Ireland hardens as it goes west. The soil becomes bare and rocky. The roads become small and winding. Miles lengthen. Time slows. In fact, there are fields and mountains where it has never moved at all. This is Connemara. Not a county, not a province. A place that existed before counties, before provinces. A land. A stillness. As they left the soft tissue of the Midlands and hit the hard bone of the West, they became silent. It was a landscape that demanded silence. Gray mountains drifted by in monarchical solemnity. Sheep gazed out at them from over drystone walls older than the Great Pyramid
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