Burren Country

by Paul Clements

  Artist Manus Walsh at his home in Ballyvaughan © Trevor Ferris

  For forty years a Belfast artist had a love affair with the Burren. Raymond Piper, who died in July 2007, had a long association with County Clare and was a regular visitor. As a young boy he developed an interest in natural history after moving with his family from London to Belfast.

  He got to know Clare and its back roads while working on illustrations for Richard Hayward’s book Munster and the City of Cork (published in 1964). Piper produced more than 120 evocative sketches of the built heritage, landscape and street scenes. The book includes a two-page spread of his delicate line drawings of the Burren flora featuring geraniums, wild strawberry, mountain avens and burnet rose. He also sketched some of the area’s best-known antiquities such as the Poulnabrone dolmen, Leamaneh Castle, the High Cross at Kilfenora, the Crucifixion and Sheela-na-Gig at Kilnaboy Old Church, and the doubleheaded Tau Cross at Kilnaboy.

  The two men travelled thousands of kilometres around Ireland and Hayward’s infectious enthusiasm rubbed off on Piper who became interested not only in the wild flowers, but also in archaeology and geology. Writing about the Burren, Hayward described it as ‘a region of unearthly bare limestone hills like some displaced section of the moon’. Together they walked the roads and pavement, seeking out information from local people when they could find them. Hayward wrote about how they spent four hours at Carron exploring the area and coming upon a tiny colony of the Irish orchid (Neotinea intacta) ‘wasting its very real beauty on the desert air … where we never met or saw a living soul’.

  On their Clare rambles they also spent time in Ennis, Quin, Newmarket-on-Fergus, Killaloe, and visited Bunratty Castle. But it was the Burren that enchanted Piper. His journey in the company of Hayward added a new dimension to his life. It was the start of a love affair with the place that saw him return on numerous annual pilgrimages to quarter the ground in search of wild flowers. Over the next four decades it would become a happy hunting ground for his botanising. With precision and intricate detail he drew all the species of the exquisite orchids and their variants.

  Raymond Piper at his home in Belfast

  In 1967 Piper was staying in the Falls Hotel in Ennistymon when he met a Dublin photographer, Dick Deegan, and an Irish botanist, George McLean. He had little or no knowledge of orchids or their habitats but wanted to find the dense-flowered orchid and so they set off into the heart of the Burren in search of it. With childlike wonder and astonishment Piper saw orchids everywhere – in marshy fields, on roadside verges and banks, and near houses. Within a short space of time they found not only the dense-flowered orchid, but also the fly orchid, bee orchid, fragrant orchid, early purple, and common spotted orchids all growing in proliferation. This marked the start of a fanatical interest in these attractive and ostentatious flowers, and an insatiable demand for knowledge. He had a gravitational pull towards the area around Ballyvaughan and went on to discover many secret places.

  Visitors to his home in Belfast who expressed an interest in Clare would be treated to a detailed run down of the flora sites. Unfurling his copy of the Folding Landscapes map, he delighted in pointing out places he knew well from his field trips, and a torrent of townland names would pour forth: Boston, Lough Bunny, Mullaghmore, Corcomroe, Eagle’s Rock, Cahermacnaghten and Rinnamona as well as the coast road around Black Head down to Aill an Daill and Poll Salach. Like a London taxi driver, he had ‘the knowledge’ borne of years of experience and knew where to go and when to go. He could direct friends on a quest for the gentian, common butterwort, or hoary rockrose to specific sites whether it was via a boreen, near the location of a particular giant erratic or beside a ruined church.

  As a self-taught botanist he followed in the illustrious footsteps of Praeger. One of the most thumbed books in his collection which became his vade mecum was Praeger’s A Tourist’s Flora of the West of Ireland, first published in 1909. Piper became a champion of the Burren and was lured back to it regularly. In 1968 he painted a suite of wild flowers that included mountain avens, twayblade, gentian and wild strawberry in oil on prepared boards. His original orchid drawings now hang, framed and protected under glass, in the sitting room of the secluded Gregan’s Castle Hotel.

  During the 1990s he was involved in the controversial campaign against the proposed building of the Mullaghmore interpretative centre, an area he loved with a passion and somewhere he frequently visited. He vigorously supported the Burren Action Group in its determination to overthrow the plans. He was worried about the consequences of the implementation of the project and wrote letters lobbying support from interest groups. After a visit in 1991 he wrote about what he called the ‘brutal destruction’ of some of the verges on the road from Kilnaboy to Boston:

  Bulldozers have ruthlessly ploughed through banks and verges and heaped the remains of plants, soil and rocks on to the adjacent ground which contained small but important sites. If this debris remains for long the plants covered will not survive. The increasing violation and erosion of the Burren which has taken place deeply concerns me and must be drastically curtailed. Once such a sensitive environment is breached the consequences would be dire and the area concerned would never recover.

  Raymond Piper studied orchids, not just for painting, but for conservation reasons because he feared they were dying out. Some orchids are sensitive to environmental change and damage as their roots store food and the current year’s leaves provides sustenance for the development of the following years’ plants. As long ago as April 1971 – after an Easter survey of the Burren flora – he expressed concern in an interview with The Clare Champion about the use of artificial fertilisers by farmers which he claimed had resulted in the killing off of some wild flowers. In later years he became alarmed about the gradual decimation of orchid populations lamenting that no one would listen to him.

  Through regular trips, he got to know local people, and from Lisdoonvarna to Ballyvaughan made long-standing friendships. Many found him stimulating company. The poet Michael Longley, who visited the area with him, wrote: ‘Walking with him in the Burren was a revelation. I learned more in a morning or an afternoon with him than I would have learned in a year. He gave me some of the most fulfilling and unclouded times of my life.’

  He was a man who knew the colours, feel and texture of the landscape and its flowers intimately. For the painter of the Burren flora, he used to say, the secret is all about mixing tones. Capturing their true colour involves a mixture of tints of all the vast range of shades available on the artists’ chart. In his orchid painting he used two predominant colours: brilliant purple No. 1 and oxide of chromium green.

  ‘The chromium green is a versatile medium green and works well with other colours such as yellow ochre, Indian red, rose madder, white and blue,’ he said. ‘Like the grey of the limestone, the greens vary enormously with a motley selection.’

  He once told me that he used what he described as ‘thump happy’ colours. ‘These,’ he said, ‘are dark, neutral shades, the strong, tough old stalwarts of brown and black which add a final flourish.’

  I made a list of the names of the oil colours on the squeezed tubes of paint lying on tables and on chairs in his studio: cerulean blue, lemon yellow, ultramarine, cadmium yellow, alizarin, flesh tint, crimson lake, Prussian green, winsor blue, transparent gold ochre, Vandyke brown, cinnabar.

  The most basic colour he used was a neutral tint which he described as a deep grey, neither black nor white but with a hint of blue in it. He used it for painting white flowers, for toning them and for shadows. One of the most brilliant colours for him was cadmium lemon pale, a brilliant yellow which is necessary for highlights and leaves, and other parts of the flower. Capturing the true colour to make an exact reproduction of the magical quality of these fragile flowers on to his watercolour absorbing paper is not easy.

  ‘It’s like playing the piano with different keys and choosing your own colour. It is all down to observation and experimenting th
rough many years of experience. Sometimes it may look garish and you have to tone it in, but you can’t see colours in isolation. The light is vitally important because it reflects on the flowers.’

  He used risky colours with many subtleties of form. To get the exactitude takes time. For the gentian he used ultramarine and cerulean, adding a dash of quinacridone. Apart from the paint tubes littering every space, his cluttered studio was full of jars with sets of brushes, some made from the finest hogs’ hair and with long, ivory-coloured, polished handles: thin brushes, flat brushes, fan brushes, watercolour brushes. The length of the bristles was also important to him.

  ‘A longer bristle length gives greater colour-carrying capacity,’ he said as he stood back to survey his handiwork. ‘But of course you need the shorter bristle too for greater control, delicacy and accuracy and some of them are made to a very fine specification.’

  Piper’s amazement with orchids never left him. His devotion to the subject was total. He gazed on them for many years and for him they were exotic and mysterious. His forty years of singular fascination with the Burren was apparent to all who knew him and his understanding of the diversity of Irish wild orchids was unrivalled. He had a unique awareness of the range of variation within each species, enjoying their exotic nature, the nuances of colour, their charisma and enigmatic scent. His studies of the subject were exhibited in the natural history section of the British Museum.

  At the time of his death he was working on a book about the wild orchids of Ireland. He had crafted more than 200 drawings including numerous subspecies and varieties, not just from the Burren, but from other parts of the country. In 1974 he had been awarded the John Lindley medal of the Royal Horticultural Society and elected a Fellow of the Linnean Society of London. Part of the spark that ignited his interest leading to many honours as well as an international reputation was due in no small measure to his love for one area of County Clare which was to always hold a special affection in his heart.

  Raymond Piper was well over six feet tall. He had a warm personality and lived life to the full. He enjoyed mimicking people and would often perform with fine oratorical flourishes, grinning all over, with arms waving. He cast a long shadow over the Burren. The orchids have outlived him, but his work will live on in Keelhilla, on Mullaghmore Mountain, along the Flaggy Shore, on Corkscrew Hill, and in the hundreds of other places where he left his flamboyant imprint.

  13

  Benign Storyteller

  Landscape and I get on together well.

  Though I’m the talkative one, still he can tell

  His symptoms of being to me, the way a shell

  Murmurs of oceans.

  Norman MacCaig, ‘Landscape and I’

  When he was a teenager in the late 1960s, Ré Ó Laighléis cycled from Dublin all the way to the Burren in one day and had the sorest backside in Ireland. It was an early if painful encounter with a place that, many years later, would become his home and the inspirational centrepiece of his creative life.

  As well as writing adult fiction, Ré also writes for teenagers and younger children in both English and Irish. His novels and short stories have been translated into a variety of languages and he has won many literary awards. Constantly in demand for lectures, talks and workshops, he is a versatile and popular writer whose work has been critically acclaimed.

  The Burren’s history has penetrated his fantasy fiction and other stories, many with allegorical and satirical streams. A Dubliner by birth, he was born in 1953 and brought up in Sallynoggin. Since the 1980s he has adopted the west of Ireland as his home. Bubbling with ideas, Ré has a good-natured personality and, no matter how busy he is, always has time for people. He has given over part of the morning of a day packed with a hectic schedule of radio interviews, meetings and writing, to talk to me at his home near a lake on the outskirts of Ballyvaughan.

  As though indelibly imprinted on his mind, he recalls clearly his first trip to the Burren and that memorable bike ride. ‘My backside was certainly aching,’ he laughs, ‘although I was a fit young lad and remained fit into my forties but on that journey I was mindful of all the towns I’d only ever heard of up until then. At home we’d never had a car and never ventured out anywhere as we didn’t have the wherewithal. I started seeing these towns and learning their names and they infused in me a great interest in seeing Ireland.’

  Ré moved to Galway to teach in the 1980s, frequently visiting the Burren for half-day walks, tramping all over the limestone, inhaling its mystery, listening to its heartbeat and getting to know its secrets. ‘There was a strange infusion going on in those walks and seeds were being planted that I never thought were there at all,’ he says.

  In autumn 1992 he took a career break from teaching and moved to live temporarily in the Burren. This extended to a second, third and fourth year until he decided to pack in teaching and become a full-time writer living near Lough Rask. After four years he gave up the cottage, moved 200m along a narrow boreen and built his own house. He now has a separate writing room, An Scríobhlann, a custom-built centre used for training prospective short-story and fiction writers.

  From his house, the views take in a triplet of enchanting Burren hills sheltering his cottage: the craggy Aillwee Mountain, the majestic Sliabh na gCapall ‘the mountain of the horses’ and in between them Móinín Mountain beside Mám Chatha ‘the pass of the battle’. Behind lies the fertile valley of Móinín, a word which translates from the Irish as ‘little grassy patch’ and is the eponymous name of the publishing company Ré also runs.

  One November night, shortly after arriving, he experienced his Burren epiphany when he was awestruck by a partial eclipse of the moon over the hills. ‘I went out to the back of the cottage I was renting and watched the totality of the partial eclipse. It might have taken a couple of hours but it was a crystal clear night and I was looking out at Móinín Mountain behind the cottage. The Burren was awash with light and it was a fantastic sight.

  ‘Lots of Burren-related things had happened to me in the previous thirty years and they started running together in a peculiar way. It was like being on some strange substance but the physicality of the place, the flora, and the quality of the landscape all pulled together. I came back in and sat down at my simple little computer and started banging out a story that I had never even thought of previously. I sat for thirty-two hours which was the longest sitting I’d ever done – even longer than the bike ride – with nothing to interrupt me, and I just wrote and wrote.’

  At the end of those thirty-two hours Ré had completed four chapters of his novel Terror on the Burren (published in 1998). The book is a mix of the supernatural and realism reflecting contemporary events in the Burren including the controversial building of an interpretative centre at Mullaghmore.

  ‘I didn’t even sense there was anything allegorical going on between what I was writing and the whole destructive movement concerning the sacred mountain of Mullaghmore. It was only after I’d written it that I realised that what was going on was an influence too. It was an amazing experience. I went to bed and after five hours got up and started into it again. In another four weeks the book was written. So it was definitely an epiphany which was marked very much by suddenness and the unexpected, and all because I had no notion of writing a book.’

  Since that moment, there’s no doubting the huge impact the area has had on his work. Apart from his Burren fiction, Ré is known for hard-edged contemporary stories. ‘Even though I write books that people may think are not in any way Burren-related, living here has enabled me to produce them. It’s the freedom it has given me and the sense of place although my books such as Punk or Ecstasy obviously have nothing to do with the place. They are mainly city-related books but the writing of them has been facilitated by living here.’

  His novel Hooked, first published in 1999, is the frightening story of a teenage boy’s slide into drug addiction and his involvement with a murky and dangerous underworld. The book, filled with the
expressive and colourful language of the city streets, also tells the parents’ story and how his mother’s world is thrown into turmoil.

  Heart of Burren Stone (2002) is a collection of twenty short stories, some of which are concentrated on the Burren. Most are based in Ireland, several are set in America, a few in England and one in France. Ré says what has enabled the writing of them has been living in the Burren. When he’s not sitting at his computer, he spends a considerable amount of time on the road, leading writing workshops and working with teachers all over Ireland as well as in Britain, Europe and the US. His literary and teaching portfolio has wide parameters; he helps schools with readings and talks under the Poetry Ireland ‘Writers in Schools Scheme’. He also conducts training for writers under the Foras na Gaeilge Scéim na nOidí (mentoring scheme). In between all this he directs some of his energy into Móinín, a company that publishes children’s, teenage and adult fiction in English and Irish.

  ‘Now my life has got much more divided. In a way it’s a two-edged sword. The epiphany happened, there was this effluence of work but the result of that is that people want to meet you and this is a delight but the travel element doesn’t really have any great pleasure for me now. When you are there you are working and even if it’s abroad you don’t get to see anything.’

  Quickly his conversation returns to the Burren, sparking off a stream of ideas and thoughts. The careful words he chooses flow in an unstoppable, eloquent effusion and his answers often come with a meandering story accompanied by shafts of dry humour. I had heard Ré speak publicly several times and noted his remarkable ability to startle an audience. Punctuated by theatrical gestures and an infectious enthusiasm for his subject, his talks are energised with pure drama: ‘It’s Rock … Rock … Rock …’ he declares, to explain the Burren to outsiders, or sometimes locals who somehow had missed the point of it. He doesn’t need any prompting to pick up this theme.