Added Ireland photos - even more

So I've now updated "The updating continues..." (January 24) and "Loads to tell" (January 22) with photos from Ireland. There's a few sentence-long comments introducing the pictures that were added as well, but they're right by the photos. I'm sure you'll figure it out.

Since I've been told by people before that they have used some of my photos as computer wallpaper, if you find you like a picture and that it's not as high a resolution as you would like (not sure what Blogger puts them up as) then I can try loading a size larger (I'm using medium) to see if that helps. Although if they've been used as wallpaper before then they should be alright. And I'm just being vain to suggest it, perhaps ;) But anyway, give me a shout if that's the case.

And now for some photos from the days I spent in the Connemarra region of Galway county. This was truly out in the boonies, where buses would go in to certain villages only on one day of the week and only leave on another day. The landscape reminded me of the Highlands, but then the stone is a different colour - sort of the same colour as the Burren.

This mountain is called "Diamond Hill"; I walked up to the top of it.

View from the top of the hill over the water.

View of some of the mountains that make up the chain known as the Twelve Bens

I saw a few of these (pictured below) out of bus windows, but in walking by this one I got to inspect it more closely. What is it? It's basically a roadside shrine. There's a statue of a saint in the middle, enclosed chamber, then a statue of the Virgin Mary on the left, and you may be able to make out 12 crosses going up the hillside in the back that have pictures on them of events leading up to Christ's crucifiction.

You'll notice that the sheep below has three stripes on him (or her): red, black, and green. The sheep in Scotland are often spray-painted as well, but usually with just one small bit of color. I'd never seen sheep with three colours like this one below, that was in a field with similarly-painted sheep along a road I travelled. It's a punk sheep!