Kerry Landscape Singing paintings by Robert Egginton

Come away O human child,

To the waters and the wild ...

Is this Yeats calling to all humanity to be made sane by nature? Nature that in these pictures is largely unchanged since before the first people arrived here.

'Gap of Dunloe' (no. 1) is as it was when the first waters flowed through here after the pass had been gouged out by two million years of ice.

There is nothing in the sea, sand and mountain backdrop that was any different in the scene when, according to legend, Amergin the poet was the first person to set foot on Ireland here at 'Low Tide, Ballinskelligs' (no. 4).

Our first peoples hunted for their meat and gathered edible plants. They would not be in the slightest disorientated if they were to look out at the McGillicuddy Reeks across the waters of the 'Upper Lake' (no. 14).

Daniel O'Connell, the Liberator, would still be drawn back again and again to 'Derrynane Bay' (no. 13) where he was revived to face the ravages of law and politics.

In the month of October red stags are bellowing in the foothills of the McGillicuddy Reeks, along 'The Gaddagh River' (no. 28) as they have done, for more than 10,000 years, when warning off rivals for their harem in the annual rut.

Twice ever day since the waters were freed from the grip of ice, seawaters filled the river estuary here at 'Sneem' (no. 16). The mingling salmon, sea and brown trout, the supply of fresh water and the mild climate made this an obvious place for early man to camp.

Early man would have thought that this lone boatman in 'Lough Leane' (no. 17) was more than likely fishing but might also have been on a journey, because, up to comparatively recently, it was only possible to travel with relative ease over sea, river and lake.

Eventually man made his mark even in the most inaccessible places. Like the North American conifers and the slated, two story house in 'Glencar River at Blackstones Bridge' (no. 3).

When eventually there were tracks every journey was slow, difficult and very often dangerous before the building of beautiful stone bridges, that blended so effectively with the landscape, like that in 'River by the Conor Pass' (no. 25).

Yeats invites human kind to come to the wild

With a fairy, hand in hand,

For the world's more full of weeping than you can understand.

- Frank Lewis

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