liminal

so this week i learnt a new word.  liminal.

jamie doward used it in the beautifully descriptive first paragraph of his article Project runway: carving up the Kent marshes:

Few places in England are more haunting than the Kent marshes. They are a desolate, liminal place where land melts into sea and history floats on geography: a place where smugglers lurked, where Spitfires once swirled like starlings. Here, buttressing the marshes where Dickens had Magwitch confront Pip, and where Derek Jarman lived in his famous poppy-strewn retreat, Prospect Cottage, lies the peninsula of Dungeness, England's last line of defence against the Channel – a unique, denuded moonscape.

liminal is not a word i'd heard of before, but is one which couldn't describe the type of landscapes i like to photograph better.

i've always liked empty places.  quiet places where the impact of the landscape overwhelms any problems or issues that are happening in 'real life'.  in wexford we're lucky to have many such places, and one of the most striking is the raven.  a spit of forest that juts out into wexford harbour, capped at the end by a landscape of another world.  of marshes and pure white sands.  white horses and fallen pines.  where if you time it right and get really lucky, you won't see another person.