Where are you now?
I'm on inner Galway Bay, doing some intertidal-zone archaeology — fish traps, harbours, quays, shell middens, that sort of stuff. I've been ten years mapping the coast of Connacht. It's kind of a hidden archaeology that very few people are working on.
Is it a labour of love?
Well, it is, but it's important as well. The seas are more dynamic than they've been. There's an increasing ferocity, and lots of sites are getting destroyed. We're losing pages of our history before we even get to read them. We have been pitifully slow to respond to the challenges of mapping this fascinating part of our heritage, especially on the Connacht coast, and are light years behind our Scottish neighbours in this field.
But it's nice to be out at the edge of the survey world. That's what I've been doing all my life — exploring the landscape with people, teaching them how to read it while walking it.
You worked abroad for many years — Iran, Israel, Jordan, Turkey, Greece. How did the Connemara terrain seem when you got back?
The mountains looked smaller because the mountains in Iran or Eastern Turkey are huge. But they grow back again as your memory dims and you readjust to the scale you're used to. I brought the Galway football team on a hike two weeks ago. They're hard-running lads, fit as fleas, but they'd never been up a mountain before. We went up above Killary harbour, looking across at Mweelrea, the highest mountain in Connacht, and I just fed off these lads from Tuam, Loughrea, flat lands, seeing landscapes they'd never seen before.
What's your favourite thing about springtime in Connemara?
From an archaeological point of view, this time is best because the growth is low. But two nights ago, it was the most amazing full moon, just stunning, like a giant torch shining down the mountain. I was coming through Kylemore. I had to stop the car and get out. It was just extraordinary. Or if you go to Roundstone across the Bog Road at night — the moon coming up, nobody around, the sea's behind you, mountains in front of you, this whole landscape of lakes and bogs. That's kind of cool.
What are your earliest memories of home?
My first memory was going to the Well of St. Cailín in Ballyconneely for the November pilgrimage. I've been going to pilgrimages there and Oileán Mhic Dara (St. MacDara's Island) since I was a child. I was just born into that world, not knowing there was anything different from any other world. My mother was a native Irish speaker.
You worked in Dublin for 10 years. What prompted that move back West?
I had a great quality of life in Dublin, but it was always going to be an urban life. I didn't want that. If my wife and I were lucky enough to have kids, which we were, I wanted them to taste a world surrounded by family, cousins, bogs, lakes, the sea. And the West has been drained intellectually to the four corners of the world because the option's there. That's the difficulty of a good education system — we're reared to leave. I was determined I was going to come back. It's been great, but I'm one of these optimists.