Anchor at Cé Dhún Chaoin representing an imaginary seafaring place

Cé Dhún Chaoin, also known in English as Dunquin Pier, is a small pier in an Gaeltacht at the western end of the Dingle Peninsula, Ireland. Originally, it was built to transport people and goods to the Blasket Islands. To this end, the natural bay was expanded in several stages to become what it is now. When you arrive and stand at the top of the cliff, you cannot see the pier or the path leading to it. Several pyramid-shaped rocks of various sizes protrude from the water, which appear aesthetically beautiful when seen from there. After walking down the path that winds narrowly and curvingly down the mountain, you are next to the rocks, which makes them appear threatening. Lobster traps are stacked on the pier, along with other fishing gear. Even an anchor has been lying there for a long time, exposed to the weather. Although the anchor was originally manufactured to be used on a ship, at some point it was no longer used for this purpose and put aside. Located on a tourist route, the pear attracts visitors unfamiliar with seafaring. When they see the anchor, they may begin to imagine what it is like to be out at sea on a fishing boat, exposed to the elements. At least, that is what happened to the author. By letting our imagination run wild while standing on the pier, the imaginary seafaring place comes into being. It is the process of transporting ourselves away to a foreign world we are not familiar with. The anchor has a heavily rusted surface, which flakes off in thin layers and, despite its iron nature, causes the anchor to deteriorate over time. As a result, rusty residues form on the concrete ground, thus creating a connection between the anchor and the place. The manufacture of the anchor has resulted in an inhomogeneous material composition, which causes parallel grooves on the surface. These grooves run longitudinally along the shaft, while the arms and flukes show perpendicular patterns. In addition to the manufacturing process, the different usage patterns have probably also reinforced and shaped these differences. Existing grooves deepen when water remains in them, and bars to the right and left of the hole in the anchor head become increasingly thinner. All these are signs of the transience of the anchor, which is imputed on the imaginary seafaring place, a place that is transient itself by its dreamy nature. The former heavy use of the anchor denotes metaphorically how inhospitable the imaginary place is. The pier as the context of the anchor further influences the imaginary seafaring place. The fact that the pier is hardly visible from the cliff and the path is small and curving makes the pier hard to reach and the imaginary place appear distant and remote. The anchor, the lobster traps, and other fishing gear indicate a seafaring context, which is metaphorically transferred to the imaginary place. Also, the experience of the water and the salty sea air resemble the corresponding impressions in the imaginary place. The typically strong winds, high cloud cover with clearly shaped clouds, and frequent rain often make the scene appear dramatic, which metaphorically denotes the inhospitality of the imagined place. The same applies to the fact that the big rock close to the pier drops steeply into the water, making it impossible to stand or sit there, similar to the imagined place not offering any possibility of reliable shelter. Despite this, tourist visitors feel generally safe at the pier, especially when there is no storm. This makes the imaginary seafaring place being a romanticized dream, as it does not necessarily correspond to what seafaring actually was and still is. The anchor, as a symbol of seafaring, is central to imagining the imaginary place, even though this process occurs within the context of the pier, which in turn contributes to the imaginary place in the visitor's mind. Anchors are among the most recognizable symbols of seafaring, having been crucial for the positioning of boats for thousands of years, and are therefore regarded as powerful symbols (Brody, 2008; Frost, 1982; Yamasaki, 2024). In some cultures, they hold central cultural significance and are considered sacred. Without this symbolic power and the multi-layered transience of the anchor, the pier would not evoke the same seafaring place. Since the seafaring place is imaginary and lacks any physical counterpart, the place-making processes only occur in the mind and are thus imaginary in nature, too. They occur when viewing and touching the anchor and smelling and tasting the air and water surrounding it. Through creating the imaginary seafaring place in the tourist's mind, the anchor becomes a denotation of this place. The processes of dreaming the place and representing it overlap.