting each new road with open-mouthed wonder. A trip up to the north-west over the weekend was a journey alternating between the more familiar twisting, unmarked boreens of my youth linked together by stretches of shiny autobahn any Teuton would envy (and helped pay for).

No country town is complete without a bypass (this picture of footballers warming up for a Sunday morning game on a foggy autumn morning yesterday was taken when I stopped briefly on the Boyle bypass). Thanks to the Sligo bypass, one can literally cross the city in five minutes - and a journey over the Curlew mountains is no longer the gear-juddering haul in third gear behind a line of trucks and tractors.

The explosion of car ownership means that even towns not on a main commuter orartial route need the relief of the bypass just to keep functioning (and no local politician ever lost votes by promising to build one). In east Galway, the Loughrea bypass will be open soon - ahead of schedule. The first sod was turned a year ago by the then-Transport Minister, Seamus Brennan - they'll get a much bigger sod to open it, no doubt. In west Galway, the debate rages over whether the next big road west should be an upgrade of the N59 to Clifden or a new road out to Rossaveel. Whichever gets built, it will only help create faster traffic jams in the city. No-one seems to know quite how to solve Galway's logjams, even if the solution doesn't need to amount to much more than a few cans of paint for bus lanes.

roscommon,ireland, irishblogs,monasette

PS: The photographers among you are probably thinking that a tighter crop would be a much more effective photograph, and you'd be right [I've since changed the photo to show a more tightly edited picture]. A picture of just the kicker and the two cows near him, or a picture that was cropped on the right just to the right of the cow looking to camera would probably be the shot I'd use if I ever got round to entering competitions. But I kinda like this one best, even if it does blow the formatting on the page - it's probably a cow thing.

Posted by Monasette at October 24, 2005 06:49 PM