Peter Cox Photography Gallery

Peter Cox Photography Gallery Beautiful fine art photographs of the Irish Landscape.
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With prices starting from €18 and free shipping for unframed prints to anywhere in the world, the gallery is a wonderful place to find a gift for yourself or a friend. Whether you live in Ireland or are just visiting, Peter's photographs bring the spirit of the Irish landscape into your home.

01/09/2026

The lower balcony on the Fastnet sits just below the lantern, and that’s where I was, out on the edge of it with the water 130 feet straight down.

The leaning out wasn’t the hard part. The hard part was holding still once I was there, working slowly and getting the corners right, with that drop under me the whole time.

In winter storms, green water goes clean over the top of the whole tower. Solid unbroken water, not spray.

I’ve spent six or seven nights out on the rock across a number of visits over the years, and I reckon fewer than a hundred people who weren’t lightkeepers have ever slept in that tower!

William Douglass designed it, but James Kavanagh built it. He was the foreman mason, he lived out on the rock almost continuously from 1896, and he personally set every single one of the 2,047 blocks of Cornish granite that make it up. Each block dovetails into the ones around it, so the tower isn’t a stack of courses, it’s keyed together into one mass. Kavanagh laid the eighty-ninth and final course in June 1903, left the rock ill, and died a few weeks later. The light didn’t enter service until June 1904, so he never saw it lit.

21/08/2026

Four in the morning and still mostly dark. The boat out of Caherdaniel, an hour’s run out to the Bull, with sunrise still an hour and a half off.

You hear the gannets long before the rock is anything more than a shape on the water, and the sound builds the closer you get. The last full count, in 2021, put it around 9,400 nests, second only to Little Skellig, and every bird in this frame is part of that. They first turned up in 1853 and started breeding in 1858.

The Bull sits about 4km off Dursey and 9km off the mainland, and rises around 93 metres. A natural arch runs straight through the middle of it, and for a few days in early June the sunrise lines up with the opening. That’s the whole reason to be out there at that hour. You also need a gap in the cloud on the eastern horizon at exactly the right moment, and most years there isn’t one. This time there was.

I made it from the deck, which was moving the entire time.

The rock is also identified with Teach Duinn, the house of Donn, god of the dead, said to be where the souls of the dead gathered before going on.

The print’s on the website, and I’ve written a longer piece on Beara that covers this rock too. Both in my bio.

Would you get up at four for a photograph like this?

19/08/2026

I made this one from the balcony of the Fastnet lighthouse, looking straight down at the water.

It was a relatively calm day, and I stood up there a good while watching one wave break in the same spot, over and over. Same place every time. The sea around it was near black, and each time that wave turned over, the light came through the face of it as a pane of turquoise, with white foam blowing off the break and older foam lacing the darker water below.

I’ve since learned there’s a shelf sitting just under the surface there, and waves build bigger over that shelf than they do around the rest of the rock. Those bigger ones are what break over the rock and over the lighthouse itself in really severe weather, which makes the wave in this photograph a baby by comparison.

Have you ever seen the Fastnet up close?

Available as a print. Search for it on the website, link’s in my bio.

15/08/2026

I made this from the helipad at the lighthouse on An Tiaracht, off the Kerry coast, standing out on the wire mesh that runs around the outside of the pad - a horizontal metal grating, nearly six feet wide, cantilevered out with nothing underneath it, so the sea is visible through the metal under your feet.

The tripod went on the mesh as well, and I gave it fifteen seconds at f/5.6 - the rocks came out pin-sharp, which still surprises me when I think about where I was standing.

The shape of the island creates a strong updraft, and it drops away in the last few feet above the deck, so a misjudged approach puts the helicopter down hard. In 2011 I was aboard one that had to abort the landing there entirely.

This was 2014, out to assess the damage after the winter storms of 2013 and 2014. The rocks sit just west of the island, and they’re the westernmost part of Ireland, 12.5km off the Kerry coast - past them it’s open ocean the whole way to Canada.

Then the file sat in my back catalogue until 2022, when I came across it going through old work and finally put it in the gallery. Eight years!

Have you been out that far west off Kerry?

Prints from EUR 75. Link in my bio.

We don't really get thunderstorms in Ireland. The odd rumble, a distant flash, maybe a half-hearted crack that sends the...
12/08/2026

We don't really get thunderstorms in Ireland. The odd rumble, a distant flash, maybe a half-hearted crack that sends the dog under the table, and that's usually your lot for the year.

So an actual sustained electrical storm arriving over the house one evening here in Cork was something else. I watched it build from indoors, lightning flashing across the mountains to the south and west, and I hadn't seen a display like it since the ten years I lived in the American midwest.

Once it had calmed enough that standing outside holding a metal tripod didn't seem completely reckless, I went out and made long exposures toward the ridge. That's the whole technique and there's no point dressing it up - open the shutter, wait, hope. No adjusting the composition, no fine-tuning between frames, just gambling that something lands in the frame while the shutter's open, and then a single bolt lit the underside of the clouds in a blue-white flare and there was the whole ridgeline, and the conifers along the right edge, all of it visible for a fraction of a second!

The detail I love most is the lens-shaped structure in the cloud where the bolt came up through it from below. Almost the entire scene is dark, and then that light exposing all the texture and form that had been sitting above the house the whole time.

"Lightning Strike, Ballingeary, Co. Cork" is on the site now, unframed, framed, on canvas, or on acrylic, from €75.

Cheers,
Peter

https://petercox.ie/products/irl-c-047-lightning-strike

12/06/2026

It’s been a bit quiet here lately, and for the best possible reason. I’ve been busy opening a brand new gallery in Glengarriff, West Cork, and I couldn’t be happier with how it’s come together.

The doors are open, so if you’re down this way, do call in. Come see the prints on the wall, have a chat, and say hello.

You can see the Rock of Cashel from the M8 long before you reach it. A cluster of medieval ruins on a limestone outcrop,...
17/05/2026

You can see the Rock of Cashel from the M8 long before you reach it. A cluster of medieval ruins on a limestone outcrop, sitting above the flattest, richest farmland in the country. I must have driven past it dozens of times over the years, always glancing up, always meaning to come back properly. This was the evening I finally did.

The sun was low in the west, throwing warm light onto the stone walls and the round tower. Partly cloudy, which is what you want. Enough cloud to catch colour, enough gaps to let the light through. The sky was turning pink over the Galtee Mountains, with a band of haze along the ridge giving the background a real sense of depth.

What kept drawing me back was the boundary wall. From ground level you barely notice it, but from this angle it becomes the whole composition. It traces the contours of the hill in a long, unbroken curve, holding the cathedral, the round tower, and Cormac's Chapel within its sweep. The graveyard sits inside it, the Celtic crosses catching the same warm light as the ruins.

The Rock was the seat of the high kings of Munster before it was handed to the Church in the 12th century. The scaffolding you can see on the round tower in this image was part of a long-running conservation project for the wall paintings inside Cormac's Chapel. It had been up since 2009 when I made the photograph, so by then it was practically medieval itself! It has since been taken down.

Have you been up to the Rock yourself, or is it one of those places you keep driving past?

29/11/2025

Last day for 20% off all prints! Sale ends Sunday at midnight.

22/11/2025

Black Friday sale now live on petercox.ie - 20% off all prints!

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