October 9.

We spent the day in County Cork driving from Skibbereen around to the fishing villages of Baltimore and Union Hall, visited a large number of beaches including Galley Head, then carried onto Kinsale via the Drombeg Stone Circle and the Timoleague Friary Ruins. 

Galley Head has it all: a private castle, an underground inlet in spectacular rock formations and a private lighthouse.

Tiny white flowers scattered up a grassy slope.The ruins of the castle wall.The castle is ‘private property, nobody allowed across fields, fishing or otherwise’.
As beautiful as the stone ruins were they were nothing compared to what the cliffs had in store for us.
An array of colours, here the jagged stones reveal pale greens with a touch of rust in amongst the grey.A stone that is pure rust with brown stripes.Another close up of the rocks, pale sandy tones and black striped this time.And the long shot of the same stones with the waves crashing against them. Somewhere there was supposed to be an underground channel but it wasn’t here.
Black stripes with hints of purple.Long shot of the same stones with more ocean crashing.Mother Nature tries out some graphic design on the rocky textured cliffs.Long shot of the ‘graphic’ stones with an odd patchwork rust section closer by. And here is the underground tunnel we were looking for.The underground tunnel comes out as a deep channel cut into the nearby hill. That’s me looking very tiny at the end there. Carrying on along the grassy slope takes us past more rocks, not as graphic but with a lovely mauve that makes the bright green of the grass pop out. And the reward at the end of the walk: a picture-perfect lighthouse.

Galley head is at the far right of this map.

• More on our 2015 trip to Ireland.
• More of Frank’s Tuesday Photo Challenge: Stone.