Daily Photo No 8: Puck Fair

Today's photos are from the middle day of my first visit to Ireland's Puck Fair in 2010, during which a wild mountain goat is enthroned on a tower over the town, a Queen is crowned and three days of revelry and business commence, attended by 50,000 people. Records of the fair go back to a charter over 450 years ago, and the whole goat business implies more ancient origins. It's a huge economic boost to Killorglin, and chance for tribes to meet - the diaspora, the Travellers and Roma (always glamorous in a way that nobody else could pull off), the farmers from the mountains who come down to buy and sell cattle (they always say prices are terrible, but huge wads of notes quietly change hands), tourists and hawkers. You can have your palm read by the seventh daughter of a seventh daughter, buy this year's tat (decorated light-switch surrounds were in a couple of years ago, ranging from Manchester United to Disney characters and tractors).

The organised activities vary little over the years: an opening ceremony and parade including the evergreen Seán O Sé singing An Poc ar Buile ; bands every night, a middle day of family activity like the fancy dress and bonny baby competitions, Bird's funfair, late-night drinking (though no longer 24 hours per day), street stalls, a horse fair and a cattle fair, and street musicians everywhere and of every age, concluded by the dethroning and liberation of the very pampered goat. Yet despite the regularity of the fixed events, there's always something new. The buskers always have folk versions the song of the year (one awful year saw the domination of Ed Sheeran's Galway Girl but Vampire Weekend featured intriguingly a few years before that). The market hucksters always have a new household gadget, while the knock-off DVDs and 'designer' clothes reflect changes in fashion and taste. So I go out with my camera to the same events every year, and yet the images I record are ever so different. I'll definitely be posting more of them, but these two are early attempts to capture the independent spirit of Co. Kerry and its people. Taken during the cattle fair, they give a fair sense of the very distinctive, weather-beaten beauty of Kerry's rural people and their indifference to cosmopolitan tastes. The old folk always dress up for the fair if they're not working - it's the Irish passegiata. Whether there'll be a fair this year is in doubt - I hope there will at least be a ceremonial enthronement for the sake of historical continuity.