Twilight has powerful transformational quality. The ‘violet hour’ of T. S. Eliot can bring with it a fretwork of shadows with a before and after feel. With the slow disappearance of the sun, a sadness hovers in the air at this special transition time. The light of the sinking sun travels through the atmosphere catching dust, gases and liquids floating around. On a clear night an afterglow with a tantalising resonance is visible around Black Head. Watching the darkness slowly unfold in late evening is to see the Burren at its most captivating. It is a soft translucent light. For photographers this is the time to capture Cartier-Bresson’s ‘decisive moment’ – which may last only a few minutes before the final fiery curtain call but is a divine moment.
Often I watch the light travel across the terracing so that some parts are spotlit and others remain in shadow – a contest of illumination between those that have the pleasure of sunbathing in slivers of golden light and those that have not. The moon reenchants the surroundings too. The multicoloured spectacle of a corona around it is best seen when the moon reaches perigee, its closest distance to the earth for the lunar month. The coloured rings around the moon are a faint blue towards the inside and brown on the outside.
The Atlantic is a huge pond, its surface only occasionally ruffled on a calm night by a gentle wind or the puttering of a fishing boat. Slowly, it conceals and reveals itself as the light plays a game with the ocean. But sometimes changes occur at breakneck speed and the raking light glances across the limestone. The eye dances around the place, ricocheting from the light coming off the erratics, bouncing along the sharply defined hills and walls, to the carpet of mountain avens, and down to the sea. A skittish shower often arrives, washing the limestone, leaving a glitter effect after which the colours take on a new intensity in the clear light. The rain rinses it clean, adding a glaze. Trees have a newly showered look about them, the clints glisten as though hosed down, polished to a military shine, droplets drip from the tiny flowers, and the tarmac takes on a pristine sheen as the sun steams the remains of the surface water off the road. Heavy rain disappears rapidly through the fissures. At other times you may find yourself caught in a prodigious downpour as water slides off every stone and leaf.
The weather’s drift is seen at its best here. As befits a west of Ireland county, Clare’s weather performance can be notoriously fickle. A Burren hailstorm can be exhilarating, disturbing and very wet. A peel of thunder in the distance is followed by a crack of lightning. The energy of the rain is powerful. It falls in huge drops, attacking you suddenly and quickly diluting the scene to misty gauze. There are few better places to appreciate the shifting dynamism in nature.
The rain hurtles in off the sea in vehement bursts but most of the time it is softer. I have experienced days when it is as light as talcum powder while other times I have raced for cover from the pounding hailstones. The energy of the rain can intensify the nature of things. The limestone is invigorated by continuous sheets of rain drumming on it filling every depression with puddles. Hares and birds take shelter. A typical day often will consist of a succession of showers, sunshine and rainbows bathing the landscape in light. Some locals like to refer to it by a musical analogy: Vivaldi weather – four seasons in one day.
‘Do you think it’ll thunder?’ a rosy-glowed farmer with a lopsided, teeth-stained smile once asked me during a midmorning stroll along a marshy lane. Leaning over a five-bar steel gate, he sniffed the weather and surveyed the dark inland sky, a spectacular sight often occurring in the morning with anvil tops to the clouds. Later that afternoon the sky had cleared and the day’s drama was complete with the eventual arrival of thunderstorms but no lightning.
The walls may form the backbone to the landscape but the sky as a source of light is the backcloth. It is a place of dramatic and restless skies; this chiaroscuro is best appreciated from the top of Cappanawalla or Abbey Hill. There are times when the sky seems to go upwards forever, working a sorcerer’s repertoire of iridescent lighting tricks.
Visitors often remark on the beauty and colour of the clouds that overhang the Burren. With their exquisite hues, the infinite diurnal variations of clouds know no bounds: white fluffy cotton wool, grey blending with the limestone so you cannot see the grykes in the sky where they separate; clouds, white as chalk, scud at speed on occasion, their shadow cast large across the terracing. On other days a flurry of milky white broccoli-shaped ones line up in geometrically arranged banks. Then there are the days of bleached-out white or etiolated clouds; days when the clouds seems positively light-hearted curling thinly in a wispy blue sky; days of a cloud-veiled sky; days of skeins of, in meteorologists’ parlance, silver altocumulus, when the small, rounded clouds look like the woolly backs of sheep and you get the sense that rain will soon be on the way. There are thin skimmed-milk days when rays of sunlight shine through, closely followed by days when no clouds slide across the sky and it is an anaemic mass, pale and listless.
When the dull weather snuffs all colour from the landscape a blanket of amorphous cloud covers the sky. This is the brooding, featureless, deep mid-winter sky. On these overcast stratiform days clouds develop ragged lumps of grey with a lack of sunshine and rain falls for a long time. Sometimes clouds dangle low, hanging over the hills so that you imagine if you were on top of one you could almost reach out and feel their whiteness. On days of a high skyline, or days of a sombre rain-filled sky you are uncertain what clothes to wear. You bring waterproofs just in case and within half-an-hour the sun has come out, closely followed by a cloudburst. On one mind-numbingly cold winter’s morning I set out on a walk well prepared for the weather and ended up shedding most of what I had brought.
The number of clouds flaunting themselves in the sky varies considerably. On occasion they hover only over the land but not over the sea. The reverse is sometimes the case. On drifting cloud days, they deliver an inland shadow over Slievecarran; other days, vertical clouds race across the landscape. Rarely, though, do the shadows race – generally they move sedately, almost imperceptibly, with celestial scene-shifting.
Meteorologists have identified at least thirty categories of cloud structure ranging from stratus (near the ground) through altocumulus (medium level) right up to the towering high cirrus clouds (up to 8km above our heads). Whatever you demand, in terms of size, silhouettes, spectres and suggestions the Clare clouds offer it, providing an essential element in the Burren atmosphere: clouds cherubic, clouds magnificent, clouds exciting, clouds glamorous, clouds unobtrusive, clouds benign, clouds spindly, clouds gigantic, clouds enigmatic, clouds delicate, clouds imperious, forlorn clouds, feathery clouds, menacing clouds, windswept clouds, clouds with cauliflower heads, clouds with long tails, clouds with anvil shapes, and super clouds heaped high in the sky. In short, enough clouds to keep a nephologist happy for a lifetime. With darkness descending the pink blush of a sky behind Abbey and Turlough Hills enlivens a dusk drive to New Quay. There is a special resonance in the pageant of the evening sky when the combination of light, sea and limestone produces a golden lustre.
Once on a late May evening as I stepped carefully over freshly washed limestone at Sheshymore, I looked up to see a pair of rainbows – known to meteorologists as a supernumerary – created by light interfering with itself in the raindrops. After the heavy showers had ended the first bow was vivid with a solid arc of intense colours; the second lay just above the main one, much fainter than its twin and with its spectrum of colours reversed.
When you have had your fill of clouds, flowers, stones and archaeological remains it is pleasurable, over a coffee, to indulge in a favourite pastime: anthropological fieldwork, otherwise known as people-watching. One of the appeals of this laid-back place is to slip down a gear, reverse a decade or two and succumb to idleness. Dawdling in the sunshine outside a cafe with a large latte one spring morning, I watched the workaday rhythms of the ordinary daily life in ‘Dallyvaughan’ (as it is sometimes known) where everyone seems to know everyone.
The village is be
ing tarted up for the summer tourist invasion. Dustsheets, the colour of a straw boater, litter the pavements. Three separate teams of painters and decorators are taking advantage of the sunny May morning. At a rhythmic pace, harvest green is rolled on to the walls of Logue’s Lodge by a navy-overalled man standing on the fifth rung of a wooden ladder. A younger man, with a green baseball cap with the word ‘Ellesse’ on it, applies a black weather shield to the window frames. Every fifteen minutes they slide steel stepladders along the pavement. The older man sips water from a large brown mug with a broken handle.
Two doors down at Quinn’s gift shop a thin man on wooden stepladders puts the finishing touches of gloss to the black frames around a large plate glass window. At the corner two denim-clad men, halfway up a long metal ladder, pebble-dash with a cream weather cladding the upper-storey of Hyland’s Burren Hotel which fronts on to the main road and is the nerve-centre of Ballyvaughan. The village slumbers in the peace of a painterly morning. No one seems in any particular hurry to go anywhere or do anything. At Logue’s, every few minutes, the gaffer in overalls greets the passers-by with a friendly hello. They step on the road rather than walk under his ladders or trample his dustsheets. He seems to know the whole village.
‘Howiya Jimmy.’
‘Only middlin’, that’s a grand day.’
‘Howiya Packie.’
‘Ach hangin’ together like a pair of trousers.’
‘Howiya Sheila.’
‘Isn’t it great to see men at work on a grand mornin’ like that.’
Often delivered with an emphatic force, the ‘Howiyas’ do not come with the intonation of a question mark, more a genial enquiry about life in general. Friendly greetings always amuse me and set me thinking. When someone asks ‘how are you?’ rarely do people’s answers contain a detailed medical bulletin; seldom do they even complain about anything. There is usually an inane reply to what, in the first place, is a rhetorical question. As I nurse a latte refill, and keep an eye on the painters, I think of smart-alec answers that I can recall to the eternal question, ‘How are you?’
I always loved Roger McGough’s line from his poem ‘Bits of Me’:
When people ask: ‘How are you?’
I say, ‘Bits of me are fine.’
When Laurie Lee was asked how he was, he replied: ‘I’m still a going concern, but a bit concerned about my going.’
In Picasso’s case he was usually to be found: ‘In a state of disconcerted anguish.’
The journalist John Diamond’s rejoinder to the query was:
‘I’m okay I suppose, within the usual existential constraints.’
In Douglas Adams’ book, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, the earthling, Arthur Dent’s response to ‘How are you?’ is one of the genre’s best: ‘Like a military academy – bits of me keep passing out.’
Henry David Thoreau’s profound, yet instantly recognisable reply to the ‘Howiya Henry?’ question, invariably was: ‘I’m leading a life of quiet desperation.’
And the journalist Tiziano Terzani’s reply to ‘How are you?’ was: ‘I am very well; it’s just my body that is rotting and I am going to leave it behind.’
My mind-wandering musings end when the Bus Éireann service from Galway pulls up tailed by a string of camper vans and caravanettes. A German couple and two young women disembark from the bus. I wander around lest anyone dare ask about my health, state of mind or general well-being. Ballyvaughan has not changed much over the years. There is disagreement over the spelling of its name. Signposts opt for Ballyvaghan, without the u, others insist on the u; some call it simply Ballyvee which gets round the problem. The village is a hotbed of signs, ranking as the signpost capital of Ireland. But despite a large one at the T-junction tourists still have trouble finding their way and on my visits I am constantly being asked for the road to Doolin or Black Head. There is often a bustle about the place – never too crowded but just an agreeable number of visitors. It has three cafes, three gift shops, four pubs, a supermarket, visitor centre, launderette, hairdresser, post office, a church, two hotels, several B&Bs, a primary school, a small enterprise centre, a health centre, and restaurateurs who like to rename their premises every so often to reflect culinary changes.
It is an instantly likeable village where there is delightfully little to do. Sometimes it can seem almost out-of-time, like a place steeped in a distant and innocent decade such as 1950s’ Ireland. Off season I have found a serenity that almost touches melancholy. Perhaps Ballyvaughan is best described in terms of what it does not have. Far from the surfing crowds, it has no youth hostel, no caravan sites on the edge of the village, no neon lighting, no traffic lights, no parking meters, no billboards, no bookies, and not even an ATM to be plundered or rammed. The Burren has never managed to entice a bank to set up shop in any of its villages, nor indeed insert a hole in the wall. You may, as you make your way around the twisty roads, encounter the navy blue north Clare mobile Ulster Bank van (open Thursday from 11.20 a.m. to 12.10 p.m. in Ballyvaughan). It is an important part of many people’s weekly routine and one of the few areas of Ireland where a mobile bank still visits. The Burren is protected from those in a hurry by a paucity of transport links. No trains service the area and a limited bus service links it to Galway and smaller towns. Although there is no picture-house, a 100-seater mobile cinema, Cinemobile – Ireland’s only cinema on wheels – visits Ballyvaughan from time to time, setting up in the national school car park.
There is also no crime, or at least, in my experience, very little. I once left a shoulder bag with money, credit cards and mobile phone in a bird hide and, an hour later when I realised I had left it behind, went back to retrieve it but discovered it had gone. Minor panic set it. I cancelled my credit cards, told the hotel about my loss and attempted to contact the police. The staff told me not to worry – that it would be handed in.
‘People here wouldn’t keep that,’ said Carmel, the receptionist. ‘I’m pretty sure it’ll be returned by this afternoon.’ In the meantime she suggested, in case it was handed in, we should report it missing to the Garda in the station. We tried phoning, twice – no answer. Then, it dawned on her: ‘It’s Thursday, his day off – he doesn’t come in on a Thursday.’
Later that same day a local woman who had found my possessions in the hide and taken them for safe-keeping, tracked me down via the local grapevine and handed them over to me.
Few developments blight the Burren. Apart from small clusters of holiday homes and thatched cottages, it has not reached the epidemic proportions of the bungalow blitz that afflicts large parts of Donegal or Achill Island. Thankfully there are few signs or symbols of gentrification. Its location is its strength. Four or five roads and tracks on its periphery lead down to the sea; quiet culs-de-sac that come to an abrupt end where they meet the Atlantic unsignposted and unknown to strangers. All this means that opportunities for building are limited and the developers are forced to move on elsewhere leaving the Burren largely undesecrated.
‘Don’t hurry yourself,’ says the woman in the cafe. ‘Finish your coffee, there’s no rush.’
Rivulets of rain snake slowly down the window as I stretch my refill to last until the weather improves. Time passes. Chairs are stacked on tables, floors brushed, money counted, and blinds drawn. It has just gone five o’clock. Another day’s trading is coming to an end but in the Tea Junction cafe they have all the time in the world to shut up shop. An aroma of strong brewing coffee hangs in the air.
The only other customers, two women in their forties, finish off a conversation about men – past and present – in their lives. One ends every sentence with a long sigh and a speech tag ‘As you do’ and the other rejoinders with a minimal encourager ‘As if …’ followed by an even heavier sigh. For thirty years, in the hurly-burly world of journalism I have been ‘quick-coffeed’ on numerous occasions in between rushing back with stories, meeting frantic deadlines, script-writing in a cameraman’s car, or job-changing within the
media. The new image of the first decade of the twenty-first century – ‘a coffee to go’ – is a culture largely alien to the Burren.
One of the aspects of the place that has always fascinated me is the easy-going nature of the way of life. The slow tempo of the Burren takes time to work on you. There is an uncrowded quietness. No one seems to be in any particular hurry; in fact, nothing must be done at speed since that would be hostile to the spirit of the place which has a sane disregard for haste. To say they have their own timescale and operate at their own relaxed pace is an understatement. Spend a few days here and you begin to realise the insignificance of time – watches and clocks seem irrelevant. Time is a loose concept and passes unnoticed. Perhaps more than anywhere else in Ireland, time here has enormous elasticity. Slowness gradually seeps into your bones.
A typical Burren day starts slowly. Often the mist, never in a rush to clear, lingers all morning or until around eleven o’clock – assuming you have still not lost track of time. Its eventual disappearance and the emergence of the slow-motion sun is a major contributory factor in the decision as to how to spend the rest of the day: on the hills, on the lower slopes of the terracing, walking the coast, a spot of bird-watching perhaps, observing the flickering wings of the Orange-Tip butterfly, or daydreaming in cafes while eavesdropping on conversations.
Burren Country Page 10
