Filming These Islands

On reading of this structure reported in the Irish Times in 2011 (Fig. 76) the initial appeal (beyond the incongruity of this structure on the front page of a national newspaper, and its collision with adjacent headlines), was its relationship with the land.^{137 137.} Available at: https: //www.irishtimes.com/news/mcnamara-behind-mysterious-achill-henge-1.17867 [Accessed 4 March 2024  Rather than enquire into the developer’s intentions we saw this as a ‘text’ available for appropriation. Tom and I immediately decided that we would visit it and that I would film this encounter, thus the footage for These Islands is thought about as field-recordings. I vividly remember walking from a distance through the bog towards the structure and recording successive views along my approach. High winds meant the camera shook while on the tripod. Most of the audio was hampered by wind-thumps (I wasn’t adequately prepared). The establishing shots show the surprising slightness of this large structure when seen across the scarred bog commonage. Reaching the gravelled track near the structure I recorded the sound of my footsteps and my breathing as the camera hopped unevenly in my hands, and the camerawork reflects the uneven footing beneath. While I walked the mud-track perimeter I allowed the camera to tumble and sway as I made my way around, consciously embedding my physical presence in the footage – a V-Effect that would constantly draw the viewer to the spectacle and construct of the film. I wanted to capture a sense of the encounter but at the same make the viewer aware of this footage as one encounter, not a definitive representation of the structure. I was after all entirely external to its existence, an intruder. This framing in turn shaped my own attitude and encounter giving me objective distance. On noticing the hollowness of the piers I took to throwing stones and rubble at them, recording the sounds – I was ‘playing’ the otherwise silent structure as sound source, as if to yield another type of information from it. As the light changed and the weather calmed the impression was different, and I filmed locked-off shots in a more conscientious effort to gather multiple viewpoints.