Rocks and Minerals – Page 14 – Michael Stephen Wills Photography

On the Tain Way

A place of myth and wonder on foot and approachable

May 9, 2021May 9, 2021 MichaelStephenWills28 Comments

On Monday, June 9, 2014, cousin John Mills dropped his son, Sean Mills, myself and Pam Wills off at the foot of the western slopes of Slieve Foy on the Tain Way. Sean, Pam and I walked the way over the mountain and into Carlingford in the footsteps of epic Irish heroes.

Our guide, Sean Mills, proposed the walk and it fell on our last full day in Ireland. Sean’s father and our host for this visit, John Mills, transported the group including my wife Pam to the starting point at the foot of Slieve Foy.

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Yes, if there is any part of the Tain Way the the mythic Irish heroes trod it is this one over Slieve Foy mountain. The saga, in Irish “Táin Bó Cúailnge” and “The Cattle Raid of Cooley” in English, features this bull, “Donn Cuailnge” “The Brown Bull of Cooley”, here as a statue erected 2011 by the Grange and District Residents Association.

Donn Cuailnge raged over the very slopes we walked this day. The myths themselves fill a volume and I am unable to do them justice here.

On the way, John stopped at the Old Aghameen School he attended in the late 1930’s early 1940’s 70 years before and we pass through the country soon to grace our views.

Many thanks to the Glenmore Athletic Club, the Cooley Walking Forum and land owners who provide access to the Tain Way.

We had our leave taking with John, who planned to stay near the phone for our call from Carlingford, if all went according to plan. That same year Pam had the first of two total knee replacements. This was our longest hike in Ireland and Pam was not likely to miss it, regardless of any pain. Pam is always ready to smile.

At start, the Tain Way is broad, green and welcoming.

The western slopes of Slieve Foy hold views of a valley among the Cooley Mountains with Dundalk Bay of the Irish Sea to the south / southeast. It was not long before the view started to open and, then, opened and opened the entire walk to the top. We were graced with a lovely, cloudy, June day. Mist only, no rain. Plenty of wind, not strong.

Farms are all about. Here a farmer attends to the flock. They know who he is.

The lower slopes hold many small stream among granite stones.

I will continue with our walk on the Tain Way soon enough.

Click for the next chapter of our time on the Tain Way

Here’s a previous Ireland posting……

Copyright 2021 Michael Stephen Wills All Rights Reserved

The path beckons

just around the corner

October 31, 2020October 30, 2020 MichaelStephenWills7 Comments

What is there, just beyond?

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Click Me for another Malloryville post, “Formed By Water.”

Copyright 2020 Michael Stephen Wills All Rights Reserved

Kame = Pile

Kettle and Kame Topography

August 31, 2020September 1, 2020 MichaelStephenWills4 Comments

Hard on the defunct gravel pit of the northwest side of the preserve is the deposit of glacial rocks washed to some extent by melting ice the former owners of the pit were turning over for profit with the averted result of destroying the water sources for the ecosystems of the future preserve.

The deposit is called a kame. Kames are the obverse of kettles, formed with an enormous remnant of glacial ice melts in place leaving a substantial depression. A kame is formed when earth gathers in a depression formed by meltwater running over a glacial surface. When the glacier melts (in this area the ice wash a mile high), the washed earth is left as a steeply sided pile we experience as a hill.

Water flowing beneath glaciers forms the long, ridged hills, eskers, we explored in yesterday’s post.

The forested land of this video the kame, upper left, shown in the header, an IPhone7 photograph of GoogleEarth. Also marked is a path for the primary esker, the bog formed by a kettle and another kettle that is now a pond. Click me to view a pdf file saved from GoogleEarth. It provides a clearer view of the header image.

Click me for better experience viewing the following video. To do this from WordPress Reader, you need to first click the title of this post to open a new page. Note the replay icon (an arrow circling counter-clockwise.

Click Me for the first post of this series.

Thank You for visiting. Here is a recapitulation of Malloryville Preserve.

Copyright 2020 Michael Stephen Wills All Rights Reserved

Long, Ridged Hill

A Look at an Esker

August 30, 2020January 8, 2026 MichaelStephenWills2 Comments

Well formed, sinuous, graded on both sides, eskers can be mistaken for man-made earthen structures, such as railroad embankments. Here is an example, nine-tenths (0.9) of a mile long substantial enough to direct the flow of Fall Creek. On entering the Malloryville esker bed the stream makes a right angle turn.

Here we are at the foot of the primary esker of Malloryville Preserve (it is marked as such on the information placard of this series first post). The slope to the right is the esker. A swamp lies to the right.

This video provides a better feeling for this esker.

Click Me for the first post of this series.

Copyright 2020 Michael Stephen Wills All Rights Reserved

Turtle Socks

Flowers from Mars

August 29, 2020September 1, 2020 MichaelStephenWills20 Comments

Two kettles of the preserve represent a pond and, below, a bog. Here is a photograph from the observation platform using the IPhone 7. I brought along the Canon dslr and 100 mm “macro” lens for the stars of this show…..

….purple pitcher plants (scientific name: Sarracenia purpurea). In past years, the central observation deck cut-out, hosted healthy pitchers. Today, invading high bush blueberries from the bog margin, crowded out the pitchers and the only flowering plant were among the grasses 8 to 10 feet away. My goal was photographing the extraordinary flowers.

Each flower rises from the base on a strong stalk. Here are the pitchers, also called “turtle socks”, flooded with sunlight.

A flower unlike any I have experienced, like the carapace of an insect, the reproductive element underneath a hood.

The posterior, there are only bracts.

I have, somewhere, macro images of the pitcher, with the downward facing hairs. Brought the wrong lens to capture this at a distance.

Click Me for the first post of this series.

Copyright 2020 Michael Stephen Wills All Rights Reserved

Flowing water

Water flowing from glacial till

August 28, 2020December 8, 2025 MichaelStephenWills2 Comments

Amazingly swamp, fen, bog, marsh can all be experienced during a thirty minute walk within this preserve. Here we are traversing a swamp …

…buoyed along on planking from recycled plastic.

The founders of this place, from a dairy farming family, strove for years to protect the water sources from encroachment by development, primary a duplicate of a gravel pit found on the other side of the Fall Creek valley.

This former acidic rainwater, percolating through glacial till, is buffered and chemically altered to create these multiform environments.

Water, flowing quietly, almost soundlessly, with powerful effect.

Click Me for the first post of this series.

Formed by Water

Overview

August 27, 2020January 7, 2026 MichaelStephenWills11 Comments

Let’s digress from our exploration of Iquique, Chile for this attraction local to the Finger Lakes Region of New York State, an environment diametrically opposed to the Atacama desert. The Preserve at Malloryville opened 1997, eleven years after we moved to our home our home on Fall Creek (see header photograph).

The correct name is the O.D. von Engeln Preserve at Malloryville. I knew this name from his Finger Lakes geology book obtained from the library and read closely in the early 1990’s. It helped me understand the landscape among which our home was set, in 5 minutes walking distance from the future location of the preserve.

The text from the above information placard at the preserve entrance says it all:“Wetland habitats are shaped by the water that supplies them: the amount, how it moves, and the minerals it carries. Malloryville’s eskers, kames and kettles control the rate of delivery of water to the surface and suffuse it with varied concentrations of minerals. As ground water bubbles to the surface at the base of these hills, distinctive wetland habitats form, each with its own unique community of plants. The preserve’s intense concentration of bog, fen, marsh and swamp habitats is the direct result of ground water moving through this unusually complex array of glacial features.

Before the preserve was opened I was familiar with the landforms described in the above placard. My son and I did his first camping on top of an esker outside our front door. We enjoyed hiking along Fall Creek.

To be continued…..

Stealing a Shot

Father and Daughter

July 18, 2020June 30, 2020 MichaelStephenWills3 Comments

These people clambered up for a shot while I was set up to capture the scene at the perfect light. They wasted my precious moments of light. Luckily, I managed captures while the child was out of sight, shared in yesterday’s post. These photos were accepted by Getty as “editorial” content.

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Giant’s Chair

at sunset

July 17, 2020June 30, 2020 MichaelStephenWills2 Comments

Here is a formation seemingly created to capture the human imagination. I spent time attempting to get it right. At one point, the setting sun emerged from the clouds to light the scene.

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Pam’s Views of the Causeway V

Baby-Finn

July 16, 2020June 27, 2020 MichaelStephenWills1 Comment

For Pam’s return trip I recall a favorite episode of Finn McCool’s, the mythical hunter-warrior associated with the Giant’s Causeway. Fearing a match with an opponent sure to defeat him, Finn relied on the wits of his wife, Oona, who dressed him up as a baby. She made griddle cakes, hiding an iron skillet in one or two. The giant, given the iron cakes, suffered broken teeth. Baby-Finn wolfed his cakes down. Overawed, the giant fled back to Scotland, fearing to face the man who’d grow from a baby such as that, tearing up the road (The Giant’s Causeway) behind him, to prevent Finn from following.

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