North View

Views and photographs are today’s story. It starts with sunrise and sunset panoramas taken five hours and thirty-five minutes apart after a four year gap. True north is through the declivity between the two crowns about a quarter of the way in from the right of the lower photograph. My view is restricted on the right by a big cedar and the left is terminated by our window frame. The photographs were not conceived to be perfectly aligned in time or space.

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The view is about ten kilometres across. On the other side, the north side of Dublin Bay, the vista is from the eastern Dublin suburb of Ringsend (on your right) to Bailey on the Hill of Howth (to the left).

The two chimneys beyond the water are Dublin icons at the now defunct Poolbeg Generating Station on the south side of The Liffey. The adjacent retired military barracks of the Pigeon House provides the more common name for them, Pigeonhouse having earlier been the packet port for Dublin. Geographically, these are southside because they are south of The Liffey. To us in this view, they appear north of the bay that extends into Sandymount, invisible to us because of the coastal concave embayment.

To the south of the water, we can see a church spire on the hill at Mounttown, a rise that hides Monkstown and Blackrock from our view.

The mouth of The Liffey is visible as the Poolbeg lights, red and green seen here in Sunrise. They are at the end of the South Wall, the name of the pier out to Poolbeg which is clearly visible as a finger extending out into deep waters. These lights guide the shipping into Dublin Port.

The pincer-like harbour piers in the foreground are those of Dun Laoghaire. And the navigation lights, red and green, mark the entrance to what used to be a principal ferry port. Two churches flank the Town Hall and the Marine Hotel, the stickleback roof of the library visible to the east of the lower spire.

The suburbs on the north side of the bay run flat from Clontarf to Dollymount and Raheny, to Kilbarrack and Sutton before rising towards Bailey.

This view is not permanent. Protected views are things cities can organise for themselves (like London has). We used not have an uninterrupted view of Dun Laoghaire Harbour but there came a storm and a huge tree in the foreground was felled. We have almost a decade since, so we can’t complain (too much). In the four years that has elapsed between dawn and dusk in these photographs, new crowns are rising very quickly indeed.

Soon the Mourne Mountains will disappear from our view.

These are all handheld shots:
Mournes 2015 : Canon EOS-1D X and Canon EF70-200mm f/2.8 IS II USM +2X III lens at f/5.6 1/160 and ISO 100 (400mm – 1920 x 427 px)
Sunrise 2016 : Canon EOS-1D X and Sigma 50mm f/1.4 DG HSM Art lens at f/5 1/100 and ISO 3200 (50mm – 4 shot panorama merged in Lightroom 13623 x 3027 px)
Sunset 2020 : Fuji X-T3 and Fujinon XF18-55mm f/2.8-4 R LM OIS lens at f/6.4 1/125 and ISO 2000 (88mm – 9 shot panorama merged in Lightroom 12914 x 2870 px)