Dun Briste - a Return to the Broken Fort

When I first wrote about Dun Briste, the evening was cool and calm, with a little onshore wind and nothing between me, my tripod and the edge of the headland but serene views. In recent weeks I went back to the Broken Fort in very different weather. The warm summer weather had ended and the bulk of the tourists to Ireland had headed home, and I was leading a private photography workshop here with a returning client. With no crowds, we were able to set up easily in position and enjoy the wild Irish landscapes without interruption.

Wind from every direction

The wind didn’t so much blow in from the Atlantic as arrive from all sides at once, buffeting the headland and everything on it. On this coast a tripod is only as good as its stance, so I splayed the legs as wide as they would go and kept the camera low and braced.

Only one long exposure was worth making here: around five seconds. It was enough to soften the movement of the Atlantic around the base of the stack, but not so long that the clouds rendered differently. The wind wouldn’t allow that anyway, even the best planted tripods wouldn’t stand a chance with camera, lens and filters all picking up vibrations as well from the gusts.

The same subject, a different place

Without direct sunlight, as on my previous visit, the layers of sedimentary rock on the stack’s exposed sides are darker and more severe. But the place has a photogenic atmosphere no matter the weather.

My client had photographed Dun Briste with me before, also on a previous, much calmer summer visit. Returning together in such different conditions was a reminder that even familiar locations can present entirely new photographic challenges.

Layers of time

Dun Briste stands around 45 metres high and about 80 metres off Downpatrick Head, and it is made of sedimentary rock laid down in the Lower Carboniferous, roughly 350 million years ago. Ireland then lay just south of the equator, and this coast was a warm, shallow tropical sea. The layers in the stack are that sea floor in slices: limestones, sandstones, siltstones and shales, each band recording slightly different conditions, from clearer water to muddier water to sand washed in from a nearby shore. Along the neighbouring coast, limestone beds still hold trace fossils, the burrows of creatures that lived in that sediment.

The beds are close to horizontal, so the stack, the headland and the cliffs along this coast all share the same banding. That is why the flat, grassy top of Dun Briste sits level with the mainland. The different rock types also weather at different rates. Harder sandstone and limestone beds tend to stand out as ledges, while softer shales and siltstones are cut back, which gives the stack its striped, stepped look and, in flat light, its dark tones.

The rest is the work of the Atlantic. Waves exploit the joints and bedding planes in the rock, opening caves that run back under the headland. The blowhole of Poll na Seantainne on Downpatrick Head shows how far the sea works beneath the cliffs. Left alone for long enough, a cave becomes an arch, and an arch eventually falls.

Each of these layers would have taken tens of thousands of years to form, slowly accumulating materials under different local, regional and global conditions so you are really looking at layers of time here.

A fort that fell

The annals record an important headland collapsing into the Atlantic in this area in 1393. Irish legend tells it differently, crediting St. Patrick in the fifth century and his battle with Crom Dubh. When archaeologist Seamus Caulfield surveyed the stack in 1981, he found mediaeval, longhouse-style buildings on top. That points to a separation after the mediaeval period, which favours 1393 over the Patrician legend. It’s unlikely people would have spent time building dwellings or using this steep-sided patch of earth for anything, not even grazing, over the centuries following. The full story is in the original article.

Photograph it in any weather

Dun Briste sits on the Wild Atlantic Way, there is a short walk up from the car park outside Ballycastle - although that drive takes some time as it is a single lane road for a lot of the way. If you would like to photograph it with me, whatever the Atlantic decides to do on the day (and the quieter months after the summer crowds dwindle are a good time to go), take a look at my Mayo photography experiences or get in touch.