WHEN
Unfortunately I don’t live in Ireland, so I can’t go out of home and visit my beloved stones any time I feel like.
I have to do that during my holidays, that are usually once a year. This means that all my visits are concentrated in a small lapse of time, from ten to twenty days on average during the year and, more, I haven’t been able to go up there every year.
So far we had the chance to go to Ireland twenty-one times. The first time that my wife and I went to Ireland was in 1994, but I only started taking visit notes and geographical references in 2003, so all those places we visited in the earlier years can’t be showed on this website. What I have collected since 2003 is still a pretty large number of historical places but it’s less than what I really saw in my life.
Occasionally I will re-visit some of those older sites if I have the chance to do that, but I’d like to concentrate on the new and unvisited ones. Should I re-visit a given site, I will retain the original date of visit, hence, even if I visit the place a second time, the relevant page on this website will show the date of the first visit, while I will state that it's an update.
You will notice some differences in the content of the descriptions between the early pages in 2003 and the more recent ones. Of course I had to improve my style and technique, hence the older pages will be less accurate and will contain less details or information. Please, be soft on this.
When did I start thinking of making a website? The first idea came when I saw that the monuments I visited were a large number and still growing. More than a simple list of seen places this passion of mine was becoming something more professional and that needed to be shown to somebody else with the same interest. There are many other websites that treat the same subject, I just wanted to be one of them. The first idea came to my mind in the late Autumn 2008. The project started in February 2009, but it took two years to become a real website with its own personality and with a number of entries that are worth to browse. The work involved in the making of this website has been enormous, both for me for the data entry and for the webmaster who had to satisfy my repeated new, and sometimes crazy, requests. I think that, so far, over five thousands hours have been spent for choosing the photos, writing and editing the texts, creating the graphic contents, checking that everything was alright. And all of this has been done in my spare time.