What a five-minute conversation taught me about Ireland.
I’ve been traveling the roads of Ireland for more than fifty years. I know the landscape the way you know an old friend — by its moods, its silences, the way light falls differently on the same bog depending on the hour. Every photography trip to Ireland I’ve led has surprised me. Ireland always finds a way.
This is a story about a phone call I almost didn’t make.
We were passing through Leenane — that small village at the head of Killary Fjord, where the long silver water cuts between Galway and Mayo. I had a mission. We were heading to the Connemara Pony Show and I was already thinking two days ahead, looking for a place where I might photograph ponies running loose in a field. Not at a show. Not posed. The real thing.
The hotel in Leenane had seaweed baths — the old kind, deep Victorian tubs filled with warm seawater and harvested Atlantic kelp. While our small group settled in, I got talking with Brenda at the front desk.
I asked if she knew anyone with Connemara ponies.
Brenda picked up the phone.
Within five minutes she had called her neighbor, a man named Joe Welsh who kept ponies on his land nearby. We organized a time. He’d meet us on the road — his place was hard to find — and we could follow him in.
Two days later, we spotted him waiting: the smallest, brightest yellow van I have ever seen. Banana yellow. The kind of yellow that makes you smile before you’ve even stopped the bus. We followed it down lanes I would never have found on my own, until we pulled up to his farm.
Joe met us at the bus, bucket of oats in hand, said hello, and brought us into the field. There were five ponies waiting. Connemara ponies are native to this part of Ireland — compact, hardy, and extraordinarily beautiful, bred for this landscape over centuries. When he was ready, he got them moving.
What happened next was the kind of thing you can’t plan or direct. It’s what every photographer comes to Connemara hoping to find. Five ponies running across a Connemara hillside, eight photographers scattered across the field working from every angle.
After the field, Joe took us down the path to his beach. It’s a stretch of Atlantic shoreline that looks unremarkable until he tells you what was filmed there.
The 1990 Irish film The Field was shot on his property. In the final scene, a herd of cattle are driven off the edge of a coastal cliff — one of the most devastating moments in Irish cinema. The film is about land, about what it means to belong to a piece of ground so completely that losing it undoes you. I stood on that beach feeling grateful to have been shown it.
Then Joe said to me — do you want more ponies?
His niece had two up at Ashleagh Falls, not far away.
Yes, of course.
We followed the yellow van for about half an hour through Connemara. Ashleagh Falls drops over a wide shelf of rock where the Erriff River meets the tidal water below. In spring the Atlantic salmon run upstream past the falls — you could see them jumping as we arrived.
Joe went to get the ponies from the field and brought them down to the riverbank. The falls roared behind them. The salmon were running.
We stayed until we had to go.
I hadn’t planned any of this. Neither had Joe. It unfolded the way so many of the best things do in Ireland — from one conversation, one question asked at the right moment, one person who picked up the phone and called a neighbor.
The people of Ireland are like that. Open, generous, and genuinely pleased to share what they have.
I’ve been leading small group photography trips to Ireland for several years now — specifically through the west of Ireland, the Connemara coastline, and the backroads most visitors never find. Every trip is different — the itinerary is intentionally fluid, guided by weather, light, and what opens up when you slow down and pay attention. Some of the best moments have come from exactly this kind of thing: a conversation at a front desk, a phone call to a neighbor, a banana yellow van waiting on a country road.
This is why I call the trip Without a Map.
Not because we don’t know where we’re going. But because the places that matter most can’t be put on any map in advance.
If this sounds like the Ireland you’ve been looking for, I’d love to show it to you.
Learn more about the Ireland trip →
Is Ireland on your bucket list? I’d love to know what draws you there.
Be well….be creative,
Clare
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