Picture the scene, the London Underground, rush hour; it's a landscape of elevators, signs and people - people everywhere, moving, queuing, pushing, shoving, negotiating and carving out a space for themselves waiting for and on the tube train. The elevators that give access to the vast impressive labyrinths of the underground are full. People are stuck or corralled for that moment in time going down the elevator. I was stuck going up – but all the way up the elevator I was struck by the people coming down and their restricted movement; the elevator made their upper body move from side to side. It was for me a surreal experience. It grasped my own imagination. That is just one landscape that has impressed me in my own life's experiences.

The Lee Valley's landscape has a much larger and different canvass than that of the London Underground with much larger content of the natural world and its interface with the human experience. It is also just one of several river valleys in County Cork, which possesses differences in its topography - its shapes and forms. There is a tangible difference between the cut up landscapes of Gougane Barra and Inniscarra.

The rolling fieldscapes are impressive in Inniscarra but the raw cut up glaciated landscapes are as impressive in Gougane Barra. Both areas different in topographical nature and both landscapes stretch beyond the borders of their respective named boundaries, Uibh Laoghaire into West Cork and the rugged Bantry coastline and Inniscarra seems to merge with Mid Cork to the north of its territory.

In building up a profile of the latter places, I have travelled through them and tried too to think outside the veil of history, to think beyond the realm of the facts and figures of how a place and its identity is created. However it is this side of thinking about place that I struggle with. It is only with the passing of the river Lee project and travelling around the County for the Discover Cork: Schools' Heritage Project, that I have being exposed to the bigger picture of human survival and the human association and connection to landscape itself.

I feel the framework of the actual physical landscape is important to any study of place. Nevertheless, there is something in the landscape itself that I struggle to come to terms with – to understand. I have been drawn to stop and look many times at the various scenes that have presented to me. It's like in each scene there is a new script to be read with all new characters. The thing is there always seems to be a new script and new characters to interview and build up profiles of.