Setting Foot on the Shores of Connemara

by Tim Robinson

  When we reached his house he suddenly dodged inside before me and ran to rap on the bedroom door, shouting, ‘Get up! Get up! Are you all in bed yet?’ – and then turning to me with a laughing face flung open the door to show me the room empty save for a blanket or two on the floor. The only adequate response to his joke would have been to promise to stay with him there for the rest of his life, indeed to have settled down, repelled the sands and repopulated the island. But the tide of my life was set in another direction, and it was already time to walk out of his world.

  * * *

  The second of these little domains with their lunar schedules of opening and closing hours was named after a saint of ancient times who sailed there from Aran of the Saints itself, and I hoped for miracles from it. It stands in the mouth of a bay near An Caiseal and is reached by the Road of the Islands, a sequence of fords improved into causeways of piled boulders, which links three islets into a mile of tortuous path. Only three people still lived on the saint’s rocky steeps, an old couple too infirm to leave home and a man who preferred to row across to a farther shore of the bay to do his shopping; thus through disuse the Road of the Islands had become – as the woman of the house I was lodging in at the time had told me in her horribly corrupted Irish – ‘cineál rougháilte’, kind of rough. So I had allowed myself plenty of time for it, and came down to the shore to find no sign of it beyond a little jetty of black stones slanting down into the broad and steady outflow from the bay. I sat down to wait for the way to open, which it did, not mechanically like a toll-barrier or park gate, but as a flower does, by change so slow that it lulls, entrances and eludes the attention and thus appears as a number of separate instantaneous and miraculous leaps from stepping-stone to stepping-stone across the flow of daydream. The river-like shifting of water into which the way descended between the shore on which I lay and the islet a hundred yards away was every time I remeasured it with my eye narrower than I had remembered, but its present state seemed so unchanging as to throw doubt on the memory.

  Eventually the flood looked as if it might be fordable, so I walked out over the roughly piled and seaweed-covered boulders of the causeway and planted my foot in the current, which pressed against my Wellington boot and rose in a silvery bow-wave that warned me to withdraw, to be patient. And over the next ten minutes stones added themselves onto the length of the causeway, appearing like dark mushrooms growing up through the water. When one or two more had made themselves available in the middle of the dwindling gap I made a few splashy bounds, and the farther part of the causeway took me safely to the shore of the first islet. There was no obvious path across it and I had some tussles with thickets; a few cattle in a marshy hollow looked up but did not finish formulating a reaction to my presence before I was making my way over the ford between their islet and the next. That and the third crossing were no obstacle, but on the outermost islet I got into almost impassable complications of sloughs and thorns and reefs of rock, and the ultimate causeway was a long penance of round boulders wrapped in wet seaweed. I was hot and tired as I climbed the grassy lane that ran straight up from the end of the causeway to the cluster of gables near the top of the saint’s island.

  Life has so far withdrawn from these marginal places, leaving few except the old, that I had not expected to find a man entering upon his prime here and still less one who appeared to embody the ideals of those visionary revolutionaries of the turn of the century who dreamed of and fought for a Gaelic nation, alive to its ancient traditions and fiercely independent of the corruptions of modern Europe. This man, another Tomás, thoughtful-looking but open-faced, just returned in his boat from Sunday mass, was sitting in his neat sunny cottage smoking his pipe and contemplating the sally-rod baskets he had been making during the week. Before the door was the framework of a currach he was building for the Pattern Day boat-races on another island. We fell into easy conversation, as if it had been my daily habit to drop in on him. I was a little disappointed to hear that the baskets were merely to decorate a pub. However, his contentment with the island life that gave him space for his crafts, and his ready response to my inquiries about old burial grounds, holy wells and such matters were genuine enough. He led me with the leaping strides of one of Synge’s Aran men down the rough flank of the island, while his dog flitted and circled, not so much the man’s shadow as the shadow of his attention as he cast the automatic glance of a farmer about his fields. In a hidden hollow he showed me a little burial-ground, long disused and very overgrown, unrecorded on the map, nameless, its graves marked by mere boulders we found with our feet in the long grass, with a pine-tree he had transplanted there flourishing over it and a bit of thornbush in the gap in the wall to keep the cattle out. He thought that most of the graves were of children but that there were some adults buried there too from the drochshaol, the ‘bad time’ of the Famine. He asked me, as the Connemara man of Patrick Pearse’s unearthly paradise would not have done, whether I thought the Council would give him a grant for looking after the place, and I told him I imagined they would not, knowing as I do into what extremely small pieces his executors have torn Pearse’s will.

  While I made my notes – for such a ‘children’s burial ground’ might well be the site of a forgotten Early Christian church, or even some spot of prehistoric sanctity – and puzzled out by means of the field-walls where we were in the spider’s web of lines on my old Ordnance Survey map, we discoursed of other wonders. I asked if there was a holy well on the island, and after some thought he said that there was not, but that there was a well about which there was a doubt as to whether it was holy or not. He offered to show me two strange marks on the rocks on the way to it; one, he said, looked like the print of a heel of a huge shoe, and the other like that of a great bird’s foot. These sounded promising. Curious marks in the rock seem to be less common in granite Connemara than in the two limestone areas I had mapped, Aran and the Burren, in both of which I had trampled miles in searching out the imprints of the hoof of a mythical cow, of St Benan’s foot, St Bridget’s knees, St Ísleamán’s hands, St Colmkill’s fingers and even his ribs, as well as the marks left by an entire dinner service down to the pepper and salt whisked away through the air from a king’s banquet by St Colman. In those two wonderful regions where neither the aboriginal rock nor the ancient lore is much obscured by later deposits, it seems that every irregularity underfoot has both a scientific cause and a legendary one, but when I pestered the geologists for more details of the formation of these ‘solution hollows’ it appeared that although they had been classified according to various discordant schemes they had not been fully understood, and that the geological system of explanation was hardly less dubious than the hagiographical one. Nevertheless such oddities were for me something more than the faintly comic after-images of the wondering mediaeval vision of the world that still persists in such places and that I find so sympathetic, for at such spots two modes of understanding intersect, giving as it were an accurate fix on a point of reality, which therefore could become a reference-point of my own intuitive surveying.

  But today I was to be disappointed. The first of the two marks the islander had to show me, the heel-print, in a stone of a field-wall near his house, appeared to be natural, but I could add nothing to his description of it and he had no legend to account for it. The second, the bird’s footmark, was in a sheet of bare rock at the highest point of the island, and I could tell him it was the bench-mark which the old surveyors carved on points the heights of which were given on the map – and that here we were therefore exactly so many feet above sea-level. But for my purposes a secondhand trig-point would not do.

  The dubiously holy well was in a field largely of bare rock not far away, and as soon as I saw it I knew how the doubt had arisen, and that it would play a part in my own mysterious triangulations even if it would not appear on my finished map. Many of the holy wells of the west of Ireland are not true springs but mere hollows in the rock that hold a little rainwater, sometim
es through such long droughty periods that it is easy to share the old folks’ belief that they never run dry. Now only a few days earlier on another island I had seen such a well, dedicated to St Ann, which was a perfectly triangular hole just a few inches across. The granite of this region is cut through by long slanting fissures that run in various directions, and there three such planes, happening to intersect just below ground-level, had left a tetrahedral piece of stone isolated between them to be plucked out by the glaciers that scoured the region during the Ice Ages, or dissolved away by trickling rainwater in subsequent millennia. The puddle we were now looking at was another, rather larger triangle, and just as it had immediately appealed to me as being custom-built by Nature for my personal system of co-ordinates, it must always have seemed to the old folk of the island to relate to the St Ann’s well which they would have visited, and therefore to bear some significance, which in this case it appears had never become explicit, for there were none of the usual accumulation of little objects – pebbles for counting the ‘rounds’ of prayer, coins, holy medallions, teacup-shards, horseshoe nails – that mark a well at which wishes are efficacious, and the young man had no qualms about letting his dog drink from it. And although I am acquiring a reputation in these countrysides for my devotion to the cult of blessed wells, I did not feel I could pronounce on the genuineness of this one, precious though it would be to me.

  By the time the islander had finished naming for me all the inlets and headlands visible from this height, the state of the tide was on my mind. I said goodbye and thanked him, and walked on down to have a quick look at a cluster of roofless cottages on a steep slope above a little bay. The overgrown kitchen gardens and lanes around them trapped me in brambles and ambushed me with tottering walls, and it took me so long to work my way through them and around the coast to the beginning of the Road of the Islands that I felt I should hurry. Then the three islets flustered me with clifflets and pockets of bog, and in the end I went so far astray on territory disputed between marshland and seabed that I began to imagine that the final causeway to the mainland must already have been submerged, and that I would have to bellow until someone launched a boat to fetch me off. But then the causeway came in sight, a broad firm path still well above the waters, with the look of one saying calmly, ‘You could have taken another hour, or half an hour at least,’ or even, reproachfully, ‘By hurrying you risked something more than being stuck on an islet for a few hours. You might have blotted the ironies of your meeting with today’s Connemara man, or even mislaid one of the co-ordinates of your dream.’

  3

  The View from Errisbeg

  In my face, the Atlantic wind, bringing walls of rain, low ceilings of cloud, dazzling windows of sunshine, the endless transformation scenes of the far west. Underfoot, dark crystalline stone, one of the many summits of a dragon-backed hill, the last, beyond which the land tails off into a bleak peninsula, clusters of foaming rocks and a lonely lighthouse. And spread below, to the north, a bewildering topography of lakes lost in bogs, across which scarcely less comprehensible maps of cloud-shadow race inland, towards mountain ranges. Eastwards, a wrinkled golden spread half unravelled by the sea, dotted with the tiny white rectangles of human habitation; off this, to the south, islands, the nearer ones gold too, those on the horizon grey-blue; finally, closing the south-east, another land, of hills the colour of distance itself.

  The hill is Errisbeg, which shelters the little fishing-village of Roundstone from the west wind, in Connemara; the portion of the world’s surface visible from its summit comprises the suite of landscapes grouped around Galway Bay which it has been my wonderful and wearying privilege to explore in detail over the last fifteen years, the Burren uplands in County Clare, the Aran Islands, and Connemara itself. Most recently I have been enquiring out the names of those lakes that lie on the dark plain below like fragments of a mirror flung down and shattered. The elderly men who used to herd sheep, fish for brown trout or shoot the white-fronted Greenland goose out in that labyrinth can recall about two dozen of the names of the larger lakes, and there are a similar number whose names I am beginning to despair of, not to mention countless little ones, all within an area of about thirty square miles. One is called Loch Beithinis, birch-island lake; for while the lakes themselves are often hard to find among the slight undulations of the bog, the wind-shaped domes of the dense little woods on their islands are visible from greater distances. Crows nest in most of these islands, and the occasional merlin; some are heronries, and the trees of one have been reduced to skeletons by the droppings of generations of cormorants. The vegetation of these ungrazed patches suggests that but for the omnipresent sheep at least the better-drained parts of the low-lying blanket boglands would be covered with a forest of sessile oak, holly, yew, birch and willow. As elsewhere, it is human activity that determines the texture of what appears at first glance to be untouched wilderness, a fact that complicates the conservationist case somewhat. However, this area, which is becoming known as Roundstone Bog, having been spared by forestry and commercial turf-cutting so far, should most certainly be preserved as it is; apart from its ecological uniqueness, it harbours one of the rarest of resources, solitude.

  One road winds across this bog, along which the traveller can enjoy a sky undivided by wires. I can just make it out from Errisbeg, clambering around the knoll called Na Creaga Móra, the big crags, famous in botanical literature as the station of a heather, Mackay’s Heath, discovered here by the self-taught Roundstone botanist William McCalla in 1835, and otherwise only known from Donegal and Oviedo in Spain. The other rare heathers of Roundstone Bog are the Dorset Heath, of which half a dozen tussocks here constitute the entire Irish population, and the Mediterranean Heath, which grows in the streaming valleys of Errisbeg’s north-east flank, and in Mayo, and is otherwise restricted to Spain and Portugal. It is the warm breath of the Atlantic that fosters such southern exotics in this almost tundra-like terrain.

  Following that road with my eye, I see it disappear north-westwards, where the Protestant spire and the Catholic spire of Clifden show above low hills, the western decrescendo of a symphony of mountains all along the skyline. Due north of me, the Twelve Bens huddle like sheep; there are in fact eleven summits of between 1700 and 2000 feet in height, with names like Binn Bhán, white peak, and one which is not a peak but a massive lump, called Meacanacht, probably from an obsolete Irish word meaning a lumpy thing. While the sharper tops are of quartzite, a rock resistant to weathering and inhospitable to vegetation, Meacanacht is of kinder stuff, a schist that breaks down into clayey soil; its southern face is green, and rare alpines lurk on its north-facing precipices. Farther east and separated from the Bens by the majestic Inagh Valley are the Mám Tuirc mountains, a line of peaks forming the boundary between Connemara proper and its eastern province, the Joyce Country. Mám Tuirc itself, the pass of the boar, towards the northern end of the range, is hidden from me by the Bens, but I can make out the broad saddle of Mám Éan, the pass of birds, near the southern end, where the ancient Celts used to celebrate the festival of Lughnasa at the beginning of harvest-time. Later this site was Christianized, and legend brings St Patrick there to bless the lands west of it from that vantage point. For the Pattern Day festivities that succeeded to Lughnasa, Connemara and the Joyce Country would meet there, to pray, to drink poitín, to enjoy a blackthorn-stick fight. A few years ago the clergy imposed the alien rite of the Stations of the Cross on Mám Éan, but even while the priest is conducting the ceremony folk faithful to the old ways still clamber into St Patrick’s Bed, a hollow of the steep hillside only a few feet away from the new marble altar, and turn round seven times, sunwise.

  Although the clustered Bens and the oblique line of the Mám Tuirc peaks look unrelated when one clambers among them, their essential unity is clear in this view from Errisbeg. They are the remains of one great ridge running from east to west, which dates from the Caledonian period of mountain building some 450 million years ago, when t
wo of the plates that make up the earth’s surface were slowly driving against one another, the resultant crumpling being the origin of the mountains of Scandinavia, ‘Caledonia, stern and wild’ itself, the northern half of Ireland, and Newfoundland. A sandstone of even earlier date was pinched in the interior of a giant fold here, and recrystallized under immense pressure to produce the unyielding quartzite of the Connemara peaks. Clay and limestone materials caught up into the outer layers of the fold were metamorphosed into the softer schists and marble that have worn down since then to form the lower land south of the mountains, the corresponding but narrower valleys north of them, and the broad north-south corridor of the Inagh Valley. The blackish crags of Errisbeg itself are of gabbro, a dense basic rock that came up molten from the earth’s mantle some tens of millions of years before the Caledonian convulsions. The lovely cone of Cashel Hill rising from the head of the bay east of Roundstone is of the same rock, and there are a few similar dark hills north of the Bens, including Dúchruach, the ‘black stack’, that lowers over the wooded valley and lake of Kylemore, a sympathetic backdrop for the nineteenth-century gothic fantasy of Kylemore Castle. Thus there are dark hills both north and south of the pale quartzite mountains, preserving the approximate symmetry of Connemara about its east-west axis.