Connemara Bog
— — the brown and silver country, just after rain.
Not only on a wall.
“Atlantic blanket bog rolls out west of Galway city, ringed by the Twelve Bens and broken by the bays of Roundstone and Killary. The land is the colour of strong tea and old silver: sphagnum moss, heather, bog cotton, dark pools that hold the sky. Roads narrow and turn. In June the cottongrass goes white in patches the size of a small field. Sheep walk where the turf has been cut. The wind off the Atlantic is constant enough that the trees, where they exist, lean inland. There are stretches where nothing moves but the light.
Connemara Bog, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
Each tile ships in a kraft box, tied with cream ribbon, with a handwritten note from the studio if you'd like to add one.
Three or five different vistas, hung together — a chapter of places you've been, or want to go.
The place, in three passes.
Connemara occupies the western half of County Galway, in the Connacht province of Ireland, bounded by Killary Harbour to the north and Galway Bay to the south. The Twelve Bens (Na Beanna Beola), twelve quartzite peaks rising to 729 metres at Benbaun, stand at its centre, and Atlantic blanket bog covers most of the lower ground between them. Connemara National Park, established in 1980, protects about 2,957 hectares of bog, heath, woodland, and mountain near Letterfrack. The N59 is the spine road. The region falls inside the Gaeltacht, the Irish-speaking area, and Irish remains a daily language in towns like Carna and Carraroe.
Atlantic blanket bog formed across Connemara over the last 4,000 years as cool, wet conditions allowed sphagnum moss to outpace decomposition. The region receives roughly 1,400 to 2,000 mm of rainfall a year, more than enough to keep the ground saturated and the peat building. The peat in the upper layer is about 90 percent water by weight. Roundstone Bog, designated a Natural Heritage Area, is one of the most intact tracts of lowland blanket bog in western Europe. The dark pools across the surface are bog hollows, and the fibrous brown layers beneath, when cut and dried, were the fuel that heated houses across the region for centuries.
The bog reads differently each month. In late May and June, common cottongrass (Eriophorum angustifolium) sends up the white seed heads that turn whole stretches of ground pale. From August into early September, ling heather (Calluna vulgaris) flowers across the high ground and the bog goes purple in patches large enough to read from a satellite. Autumn brings rust to the molinia grasses and russets to the bracken on the lower slopes. The dark months belong to the wind and the rain, when the surface holds open water and the peat absorbs whatever the Atlantic delivers. Carnivorous sundew (Drosera rotundifolia) and butterwort (Pinguicula vulgaris) catch insects on the wettest ground.