Sometimes we have to see what we see from the perspective of danger. The Cliffs of Moher are dangerous, and by accident or intent, have claimed many lives over the centuries. So there are walls and fences, and signs warning of danger, prohibiting passage, spelling out the consequences of risk taking. And I know about the health and safety imperatrive – risk assessments and policies and strategies to help people stay healthy and safe.
But these cliffs are not only to be seen – they need to be felt, their long argument with the sea heard, their wind carved faces seen as the indomitable expression of defiance. To look over the edge, to sense your own smallness, to feel the wind pushing and shoving, to make the mental calculation of height and drop from cliff top to rocks or sea – that too is part of the impact of these cliffs. Still. We sensibly viewed them from safety – and we saw them, and felt something of them. But not their utter thereness; not the seductive pull to the edge to really see and fear; and not that humbling awareness that these storm sculptured walls, towering out of the waves, were there before us and will be there after us.
You can take photographs. You can listen to the crashing waves. You can gaze for ages at the long held lines of the Cliffs of Moher which for incalculably longer ages have held back the sea. And still there is a surplus of significance, an awareness that this is a place where our humanity is reaffirmed, paradoxically, because it is a place where our transient living fragility is contrasted with these aeons old petrified rock fortresses.