Volcanic plugs are the geological equivalent of leftovers. When a volcano falls silent, the conduit through which lava once travelled cools more slowly than the surrounding country rock. Over millions of years, weather strips away everything softer until only the resistant plug remains, standing alone above the eroded landscape. Doon Hill is one of these survivors. The volcano that fed it died so long ago that no human eye has ever seen its fire, and the hill that remains is now a habitat for skylarks and a stage for the wind. Walking up it, you climb through stratified time. Below your feet is rock that was once a passage for liquid earth.

At the foot of Doon Hill stand the ruins of Bunowen Castle, and the story of the castle is the story of how Irish land changed hands. The original castle on the site belonged to the O'Flaherty family - the same fierce western clan whose chiefs ruled most of the country north of Galway Bay. After the Cromwellian conquest of Ireland in the 1650s, English authorities 'transplanted' the lands at Bunowen to Art Geoghegan, a landowner from County Westmeath. The word transplanted is a polite cover for what actually happened: families dispossessed by force, told to take what they could carry and walk to assigned land elsewhere, often in Connacht's poorest western edges. The Geoghegans rebuilt and extended the O'Flaherty castle, and they remained until the mid-nineteenth century, when the Blake family purchased the property in 1852 to use as a summer home. The castle is now in ruin, owned by the McDonagh family. Near it stand the ruins of a medieval church, a cemetery, and the remains of a garden.

The story of Doon Hill is partly the story of how much time a landscape can hold. The hill itself goes back to a volcano that has been dead longer than the human species has existed. The castle at its foot goes back to a clan whose name is older than any English-language map of Ireland. The garden behind the castle - small, walled, almost gone now - was someone's nineteenth-century idea of cultivation, of making the land yield roses or vegetables in a place where the wind off the Atlantic discourages both. Each layer ends. Each one left something that the next one built on, or beside, or against. The hill outlasts all of them.