On an unrelated note, the nominations for the 2011 Irish Blog Awards are open until the end of the week.

On Christmas morning 2009, I took a picture of the temperature reading on my car dashboard. I was in Carrick-on-Shannon, snow lay on the ground and it was minus 8 degrees Celcius. It was the coldest reading I had seen on my car’s temperature gauge thus far. On Christmas Day 2010, the car gauge read minus 12 in Eyre Square at 8.30 in the morning. It was the coldest I had seen in the city, but temperatures in the west of Ireland regularly dipped well below that temperature. The lowest temperature I witnessed myself was minus 15 near Athenry a few days before Xmas, but temperatures were lower than that in the north of the country.

The cold spell was long-lived by Irish standards, and in many towns and cities, frozen pipes meant no water for many people. Lakes and rivers froze too – even the Shannon. The picture above [taken on Dec 23rd] shows the river Suck (which flows into the Shannon) near the bridge at Ballyforan on the Roscommon/Galway border. The water near the bridge flowed freely but 50 metres downstream, the river surface was completely frozen.

Here is a view of the river when it is not frozen.

The image above, of Clare Island in Clew Bay in Mayo, was taken from much the same position as this picture, albeit with a different lens and at a different time of year. Here, the mountain of Knockmore [which means big hill in Irish and is 462 metres tall] on Clare Island is covered in snow during late December 2010. In the foreground is Old Head [close to Louisburgh], free from snow probably due to the sheltering effect of Croagh Patrick mountain from where this picture was taken. The distance between Old Head and the island is about 11 kilometres (or about 6.5 miles) – it looks closer due to the compression effect of using a telephoto lens – a 400mm lens that seemed to get heavier with each step that I took towards the summit.