Mount Brandon
A river below meanders, and the green pastures disappear into the vast mountains that stand out from the valley below as they tower into the sky hundreds of feet above. Mount Brandon curves along the Dingle peninsula raising hundreds of feet before disappearing into the ocean. Like Saint Brendan’s Cove, Mount Brandon has also been a sacred place for the Irish over the centuries. It continues to tell the story of Saint Brendan. Mount Brandon is named after Saint Brendan. It is here legend says that that Saint Brendan climbed to the summit and looked out to see where he was going to take his next adventure—to the “promised land,” to the islands north of Ireland, or to America. Did Brendan really climb to the summit of Mount Brandon? Mostly likely he didn’t. But to the Irish, this story shows the very character of Saint Brendan as he is known by them—a saint with the spirit of a sea adventurer. I also chose to do this painting to show the merge between Christianity and Druidism of Saint Brendan’s time. Mount Brandon is as much a spiritual site for Christians as it is for Celtic pagans. The Dingle peninsula, the site of Mount Brandon, and the birthplace of Saint Brendan, is also supposedly the place the first Celts landed when they first came to Ireland. Saint Brendan lived when Christianity in Ireland was new and the differences between Christianity and Celtic Druidism had not yet hardened into open hostility.