Here the world had simplified itself down to rocks, ocean, sky, wind and rain; these because everything else was fleeting and you felt overwhelmed by such a sense of permanence all around, by the realization that what you could see in any one moment and in any direction had always existed and always would. Holy men built monasteries in places like this, trying to capture part of the alchemy that coaxed time into standing still. The immensity of so much wildness, brought on a kind of melancholy, it dwarfed you, made you feel small beneath greater things, but it also made you feel oddly and fully alive.

The Dead House by Billy O’Callaghan