It's Monday afternoon, 4.30p.m. at Cork Bus Station. I'm waiting for a bus to take me to Waterford. The first bus is full, so I wait for the second. The place is very busy with the coming and going of people and buses to all parts of the country. The faces change with each passing minute.

Each person brings something new to the place, a place of rapid changing memory. People talk aloud to the ticket sales desk and to those standing in queues - each person bringing their own experience and knowledge of the world of how to negotiate it - the school-going student to the elderly pensioner to the foreigner, each looking to travel, all anxious, nervous with anticipation, polite with decorum awaiting a journey. A fast vibrant energy picks up with each bus arriving and leaving inscribing fleeting memories at the station itself. Both the location and people connected to each other. This is another normal day, full of life's opportunities for the bus station.

The last couple of months, I have been thinking a lot more about all the people I have met in my own travels what they have said about their own journeys in life and their association with the River Lee. In addition, last December in the Cork Vision Centre on North Main Street, I held a photo exhibition celebrating the places and people, the landscapes and memories along the River Lee Valley.

I felt that this heritage project was successful in its aims of celebrating the Lee's vast heritage, from the natural to the archaeological to the cultural. I got to share the wider context of the Lee's landscapes and memories with viewers who gave their own impressions on pictures and sharing their memories on what the pictures brought to the viewer's mind. The exhibition provided me with new memories, new themes, new contacts and new questions to ask of the Lee valley and its heritage and memories.

So as part of my contribution to European Heritage Days in September, I am relocating my exhibition to Gougane Barra for the next couple of weeks to be based in the sitting room of Gougane Barra Hotel.

Of course, with this move, there are new questions to be asked. In a philosophical sense, what if you brought back the landscapes and memories studied along the valley to the start, the source of the river? Does it change the nature of Gougane Barra and its values, beliefs and what could be described as Gougane's guidelines for inhabitants and dwellers - does it add to the sacred site of Gougane Barra? Do the images of settlement, industrialisation, fertile countryside, even the journey of the river enhance and changes the nature of Gougane Barra? Does it connect the valley's cultural heritage together?

My goal is not to change it but to explore Gougane's identity and what could be described as the 'codes' of identity that have created it and ask questions about it, therefore probably creating new questions about its identity. The source and mouth of the river is linked by cultural change and continuity in particular human occupation, the product of cultural processes from standing stones, forest clearance, farmland creation to the Lee Hydro Electric scheme we have been discussing the last number of weeks.

Even Gougane Barra has experienced change - its wilderness originally penetrated by monks, a legacy in later years woven into a national heritage site by the nature of religion, landscape, memory and myth.