I'm starting to love County Antrim more and more. Not only is it chocked full of wonderful monuments, but the landscape is beautiful and the people are so friendly. Stopping and talking to farmers is seriously slowing me down on my research, but I don't mind that much. It's a pleasure to pass the time of day with these great people.

Today the weather was outstanding. I was rather glad about this, because one of the sites I was visiting involved a 3km walk. The lovely, phallic standing stone on Ballygilbert Hill is great. I was very surprised at its size, too. I had expected something a lot smaller. The view over the bay below and out to sea towards the Maidens or Hulin Rocks and northeast to The Mull of Kintyre is pretty good too!

I managed to get to al but one of the sites on my list today as well as stumbling across a couple of cairns that I wasn't expecting to see. As well as seeing a few new monuments I also popped back to see the rather ungainly portal tomb at Ticloy (County Antrim) that I visited some 900 monuments ago.

Last week saw my monument count go over 1900 - quite a landmark. I'm not sure when I'll reach 2000 at the moment, because a lot of the ones I have not seen are rather spread out now: there's little opportunity to go and blitz an area and see 20 in one go these days.

I still don't know when the piece we recorded for RTÉ's Nationwide program will be broadcast, but I'll let you all know as soon as I do. As mentioned last week I have rewritten one of my other websites - monu-metal.com, which features news and info about my books. This new site is now live.

This weekend was supposed to involve a trip to Antrim, but the weather conspired against me once more. Well, the weather forecast conspired against me - on Friday it said Saturday would be ok, but when Saturday arrived it said differently. It did say that Sunday would be ok, though. However, when Sunday arrived it had changed again, so I decided to stay at home. Typically, Sunday turned out to be a nice day after all!

Staying at home wasn't too bad, though. I did start to rewrite one of my other websites, which I'll relaunch soon. My new, high-spec web server also meant that some of the code for this website needed attention. The move to the new server gave me the opportunity to upgrade various things and these newer versions caused a few problems. I'm fairly certain that I'v overcome these now, but there may still be a few issues on some of the less frequented pages.

As well as the above I also refined the designs for the t-shirts I am thinking of producing. These feature rare and wonderful old line drawings of megalithic monuments taken from 19th Century books. I will probably put a small number up for sale via the shop soon, so keep an eye out for an announcement on the home page and here in my blogs.

After the excitement of going out filming for RTÉ yesterday I needed something more gentle. Recently Andy Ryan stumbled upon two bullaun stones right next to Ullard (County Kilkenny) church in Kilkenny, so I headed off to see those.

En route I stopped off at another one I only heard about recently and revisited the stone at Kildreenagh (County Carlow). While at Kildreenagh I also hunted out the second bullaun in a field close by. Whilst returning from this stone I spotted an earthfast boulder with a single cupmark - another previously unrecorded piece of rock art within sight of Mount Leinster.

When I reached Ullard I met a couple visiting the holy well near to the bullauns - the well is still in regular use and still believed to cure ailments. I let the couple take the waters before photographing the well. Then the rain came, so my day was cut short, but luckily not by much and I'd seen most of the sites I'd set out to see.

Welcome to 2008! I got off to a slow start this year, because I didn't go out on New Year's Day as I have done in recent years. However, the first trip of the year turned out to be a very interesting one. For once I won't be posting details of all the sites I visited, because today I had a RTÉ reporter and cameraman with me. We were recording a little piece for Nationwide. Ill let you all know when it's due to air.

The only site I'll mention is the lovely little urban portal tomb in Ballybrack (County Dublin). I was shocked to see that the top of the capstone has been badly vandalised. Graffiti has been daubed all over it in white paint.

I have seen so much rock art lately that you're probably getting a bit tired of seeing nothing else, so today was a trip to break the recent trend. Today I was off to see passage tombs! Not any old passage tombs and not your usual suspects, either. Today was about Antrim and its small group of coastal, passage-less passage tombs plus the amazing hilltop passage tomb-proper at Carnanmore.

I had meant to see a lot more on my way up through Antrim, but it was very foggy for the best part of the morning, forcing me to drive on by many interesting looking sites. Luckily, by the time I reached a bit further north the mist and fog had all cleared and I was able to make my ascent up a rough, boggy hillside to Carnanmore.

The site before Carnanmore was a real surprise. I was expecting a court tomb, but instead found a southerly outlier to the northern coastal passage tomb group. And what views, too! That comment applies from most of the sites I went to today - I could see clearly across to Scotland at one point!

Once again the people of Antrim made me feel very welcome. Lovely chats and kind permission to visit the sites is always a feature of a trip to Antrim.

For some weeks/months now myself and Ken Williams have been trying to pick the right day to hunt down a lovely rock art panel in Crannagh townland, County Carlow. It's a 1.9km walk from the road to the stone, which is situated on a rocky slope making finding it quite daunting. While I was waiting for Ken to arrive a local farmer told me the best route up the hill, but knew nothing of the stone. Then, shortly after Ken arrived, a local man (named Mike I think - my memory's terrible so forgive me if I'm wrong) stopped to chat. He'd tried finding the stone himself before, but hadn't managed it. I gave him the GPS coordinates I had, which are pretty accurate - they turned out to be just 14m out.

The walk up the valley alongside Mountain River is a relatively easy one. All the time the top of Mount Leinster beckons you onward - well, today just the radio mast was poking through some low cloud, but the effect is almost the same. The stone is a beauty. After spending quite some time photographing the panel and saying that there must be some more in the area I wandered off to look at a few stones. I was attracted to the largest rock on the hillside and guess what ... it is decorated! It is not as nice as the first panel, nor as well-preserved, but it's there and I discovered it! My first rock art discovery! What's more, the first Crannagh panel was thought to be the highest in Leinster, but not any more. This new panel is about 10m higher.

After returning to our cars we called in at a farm in Knocksquire to see if we could see another panel that was found nearby and moved to the farmyard. It now resides in Carlow museum according to the farmer.

I then headed home via the lovely wall-embedded rock art panel at Ballinkillin to get a good GPS reading and some better photos.

Today I went to Wexford on another bullaun hunt. Despite being very wet I saw some lovely things. I found five bullaun stones, one of which is at the very nice ruined Romanesque church at Clone. Not a great deal of its decoration is left, but the door pillars and several carved heads are still there, as is a little cross and a sundial.

Normally, finding five bullauns would be enough excitement for me (I'm obviously easy to please!), but Monu-Mental About Prehistoric Waterford is now available in the shops and directly from the megalithomania shop. To celebrate the release of my second title I have reduce the shipping costs on my books. Now there is free delivery within Ireland and its just 1 Euro for the rest of the world! Every copy of both books sold from now on will also be signed.

So, come on - there's probably still time to order either book and get it in time for Christmas!

Once again the weather forecast dictated where I headed for, today. The west was not looking good, so Carlow seemed like a good idea. I abandoned the plans for my Clare trip and headed south with a list of bullaun stones and some more rock art panels to see.

I managed a handful of sites when I had news that my youngest daughter's snake, Raspberry, was not well, so I turned around and headed home to take it to the vets. Sadly, the poor little thing died before I got back. This prompted a trip into town to get a replacement to ease the sorrow. R.I.P Raspberry!

The sites I did get to were rather varied in quality. A massive bullaun and the beautiful rock art panel at Knockbrack were preceded by a small, broken bullaun.

I keep being drawn back to Derrynablaha in County Kerry. There's something special about a valley with nearly 40 rock art panels dotted around it (although some of these are actually in the neighbouring townland.) After locating grid references for many of the panels myself and Ken Williams decided to head down there again and see what we could find. Although we both saw to panels that one of us hadn't been to before there was only one panel that was new to both of us. Ken took me to a couple of panels that he'd found previously and we went back to a couple that I have found before.

We didn't manage to get across the valley into the next townland, because the river was too swollen to cross and it was getting too late to drive around to the other side. Another trip to see these is definitely on the cards though, but perhaps this should be left until the Spring when the days are long enough to fit more in.

Some of the stones we failed to find may actually be there still. I had a little mishap loading my GPS from my PC and I think some of the coordinates got messed up. This has prompted me to order a new GPS with some extra features and some proper software to load it up with.

Despite getting very, very wet in the frequent rain storms it was a good day. I got to try out some of the things I have learned about my flash setup, but I still haven't got it sussed properly: for a start I need to learn to be more patient and allow the flashes to recharge properly between shots!

I started the day with a list of Wicklow bullauns and rock art panels. The trek to the first site took me into the valley to the northeast of Lough Dan, along a popular walk to the Lough. What a beautiful place! I could certainly live there. The walk back to the top of the valley was eased greatly when I stopped to watch two herds of deer, each accompanied by an antlered stag grazing in the valley below. It's too late in the year for the rutt, but I'll be back here next autumn to see if I can witness the spectacle. I also spotted what I think are the remains an unrecorded kerbed cairn in the valley bottom.

From there I headed to the other side of Lough Dan to track down two panels and a bullaun stone. I only managed to find one of the panels. I didn't find the bullaun, because I entered the wrong grid ref into my GPS. Silly!

Then it was south to Drummin townland to look for some other rock art panels and bullauns. Again I managed to find one cup-marked stone.

After that I met up with Ken Williams to visit Drummin (County Wicklow) to take some side-lit shots to try and hilight the very worn markings. The motifs have faded even more since my last visit, but the side flash worked - as always it worked better for Ken than it did for me!

I left Ken taking pictures of that stone (complete with posing cat) and wandered into the next field, where I located a cup-marked stone that actually proved to be a proper rock art panel, because two of the cups have a single ring around them.

Despite not finding everything, it was a great day. I really do love that part of the country and feel lucky that it's so close to home.