The ups and downs of photographing Irish mountains

I would never have embarked on a career as a landscape photographer without first falling in love with the Irish mountains. Over the last 20 years I’ve been lucky enough to photograph many of the great ranges of the world: the Himalaya, the Alps, the Rockies and the incredible granite spires of southern Patagonia. Yet the Irish mountains have always retained a hold on my imagination.

Mountain photography is not easy. Opportunities to capture the Irish mountains at their best tend to be fleeting: like an antisocial recluse, they may spend weeks on end veiled in cloud and rain. There is also the very physical challenge of getting into position at the right time. Despite remarkable advances in camera technology, my equipment is undoubtedly heavier now than it was in the pre-digital era. Carrying several kilos of camera gear up and down a mountain is always a challenge but even more so when undertaken in the dark in order to shoot from a mountain summit during the “magic hour” of sunrise or sunset.

Even then, the outcome is never certain. Mountain weather is unpredictable and capricious, with a remarkable tendency to obscure views at the wrong moment. On more occasions than I can remember I’ve missed the moment, or failed to do it justice in my images. But once in a while, as the light plays over the mountains as if by command, I’ve made the right decisions and created images that I hope go at least some way to conveying the power and majesty of the Irish mountains at their best.

The creation of this book has been time-consuming and laborious, but has rewarded me with experiences that will endure long after the hardships have been forgotten. I recall a magical day of crystalline light in late September, spent largely alone on the summit of Ireland’s highest mountain, Carrauntoohil, with hundred-mile views in every direction and rainbows materialising and dissolving, hues changing and shifting. Billowing shower clouds drifted grey jellyfish tendrils and silver curtains of rain across the mountains of the Iveragh Peninsula. I remember the sun sinking slowly into the west as I went about my business, camera in hand, attempting to cram an enormity of space and light into a small box of metal, plastic and glass. Finally, as lights twinkled out across the lowlands, I packed up and began the descent, skittering down the rocky trail as the world closed in to the circle of my torchlight and the canopy of stars.

There is a mountain in the west of Ireland so remote that it probably sees fewer ascents in an average year than Everest. Slieve Carr lies at the heart of Ballycroy National Park and Ireland’s first designated wilderness area – Wild Nephin. Just to reach the bottom of the mountain requires several kilometres of walking or mountain biking along lonely forestry trails.

I remember a solo trip to Slieve Carr during the bitter cold of January 2010. The car thermometer read -13°C as I set out on my bike to negotiate forest tracks made treacherous by a layer of refrozen snow. After stashing my bike at the forest’s edge I climbed onto the open mountainside and into the winter sunshine, then up through one of the eastern corries, my feet no longer feeling the bottom of the deep, wind-drifted snow, lungs seared by the acidic burn of breathing hard in the cold air.

On the broad summit ridge I waded through 30cm of powdery snow to the huge summit cairn, a tomb built by our earliest ancestors as a final resting place for some king or queen to look out eternally over their kingdom. The average population density on our planet stands at about people per square kilometre. Here I was on Ireland’s loneliest summit with perhaps 70 square kilometres all to myself.

Later in the afternoon, as I stood high on the southern shoulder of the mountain waiting with my camera for the warming of the light on the snow, I fought an insistent, nagging voice telling me to descend. It was perhaps the voice of instinct, of the hillwalking rule book, but I was also keenly aware of just how remote my position was, how long the return journey in dark, freezing conditions, how the night renders the mountain landscape an indifferent minefield of trap and treachery. But I stood my ground, finally rewarded with the images I had wanted. Then I packed up and descended carefully into the banks of freezing fog gathering in the valley, by turns relieved, exhausted and humbled to have experienced the gamut of emotions that the mountains can evoke: determination, exhilaration, levity, loneliness, fear, but most of all wonder.

The Mountains of Ireland by Gareth McCormack is published by The Collins Press, price €29.99. It is available in all good bookshops and from www.collinspress.ie/the-mountains-of-ireland.html

For more about Gareth see: www.garethmccormack.com