Description

THE CLIFFS OF MOHER. COUNTY CLARE. IRELAND.

Like a lot of my more recent work, it’s taken a good while to finish. I started this back in 2016 and have been adding to it every time I have had an opportunity to work on it. Like a lot of my art, the plan goes out the window very quickly. Once the drawing begins it takes on a life of its own and over time more and more elements are slowly added or excluded. Like all my Celtic work it is primarily a linear work.
When the preparatory pencil sketches are finished I move to inking which is probably the most time-consuming part of this entire exercise and one of the most enjoyable.

The insets are always to the front of my mind designing a work like this one and the question is always a simple one: what goes into them? Have I a mythological basis for any additions to what is already such a marvelous iconic landscape? In this case, I was very fortunate having County Clare roots.

My mom hailed from Kilmaely, County Clare, so this one is for her and her influence is clearly visible in the inset painting relating to the stories she and her very old aunt, my minder when I was a nipper, told me as I grew up.
This aunt was a fountain of knowledge of Irish history and family history and she told me so many stories when I was a kid, often scary as hell. Of course, everything is much more vivid and alive when we are young but the story of the rather vindictive but seductive Moher Mermaid always stayed with me -and I remembered too the tales of the legendary, ghostly white horse that appeared from time to time around the Hags Head. It was there that a British Army lookout tower, called Moher Tower, was built in 1780 to watch out for the expected French Revolutionary Army invasion fleet during the Napoleonic wars.
This tower was built on the site of an ancient, prehistoric promontory fort, not unlike Dún Aengusa or Dún Conor on the Aran islands and the loss to our history of this prehistoric fortress is probably incalculable as the stone work was used in the building of the lookout tower. I have searched hard for any visual representation of this ancient fortress but I have had no luck so far and all my research is based on local knowledge, legend and real history.
Today the beautiful cliffs are a huge tourist attraction and deservedly so, they are magnificent and imposing as the Grand Canyon and on a dark rainy day, they have a sinister magic all their own.

These great cliffs run for over 14 kilometres and rise nearly 120 metres (400 feet) above the ocean, reaching their maximum height of 214 metres (700 feet) just north of O’Brien’s Tower, a stone round tower built in 1835 by Sir Con O’Brien of the royal O’Brien line of Ireland dating back to the time of Brian Boru, the greatest High King of Ireland.