Description
My eye, trained to seek form and light, stopped short—not at a mountain, but at a wave. Ben Wisken does not rise from the Sligo earth; it is forever crashing. The summit ridge is a perfect, frozen crest, a great green and gray curl of solid earth arrested at the very moment before it breaks. The late afternoon sun rakes across its western face, carving the slopes into deep troughs and brilliant highlights, heightening the dizzying illusion. In that liquid, golden light, the solid rock seems to shimmer with potential energy, as if the next gust of wind might set the whole impossible mass into motion, sending it thundering inland over the quiet fields. I fumbled for my camera, not to capture a landscape, but to attempt the impossible: to photograph a moment of perfect, perpetual suspension, a silent roar written in stone. Soon after, I climbed to its summit and stood on the crest of that wave, just a metre or two of grey stone between me and a sheer drop two hundred metres to the earth.
Sligo, Ireland.
For more Sligo mountain shots see here
and here!
