Setting Foot on the Shores of Connemara
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In the basic geographic act of mapping I find three conjunctions: that of the place mapped with the one who maps it; that of the mapper with the map itself; and finally that of the map with the mapped – this last a confrontation that tests the worth of the first and second. I returned to Aran in the spring with the first printed copies of the map, which have been on sale here since. It is too early to say much about the outcome. In a superficial way the map has been a success with tourists; in fact I sometimes wonder if in many minds I have merely substituted concept for reality. Last year when I met visitors they were usually lost and making a difficult acquaintance with the island, whereas this year I pass group after group huddled over the map with their backs to the view. As for myself, I have become a minor object of touristic interest, perhaps the only one not marked on the map. As I sit at my desk writing this, I hear the driver of a passing jaunting-car pointing out our house to his ‘load’ of tourists: ‘The man who made them maps lives there!’ Individual visitors have told me the map has enhanced their appreciation of the islands, which is gratifying, but more important to me is the generous response of the islanders, who have examined it minutely and with no trace of a wish to find fault. I know that the map has been ‘read’ to old men by their sons or grandsons, and I am always relieved to hear that one or other of the fishermen has confirmed my naming of rocks and inlets he has known all his life. Finally, I know that many copies have been sent off to ‘the exiles’ in Britain, Australia and the USA, and this makes me both proud and sad.
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Setting Foot on the Shores of Connemara
THE TANGLED TIGHTROPE
For some years I have spent a few weeks of each spring and autumn walking the southern coast of Connemara. It is a strange region. Granite, harsh-edged, glittering, shows its teeth everywhere in the heathery wastes and ridged potato fields, and even between the houses of the shapeless villages. The peaty, acidic soil is burdened with countless boulders left by glaciers that came down from the mountains immediately to the north during the last Ice Age. The land has been scrubbed raw, by the ice, by the Atlantic gales, by poverty.
South Connemara was very sparsely peopled in early times, judging by the fewness of its archaeological sites. To the merchants of mediaeval Galway it was a lair of pirates, of the ‘Ferocious O’Flaherties’. Some of those dispossessed of better lands by the Cromwellians in 1650 or hunted out of Ulster by the Orangemen in 1795 settled in this unenviable quarter. By the nineteenth century a teeming and periodically starving population was crowded into a narrow coastal strip, fishing, gathering molluscs on the shore, growing potatoes in tiny plots of black waterlogged soil which they fertilized with seaweed, and cutting turf, the only fuel this treeless land affords, from the vast bogs that made the interior almost impassable and otherwise sterile. The sea’s deeply penetrating inlets were their lanes of communication and bore the trade they depended on, the export of turf to the stony and fuelless Aran Islands, the Burren in County Clare, and to Galway city. By the beginning of this century the bogland near the coast had been stripped to bare rock.
Modern times have introduced other resources – tourism, some light industry, the teaching of Irish in summer schools, the dole – but the pattern set by that old coastal folklife, a human tidemark between the two sustaining desolations of the sea and the bog, has not been obliterated. From the little mounds of shells left by Neolithic winkle-pickers, to the newest bungalow, a daydream of California’s blessed clime, sprouting between two knolls of wet rock and already weatherstained, the dense record of life has been scribbled in the margin of the sea. Only the very shoreline itself, now that the main roads passing by half a mile or so inland have drawn habitation away from it, has been left a lonely place, a long graveyard for the black skeletons of the wooden boats that used to throng the waterways.
This shoreline is of incredible complexity. The two little fishing villages of Ros a’ Mhíl and Roundstone are only about twenty miles apart, but, even estimating from a small-scale map and ignoring the fifty or more sizeable islands in the bays and off the headlands, there are at least two hundred and fifty miles of coast between them. It was this strange geography, like a rope of closely interwoven strands flung down in twists and coils across an otherwise bare surface, that brought me to the region; I had a conception filling my head of the correspondingly strange map I could make of it, in which all the density of reference would cluster along one line between two almost blank zones, and that line so convoluted as to visit every square inch of the sheet. And having selected this particular stretch of coast because its near unmappability perversely suggested the possibility of mapping it, I had felt the idea of walking its entire length impose itself like a duty, a ritual of deep if obscure significance through which I would be made adequate to the task of creating an image of the terrain.
In the first month of days of walking I covered perhaps a quarter of the way; the going is not easy. At that stage I wrote some pages which I have now looked over, as I pause between the end of walking and the beginning of drawing, and try to recall those first steps towards the heart of Connemara.
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I carry with me on this tangled tightrope of a journey the dozen sheets of the six-inch Ordnance Survey map that cover the area, on which to note my finds – a few rare plants, a number of archaeological sites, endless hundreds of tiny landing-stages, and above all the Irish placenames I collect from the people of the region. As these maps were last revised eighty years ago I also have to mark in new buildings and paths, which sometimes involves compass-work and the pacing-out of distances. But on the whole the mensurational side of cartography is not my concern; in my efforts to see a little farther into this terrain I stand, if not on the shoulders of giants, then on those of an army, for the original Survey, made in the 1830s, was carried out in the style and with the manpower of a military operation, which in various of its aspects is just what it was. This horde of men who tramped over the countryside with theodolites and chains so adequately measured its lengths, breadths and heights that I am free to concentrate on that mysterious and neglected fourth dimension of cartography which extends deep into the self of the cartographer. My task is to establish a network of lines involving this dimension, along which the landscape can enter my mind, unfragmented and undistorted, to be projected into a map that will be faithful to more than the measurable.
The principles of this subjective triangulation of the world are only now beginning to become expressible for me as I work on this, my third, map. I can throw a glancing light on them by saying that the base-triangle of the system is that formed by the three church-towers of Proust’s Martinville, and for the discovery of its other significant points I have to rely on the sort of magical illumination that produces sometimes poetry and sometimes jokes – but when I use the word ‘magical’ of my procedures it is only as a blank to hold a space open until I find some more penetrating adjective.
Magic is a tool more easily mislaid than a compass. In my anxiety to miss no tricks on the exactly scientific level, I sometimes go out overburdened with the desire to find classifiable elements of the scene, which I can post off in the form of neat lists to the helpful experts who advise me on archaeology, botany, geology, placenames and so on; and then I merely succeed in blurring for myself the location of those more elusive places, the rivetholes through which I will be able to fasten my experience of the territory to my expression of it on paper, that are only spotted through a mobile reposefulness of mind. In fact after the first week of tramping arduous miles of solitude, with a very thin file of reports to show for the effort, having forgotten the ritual element in this endless walking and come to regard it as merely a means, which was proving inefficient, of finding curiosities, I was almost ready to admit that this wearisome muddle of land and sea was unmappable by my pedestrian methods. Worse still, the inner recesses of these bays, which from the various hilltops I climbed to get a conspectus of the country looked like the roots of a marvellous si
lver tree winding far into the rich darkness of the hinterland, had, when investigated in detail, slimy shores of black mud tidemarked by gigantic heaps of khaki seaweed, which seemed to multiply the miles by the accusation of insanity.
But by degrees, under the hypnosis of repetitive days, my perceptions changed, and all that had seemed to stand between me and my object – the steep rocky promontories, the ankle-turning shinglebanks, the slithery penetralia of the inlets – became instead part of what I was there for, the shore itself. Then the various incidental difficulties such as the field-walls and drainage ditches that came right down to the water’s edge, and even the banks of seaweed, no longer impeded me psychologically, and my body ceased to notice them as physical obstacles. I saw with interest how the walls were continued onto the foreshore by little ramparts of piled boulders linking outcrops of rock, to stop the cattle wandering at low tide. I heard the drainage channels beginning to murmur as an exceptional tide of the autumn equinox, silently brimming and gleaming along the land’s edge like the rim of water about an over-filled glass, reached into them and perturbed their stagnation. And the incredible bulk of seaweed itself took on an explanatory role as I realized the influence it has had on the fine structure of the coastline – for in the old days it was the only fertilizer used on this sour land, and there is a spot corresponding to each cottage and in places to each field where boatloads of it used to be landed, so that long stretches of the coast have been remodelled in ways so slight they eluded my eye at first, by the removal of a few stones here to make a navigable passage to high-water mark and the piling up of a few stones there to make a tiny quay.
Thus, in this region commonly said to be bare of archaeological interest, the shore revealed itself as a human construct, the work of numberless generations, in which it was tempting to discern the superimposition and entanglement of evolutionary sequences. There are landing-places even more primaeval-looking than those little hummocks of boulders at the field’s edge, for where the thick blanket-bog of the interior comes down to sea level it ends in strange soft black cliffs which collapse here and there to form little muddy harbours, out of the walls of which the gnarled roots of long-buried forests protrude as weird but handy bollards. Farther up the scale are more substantial dry-stone jetties built by energetic families, and the handsome masonry piers, famine-relief work of the last century, some of which have been given a twentieth-century topping or cladding, and finally the huge and precisely geometrical concrete acreage of the new EEC-grant-aided harbour works at Ros a’ Mhíl, which has probably come into existence over the centuries by progressive improvement of some little alignment of boulders or a twisted bog-oak root now reburied deep in its foundations.
But beyond all these fascinating explanations of itself, the shore drew me on by the mesmeric glittering of its waters; the days of walking became a drug, until I felt I was abandoning myself to the pursuit of this glittering for its own sake, that I welcomed every conceivable complexity of interplay between land and sea. I devoured distances, although I was working in finer and finer detail. Such a labour of mind and body is at first crushingly exhausting, rises to bliss as the activity fuels its own source of vigour, and then a point of satiety is reached rather suddenly, it is time to break off, go home, and lie for a spell under waves of tiredness.
WALKING OUT TO ISLANDS
‘Interdigitation’ is the fine term I overhear the scientists using for the way in which one natural zone meets another along a complex boundary of salients and re-entrants; the close-set come-and-go of its syllables is almost enough to convey the word’s meaning, but etymologically it is a little inadequate to such cases as this Connemara coastline where land and sea not only entwine their crooked fingers but each element abandons particles of itself temporarily or permanently to the clutch of the other.
An outline map of this area showing nothing but the boundary between land and water might well be misread unless it indicated which was which. To the bays that ramify into inlets and creeks correspond the peninsulas with their subsidiary headlands and spits; the lakes of the bogland are sometimes linked into archipelago-like sequences, as the major islands are joined by causeways; there are matching ambiguities too, lakes that become inlets at high tide, and islands that can be reached on foot when the tide is out. This last category appealed to me even more than the true islands I had to hire a boatman to reach.
When a few years ago I was mapping the Burren uplands on the south of Galway Bay, and even earlier during a time of walking in Provence that found expression in a series of geometrical abstract works rather than a map, I had become aware of certain experiences of the traveller that do not depend on anything in the nature of the terrain apart from its topography. The most easily conveyed of these is that high point of awareness one reaches in crossing a pass, where the line of the knowable, leading over from the lowland already traversed to that just being revealed, is intersected by the axis of the heights on either side which are left unvisited and unknowable by this journey. The completing of a circuit of an island is another of these purely topographical sensations, the promises and illusions of which I am exploring at length on the Aran Isles. In Connemara I identified a third, this visiting of quasi-islands by foot.
A little anxiety sharpens the business. Such a visit is an island in time too, a narrow space allotted by the tides; will the slight pressure one is under help to crystallize one’s impressions or merely crumple them? Sometimes one has to wait for the parting of the waters as for the curtain-up of a play, which wakes high expectations. Some of these intermittent islands of Connemara are still inhabited, but only by one or two people, and so to visit them is to visit a person, and the topography of ‘walking out to islands’ becomes an image of personal contact, a metaphor one lives out in concrete reality. I remember vividly two such intertidal episodes, one played out in a suite of green fields beached on wide sands, the other on a rocky pyramid among plunging, folding, silvery rivers of ebb and flow.
I had chosen a day of spring tide for the first of these occasions, and although I suppose this made little difference to my ration of time to be spent on the island, it certainly heightened the stealthy drama of the unsheeting of the sea’s bed. I loitered about the deserted strand wondering where was the best point from which to strike out for what was still an island half a mile offshore. The seaweedy rocks I picked my way along did not link up into a route, the sandy-bottomed pools between them were too deep to wade, and nothing seemed to be changing. Then far away on shining levels near the horizon, I saw a pair of little figures trudging outwards – women going to gather winkles round the island. I had been aiming off at entirely the wrong angle; I went back along the shore and followed in their steps over freshly rippled sand and fleeting shallows. The island put out a gangplank of damp gold towards me, but as I approached it seemed to retire behind the pale sand-cliffs of its dunes.
I had already heard of old Tomás, the last of his family, who still spent most of his time on the island although he often slept in the houses of various mainland relatives and would probably soon settle down in Ros a’ Mhíl. As I crested the dunes I saw him in the distance on a slight rise, looking about his empty fields, and it was immediately clear that this was how he passed most of his island hours. He was the only moving object in my field of vision, and I in his, though his movements as he watched me approach were merely a scarecrow’s slight turnings and leanings with the wind.
He greeted me courteously when I spoke to him in Irish, and invited me into his house which stood nearby, a little apart from the line of roofless cottages that marked the long axis of the island like the vertebrae of a beached carcass. It was a stone-built cottage of the traditional type, its thatch replaced by roofing-felt, with a loft above each end-room and a central kitchen open to the gaunt roof-space. I sat on the only chair by an empty hearth while he boiled a kettle for tea on a ring set on the nozzle of a gas cylinder. There was nothing in the room except the frayed and bleached wares of the
strandline, of which he showed me from a collection of little things on the windowsill a wave-worn cigarette lighter and a small disc of mica. I would be welcome to stay the night, he told me, but when I explained that I had to return ‘by this ebb’ he stood up immediately to show me round the island. As we went out he showed me the trophies he still wins every year for dancing jigs at the local festivals. He moved lightly before me over the low and broken stone walls of the pallid autumnal fields, in which the twisted rootstocks of wild iris showed everywhere among the scant grass. We looked at the unfenced burial-ground with its graves marked only by little boulders and unnamed except in the oral record which would soon leave the island to fade away with this old man, and of which I jotted down a mere scrap: that the grave in the north-west corner is of a woman, said to have been the first settler here, who was drowned when coming into the island on horseback, three hundred years ago.
We crossed the grassy street of the skeletal village and took a barely discernible path, once called The Scholars’ Road, down to Schoolhouse Beach. Rabbits, flourishing unhunted, had undermined the walls of the deserted schoolhouse and it had totally collapsed. To the south, the ocean-face, a third of the island was smothering in sand as the rabbits tunnelled the dunes and then ate them bare until the winter gales broke them up and set the sand marching. Tomás showed me where the lads used to play football on green fields when he was young; but the fields had fled since then, revealing low foundations of ancient habitations and the heaps of limpet, mussel and winkle shells left by some shore-folk of the island’s dateless past. On the way back to the house we lingered along the strand and examined the offerings of the last high tide. The writing on a plastic bottle we decided was Hungarian. A lavatory-brush puzzled Tomás until I explained its use, which however did not much interest him, and it was for its appearance that he carried it home.