Roonagh Point, Co. Mayo

Roonagh Point is where you catch the ferry to Clare Island and Inis Turk. On a summer morning the car park is chaos, people hauling bags, dogs on leads, everyone heading somewhere else. But from the air, all of that vanishes. What remains is the peninsula itself, a narrow finger of land reaching into the Atlantic, divided into small fields bound by stone walls that have been there for generations.

Broken cloud was exactly what I needed. Patches of sunlight moving across the landscape like spotlights, shifting the fields between bright green and deep shadow, changing the colour of the ocean minute by minute. That kind of light gives you depth and texture a flat overcast day simply cannot deliver.

And then there's Croagh Patrick. That unmistakable conical peak sitting behind everything, anchoring the whole composition. You can see it from dozens of places along the Mayo coast, but from this angle, with Roonagh laid out beneath it, the relationship between mountain and sea and human settlement becomes clear. Those field patterns, the scattered buildings, the white water tracing every rock along the shoreline. Someone has made a life here at the edge of the ocean for a very long time. That's the photograph!