It was a beautiful late July evening when I left Annaghmakerrig to drive to Colgagh with a local guide. We were heading for my first 'site' where some three weeks earlier, the remains of Brian McKinney and John McClory had been found.

For the last few miles of the journey, the road weaved in and out of the North and the South. As we got closer, my guide became a little confused, as if his recent memory of this now significant landscape was somehow being tested. We made wrong turns and drove past several times, before eventually finding the small lane that would lead us to the site. It was an idyllic rural summer evening, birds singing, cattle in fields; a typically Irish (beautiful) 'innocent landscape', tranquil and calm.

The first thing I noticed was how the field seemed almost to have been violated; rough tyre tracks; groups of rocks piled here and there; a solitary silver birch tree lay abandoned on its side, its roots holding onto that circle of earth which had once held it firmly in place.

We walked slowly towards ‘the spot’ now marked by a large stone and a crude wooden cross. The contradictory feelings of presence and loss were intense - overwhelming. We were silent and it was some time before I began to make some perfunctory photographs - my attempt to deal with the sensations and emotions I felt. My camera was not its usual shield. Here was a paradox of beauty and savagery, tranquillity and sorrow. I would have to return, perhaps many times, to be able to deal with it

On May 27th 1999, The Northern Ireland Location of Victims Remains Bill was passed in the House of Commons. It provided a form of amnesty concerning information about the identification and location of what became known as the ‘Sites of The Disappeared’. The six sites revealed were the burial places of eight people murdered by the IRA in the 1970s and early 1980s. Though they belonged to the savagery of a thirty year conflict, they somehow stood apart. They were the missing; they were Catholic and they had not only been taken from their families but also from their 'homeland' to be buried in the South.

As I revisted these places that final twist disturbed my notions of landscapes; of Northern and troubled - Southern and peaceful. I also found myself grasping at the naïve hope that perhaps I might find something that had been overlooked, or that the earth might have settled and would itself reveal something.

On May 20th 2000 the digs, now in their second phase, were finally suspended; three remains had been located, three closures permitted; for the remaining six families there was a site rather than a spot, a closing rather than a closure.

David Farrell, March 2001