To get to the paddock you must walk 100 metres up what looks like a narrow lane. It is bound on my right by a hedgerow and on my left by wire fencing adjacent a field. The trackway is worn down. The different shapes within the mud are human footprints, the front and back wheels of a tractor and horse shoes. The churned up ground hinders movement and even directs me to avoid and negotiate a way round the muck. The changing dynamics of the seasons affects the textures of the paddock walk.

Geology in Agharinagh, Lower Dripsey and modern farming in Kilgobnet townland, Co. Cork (picture: Kieran McCarthy)

The warm weather hardens the ground freezing the indentations of movements in the mud. The frosty weather also freezes the ground for a time but only for a time. The wet weather causes my movement to slow down to avoid slipping, on which on many an occasion I have.

In an overall sense, the paddock walk is full of muck and causes me to slow down and look where I'm going. In a historical sense the paddock walk through the varied indentations of humans and animals is bound up with change but also continuity of use. The Lee Valley on many occasions like the paddock walk has caused me to stop, look and be diverted from my original route of exploration. Sometimes, I would stop because something caught my eye in my fieldwork, a feature of the land, natural or human. I enjoy the randomness in nature; it is difficult to capture on camera. I also enjoy examining the human interaction with the land.

Sometimes on fieldwork with local residents I would stop and take a photograph and I would be asked why did I take a particular feature. Of course, on many an occasion, I have asked people I have met what do you see in your local area especially when I'm brought to key sites of history in a local area. Hence in researching an area, the varied perspectives of the researcher and the interviewed are important. If I took 100 people into a place such as Lower Dripsey and asked them to comment on the geographical and historical features, I would not get the same 100 responses. That's one aspect I feel, which makes heritage so vibrant and attractive to study.

Landscape at times is strongly connected to personal experiences and memories with some contemporary imagery deliberately evoking the recollection of places experienced, perhaps on travels or during childhood. Landscape is an idea. Landscape is not a natural feature of the land but a man-made way of visually organising the natural world in the mind. Landscape is always influenced by specific personal interpretations – what the individual sees.

The paddock walk and a visit to the Lewis Glucksman Gallery, University College Cork, which overlooks the River Lee in its urban canvas, provoked the penning of this article. The gallery's principal exhibition is entitled Beyond the Country – Perspectives of the Land in Historic and Contemporary Art. Art is a way of seeing the world differently provoking hidden feelings, stimulating your sense and your mind. Art should be viewed, pondered, admired exhibited, carefully scrutinised and understood from an artist's point of view.

The exhibition "Beyond the Country" invites the audience to consider different ways of interpreting landscape and to reflect on the imaginative possibilities of representing the land. The Glucksman has brought together a number of Irish and international artists who examine and interpret the land in different ways I was intrigued by their art but in particular their artist perspective. From my point of view, I was fascinated by several interesting ideas especially the artists who explored how we interact with the land, how we experience the land, how we construct a landscape in our own minds and how we record and reconstruct the memory of landscape in our minds.