Wednesday 10 July 2013

Abandoned boats on Rathlin Island












8 comments:

  1. This must have been photo-paradise for you WB :-)

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  2. Very pretty rust and decay here, Duncan, especially the bottom shot, capturing the lovely quaint vomitous hues of green and pink which Man and Time hath wrough upon Ancient Iron. (:/>@**!!

    Were I to have a proprietary interest in a place you were rumoured to be visiting, I'd surely throw on a fresh coat of paint.

    And speaking of rusted Iron-y... What exactly is it that folk who live in relatively undecayed modern circumstances find so fascinating in decay, please? A kind of nostalgie du junk??

    What is it about rust and decay that I find so unsettling?

    (Perhaps it's the same problem some people have with mirrors.)

    In any case, poking about among the local (resident) geograph-ers of Rathlin Island, with their common curious fixation upon the macro-scape, it proved possible to turn up some lovely... what would be the word? establishing shots? that actually contained such undecayed things as sea, cloud, and space. Reassuring that.

    Meditating a bit upon the pleasant findings therefrom, one was almost tempted to murmur inaudibly, Well, lovely place, innit? -- that is, but for or perhaps notwithstanding nagging considerations of historical political allegiances, those rusted chains connecting all these admittedly fascinating local micro-instances of decay with that other larger stuffed-macassar-oid mass of even greater accumulated decay, upon which the sun is said to have latterly set (though some don't yet really believe it), Empire?

    But returning to our proper subject here, the evidences of modern civilization as such, it was interesting to note the bizarre lengths to which some Rathlin Islanders are willing to go, simply to hook up to the telly.

    (You don't suppose, taking this deterioration theme to its horror-flick extreme, these impromptu-tech-enhanced denizens could be tuning into the BBC Rust Programme??)

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  3. BTW do forgive that interesting first-sentence neologism "wrough", perhaps compounded of the conscious intent to say "wrought" and the unconscious, terminal-insomniac simulation of the sense of roughness induced by the hard treatment by one's institutional handlers, with their insistent forcible insertion of that rusty iron feeding-tube.

    (These sleep-deprivation experiments we're having should be reserved for the poetic little rodent victims of "science", I say!)

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  4. These photographs give us another interpretation of that rusty old image "Abandon ship!"

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  5. Marie

    It was a fascinating place but circumstance called me away too soon. I envy my friends who caught sight of a family of Irish hares atop a hill. A hare's something I've always wanted to see.

    Tom,

    An island as pretty as this and it's the old vomitous hues that catch the eye. THAT's unsettling. The English have fed that soil with blood a good many times it's true and that other mass is now rotted to a hollow. What is it to be English now? A sash and a bowler hat maybe as close as it gets. The 6 counties are beautiful and broken.

    You need to give the handlers the fierce Gael's eye. Let the notion drop in that they themselves are the test subjects.

    Vassilis,

    I'm guessing it's the dwindling fish stocks that left the poor buggers abandoned. The drop in numbers is horrifying.

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  6. beautiful old pieces!!

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  7. These old boats are always worth having a nose about in.

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