For a while, I have made artlessly shakey phone videos in a range of obscure, mainly Irish locations, and uploaded them to YouTube.
There’s the “jumping church” of Ardee :
And the nearby Stickillin graveyard:
There’s Inishmacsaint, Co Fermanagh:
And there’s Lough Erne in general:
And there’s Aughris, Co Sligo:
Which also was where I filmed this video of waves:
And some are things of historical interest, such as the resting place of Vice Admiral Humphrey Hugh Smith in Bunbeg:
And subsequent to the above there’s this blogpost on Knockroe Passage Tomb. The results are obviously pretty shoddy and shakey and often somewhat marred by my all too evident shortness of breath. These are (generally) places off the beaten track which, in my view, deserved to be better known. I would like to think I have kept this YouTubing habit, by and large, within a certain limit, and it hasn’t become the focus of my visits, as opposed to the experience itself.
My recent visit to St Berrihert’s Kyle gave me pause. Up to then, I had seen this exercise in YouTubing (a verbal construction I hoped to avoid in the heading of this post) as a sort of exercise in both promotion and preservation.
Yet now I wonder. Are these utterly hamfisted videos just another small stream in the globe spanning torrent – a Zanclean flood – really simply another symptom of the disease of the age, narcissism. Not , I would like to think, the most malignant narcissism, but one which – even to a small degree – interposes itself between the self and the experience.
Séamus Sweeney 