We drove down and got in through the old site entrance.
Here are notes I took while we were there. I'm still trying to piece together the landscape – we walked a fair distance and I'm still unsure what the first structure was.
Below the notes are about 120 pictures.
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-Huge concrete curving wall with steel formwork ready for concrete to be poured.
-An accidental moat of rainwater about a meter wide surrounds the whole structure. 30Cm deep, a metre wide. Rushes are growing. There are dragonflies.
-We are in a huge space, having walked along a track through a woods, we are in a huge construction space. With piles of sand, gravel etc.
-The concrete structure sits in this space, the flattened and man made space.
-Emma says “it's like an art installation”, which is half right. Situated on this plinth like space it's more like a huge sculpture for giants, or maybe for satellites. Or maybe a piece of land art.
-We ate a fry up and I need to shit. It seems like an inadequate response to the landscape.
-This is the sort of place people die and then no one finds the body. You could murder people here.
-On the convex of the concrete wall, several untrimmed framework pins are still sticking out of the otherwise smooth surface.
-Young trees abound, coming through the rubble and gravel up to my waist.
-A sign, hidden under sun bleached orange mesh fencing, “Danger Open Excavation”
-There is no fencing up, only flat on the ground.
-A hand made wooden structure leans on a bank down to the concrete structure. A frame of some sort.
-Insulation board, dense foam covered in foil.
-Some rough concrete has spilled and hardened into a small mound, a man sized mount to stand on.
-A crow with a missing head.
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-We walk, see the manor, boarded up. Decide to walk towards more concrete on the horizon.
-Over the brow of a mudhill, turning away from the manor, we see the conctrete backs of unfinished houses.
-The terraced houses, shells really, are in bunker formation, curved and high and built into a man made sweeping hill.
-We can see a kicked in, blown out security guard's office.
-Get closer, it's not a security guards little box, with porno and dirty mugs, it's a pre-fabricated, pre plumbed, pre-installed wetroom. (We can see them now in every room of the houses). Everything in the wetroom is smashed up into tiny pieces.
-Get into the rooms, they aren't houses – they are rooms of a hotel (or, would have been).
-We go upstairs, one of the wetrooms has a toilet brush gaffa taped to a handrail.
-One of the wetrooms is adapted for disabled or elderly visitors.
-Half a rusted oil barrel with a flammable liquid sign.
-The centre of the upper floor. In between the two wings of the hotel. The view, perhaps, would have been of a sweeping driveway and the golf course, maybe the manor. But it's overgrown, can't see it as it is.
-A painted red wooden box, open with a high back. Two of them, sitting in the corridors.
-Crunchy, dried out, mossy, concretey dirt underfoot. There is no roof on the corridor or the rooms.
-Some of the exposed concrete framework pins have little spherical plastic bobbles on the end, for safety.
-The numbers of the rooms are sprayed outside – a reference for the builders so they know what fittings are needed.
-Three wings of rooms, not two. Two balconies for three wings.
-There's never not rustling of plastic.
-I sit on the ground floor of the hotel and look out over the site. Lots of manhole covers – drains, electric access, there is a bird feather, rubble (what is the rock?), heavy cast rubber bases for metal fencing, young trees bursting through the rubble, fern like fronds like from a dinosaur film.
-I can see space and gravelled tracks and those high gates that tell lorries how high they are allowed to be, as in, the maximum height of their load allowed on site. They are infeasibly tall, the gates. And one of them is broken, half of it lurching back, white.
-I fart and it's funny to me and I laugh.
-I remember the Harman quote from Timothy Morton's website “Nature is not natural and can never be naturalised.”
-The structures are now landscapes, the buildings are not buildings. The hotel fulfils none of the remit of a hotel.
-We are visiting these places after the potentiality has been completely dismantled in the eyes of the developers and the government and the public and the investors. There isn't even any security.
-Now, without that potential, the structures are only what they are, which is to say they aren't what they are.
-There are huge, green dragonflies. Their buzz is loud. Sometimes they land, suspicious as you walk by.
-It's good that Irish police aren't armed. I remember breaking into a place in Sweden late at night and the police came and we hid and they immediately took out their weapons.
-Further along the ground floor, a room full of the red wooden boxes. They were meant for the hotel, the ones upstairs must have been dragged their by kids or whatever. They are to hold fire extinguishers, the way you'd have a toilet brush holder, but for fire extinguishers.
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-Obvious thing to say about places that are derelict/ruins/abandoned sites: Things fall down here and no one clears them up. Telegraph poles, fence poles, huge gate posts, trees, bits of the wall, roof tiles, cables.
-The old cottages or stable houses. They were going to convert them, but the system got short circuited. They were just left, instead of being saved from decay, they've been fast tracked to ruin.
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-We get round up to the manor house. Chipboard covers all the windows. It contrasts with the dark, dirty stone.
-Behind the manor house, a plastic deck chair on its side and a weather bleached badminton racket is leaned up against the back door, sitting in smashed glass which covers the steps.
-The manor house, it was already falling apart. Imagine it, open to the public, certain bits closed off to hide the decay.
-Human folly.
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-Inside the completed but unsold housing estate now, we get in the houses through smashed windows. I'm tired, stop taking notes really, just photos.
-Dead flies on the windowsill, dead butterfly on the floor, hundreds of dead mosquitoes stuck to a sign in the window.
-You have to piss and spit on place like this. I spat from the top of the hotel, pissed in it too. I spit again here. You imbue it with a bit of you. You're made of it anyway.
-Bags of concrete and plaster left outside. First the rain got in to the plastic, then the concrete and plaster reacted with the water and turned hard, casting the shape of the bags. And then slowly, the weather has removed the bags, leaving the casts. They are casts of themselves, which is again an example of them not being what they are. On the concrete, moss grows from the cracks. The plaster has started to crumble, again, because of the weather. These interactions between non-humans.
-Maybe the houses are now just casts of houses? Caricatures of houses, impressions of houses, casts of houses.
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