The great Irish naturalist Robert Lloyd Praeger wrote in 1937 that from Mallaranny on Clew Bay one could walk thirty miles northwards "to the giant cliffs of North Mayo, and your foot need never leave the heather save that twice you cross a road, fence-less, winding like a narrow white ribbon through the endless brown bog. And if your course lies east of Bangor, you will hardly even see a house. "Extraordinarily, the same thing holds true today, as does his observation that the drive along the road on "the biggest bog in Ireland," from Bangor to Crossmolina, "is almost frightening in its isolation". The bogs nearby have yielded up some of the best preserved relics of neolithic man at Ceide Fields. This landscape is liberally pitted with lakes and pools, and underlain by a varied and in places extremely ancient geology, rocks that make their presence felt only along the coastline in the form of superb sea cliffs and stacks, and inland in isolated promi-nences and the hard quartzites of the Nephin Beg mountain range. Generally, how-ever, the stone is densely covered by some 400 square miles of aptly named blanket bog. Once you are away from the shore, the heavy, saturated vegetative mantle lays another blanket over the land, a blanket of silence. This landscape has provided inspiration for such great artists such as Jack B. Yeats and Paul Henry, the plays of John M. Synge And also Irelands greatest poet W.B. Yeats. Thanks for taking time to look and any comments you care to make