Porchfield · Photographs from Trim, Co. Meath & the Skellig Coast

In memory · Trim, Co. Meath

Danny O'Brien

These are Danny's photographs. He spent years out walking with his camera: down to the Porchfield when the balloons were up, along the Boyne at dusk, and all the way to Valentia Island and the Skelligs, where he'd wait on a rock for the light while the puffins carried on around him.

He's gone now, and we miss him. But he left us the way he saw things. He cared a lot about people, and a lot of people cared about him. This site is how we remember him, by keeping his pictures where people can find them.

Everything here is his. We'll keep adding to it as we go through the archive.

His family

About this site

Porchfield.ie is the photographic archive of Danny O'Brien, kept by his family, and named for the field below Trim Castle where so many of these pictures were made.

The Porchfield is the old open ground on the north bank of the Boyne, stretching from the town wall at the Sheep Gate down to the ruins of Newtown Abbey. It is a rare survival: a medieval "open field" that lay between the two towns at either end of it: Trim, founded by the Anglo-Normans around 1180, and Newtown Trim, founded around 1220. The two were joined by a sunken lane that still runs through the grass, now a National Monument. The town's new burgesses were each granted three acres in the fields outside the walls, worked in long ridge-and-furrow strips whose lines can still be read in the field today, eight hundred years on.

It has been common ground ever since: where the town walks, where the river bends, and where Danny stood with his camera more evenings than anyone could count.