There is much to say about this house, located in a place of rare, seemingly barren and untamed beauty. It is the changing relationship of the house and its occupants with the landscape that is truly enduring.

From the bend in the road at daytime you see only the tops of trees and some crisp monopitch edges. We arrived late in the dark of night, the trees concealing a fascinating journey to be had in their shadows.

A group of buildings at the bottom of a deep, dynamited and unremitting drive forms a home from home : a kitchen (the centre of the clach�n), a small stone flagged room (for solitude perhaps), two bedroom blocks, a large studio space and some ancillary stores and boiler rooms. The newer buildings (bedrooms and studio) are all modest, mono-pitched, glazed to the sea side, and allow the ground to continue uninterrupted below them. The kitchen (the original building on the site) has been adapted to view the landscape in a similar manner as the studio and bedroom blocks. Here, as elsewhere, vertical panes of glass become canvasses on which the changing outside textures are layered.

The rooms rely for their relationship to each other on the ground between them, traced along stone slabs, retained contours, overgrown walls and groups of step. A potent 'campfire' effect binds them on a spiritual level. Like bears in the night we sought warmth in our beds and adventure in our ramblings to the kitchen. This place comes alive with people, all crossing paths, day and night, from light to dark, warm to cold, conversation to isolation... words by Heaney, a sketch by Le Brocqui, remembrances of relationships that have been.

I've never been sure how much Stanley and Janice Berenstains 1971 book Bears in the Night has influenced my reading of the route from road to sea, but the continuing sequence of events is so powerful as to almost seem fictional. This sequence is the foundation of the house reaching as it does to the sea below.

What one rambles through is mounded, shaped, worked, stacked, sat on, fallen over, covered, grown over. It reads as constructed intervention in a landscape that still looks untouched, as if it might still all melt away as easily as the Polaroid windows of the house. Having spied the landscape using the house as your lens, a framework for your understanding, a guide for your exploration you find a clue and then off you go beyond the house, out towards the sea. It is this route to the sea that captured me.

A squarish platform of tufted grass on the sea side of the kitchen tempts one beyond the house. From here, looking left, a path downward to a seat at the bend of the route is enough to follow. Looking out over a mesh of brambles as you descend the twisting track, you see a carefully tended series of what might be vegetable beds. Passing these you cross a narrow stream over a slab only to be led along it by a mossy old wall, leaving behind an old tomb like mound in the corner. A couple of steps every now and then. As you progress downstream you take a narrow route along to a fallen tree, its furry bark and soggy skin a support at your side. Towards a clearing of sorts, another bench to retreat to and then suddenly a choice of routes down an almost formal set of parting steps. Crossing the stream once, twice and again you are led away to the centre of sloping earth terraces, through the middle, around a tree, following the wall into the small forest, the light slowly increasing, penetrating the cover, the ground becomes soft, until you are out suddenly with the now noisy stream gathered again and falling over boulders, on a small beach. Magic� and it's all true.

Caomhán Murphy is an architect and graphic designer, and an associate at McHugh O Cofaigh Architects.

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