Setting Foot on the Shores of Connemara

by Tim Robinson

  The Ice Ages, starting about one and a half million years ago and perhaps not all past yet, have carved up all these variously resistant rocks into the welter of forms that meet the eye today, excavating the valleys between the mountain ranges and the great fiord of Killary Harbour that divides Connemara from the Mayo uplands to the north. Some of the material removed by the glaciers was dumped when they melted back, in the form of the low rounded hills of boulder and clay called drumlins by geographers. These isolated hills, usually of green, arable land, contrast vividly with the dark level bogs on which they are stranded, and they all have individual names. In western Connemara such a hill is an imleach, perhaps from their rather sharply defined rims (imeall‚ a rim). From Errisbeg I can identify several of them, including Imleach na Beithe, the drumlin of the birch, and Imleach Caorach, sheep-drumlin, near Ballyconneely to my west.

  So, one prehistoric collision of continents, a few hundred million years of erosion, and my almost equally drastic geological oversimplifications, suffice to explain the look of things to the north of Errisbeg. But this tousled fringe of Connemara to the east of me – can any generalization hold it together? Immediately below is Roundstone Bay, most of which is occupied by an island, Inis Ní, which is not quite an island since there is a causeway and a bridge leading into it, and even before that was built people could walk into it over the seaweed-covered rocks when the tide was out – though, on the other hand, very high tides still overrun its lower parts and make three islands out of Inis Ní. And Roundstone Bay is only a side-issue of Cuan na Beirtrí Buí, the bay of the yellow oyster-bank, which goes on to divide again, facing the incoming salmon with a choice between the outlet of the famous Ballynahinch River fishery on the west and Cashel Bay on the east, which delivers them into the Gowla River and the hands of the Zetland Hotel’s guests. Beyond this dilemma is a broad headland with the ancient name of Iorras Aintheach, the stormy peninsula; it carries the villages of Carna and Cill Chiaráin, and to the south spawns various islands, some isolated and deserted since a generation or two ago, others linked to the mainland by causeways and still populated, others exactly halfway between these two conditions, being accessible at low tide and occasionally reoccupied by the last of their former inhabitants, who gather winkles round their shores or take cattle out to graze their sandy wind-eroded pastures. A little farther out is the most precious stone of all this stony littoral, the bare low dome of St Macdara’s Island, with its minute oratory dating back almost to the age of the hermits who sought out such inaccessible retreats all around the coasts of Connemara. Eastwards again, more ramifying bays, with islands strung together by causeways or proliferating out into the waters of Galway Bay itself, delighting and defying the map-maker.

  All this topographical extravaganza has been carved out of granite, which was intruded into the pre-existent rocks a little over 400 million years ago, at the end of the Caledonian mountain-building period. It is criss-crossed with joints and faults, which the sea has exploited to bite off archipelagos and prize open the creeks that traverse it in all directions. Without these seaways, as I will show, it would be as sparsely inhabited as the boglands and mountains farther inland, whereas in fact it is the most densely peopled region of Connemara. But in spite of the cottages and bungalows strung out along its web of roads and boreens, this is an intimidating landscape, of glinting pinkish or golden-brown rock-sheets polished by the Ice Ages and strewn with glacial boulders, interspersed with tiny saucer-shaped tillage plots of black waterlogged soil, and interrupted everywhere by dark stony or muddy shores on which high tides pile unbelievable masses of yellow seaweed. This growth of knotted wrack or yellow-weed as it is called locally is one of the factors that has made life possible on the acidic granite, for large amounts of it were harvested, both for fertilizing the land and for burning to kelp, the main source of industrial alkalies in the eighteenth and of iodine in the nineteenth century; it was the money paid out by the agent of a Scottish kelp-firm resident in Cashel that kept hundreds of families just above starvation level in the 1880s. Even today one can see rafts of weeds being towed into quays all round that intricate coast, for sale to a factory in Cill Chiaráin as a source of the alginates used in thickening agents for foods, paints and cosmetics.

  Another resource of this apparently unfavoured coast was its covering of bog, which had developed on the impervious granite as it had on the metamorphic rocks inland. That covering is almost entirely stripped away now, through generations of cutting of the turf that was shipped out of hundreds of little harbours to be burned in Galway city or on the other side of Galway Bay where there is no peat covering the rocks. But to develop this theme of the strange process by which the bareness of one landscape made another bare, I must now look south, to those islands that lie like clean steel blades along the horizon, so utterly different from the rusty twistings of south Connemara.

  Seeing the three Aran Islands from Errisbeg, wrapped in their mist-coloured cloaks of monkish remoteness and simplicity, it is hard to credit that fifteen hundred people live out there, manning an up-to-date trawler fleet, profiting from tourism, and farming those obdurately stony little fields reclaimed from the bare crags. As I watch, a line of light seeping under the islands from the bright horizon seems to be easing them free of even what tenuous relationship to mainland realities the sea can mediate, and floating them back to the time when Ára na Naomh, Aran of the Saints, was a source of inspiration to the monasteries of western Europe. The tall cliffs of Árainn or Inishmore, the largest of the islands, are turned away from the mainland to the south-western Atlantic spaces; remembering the many days I spent exploring them, I feel the thunder of the billows in their recesses and hear the fierce clamour of a peregrine falcon sweeping along their sheer faces. And beyond the islands is the Burren, with its flower-strewn hills rising in sweeping terraces to breezy plateaux, cross-hatched by four thousand years of wall-building! Marvels beyond description! I turn again to geology, mother of earth-sciences, for some unifying approach to them.

  The essential oneness of the three islands and the Burren is clearly discernible from Errisbeg; the islands are built of a number of thick, horizontal layers of rock that correspond to those of the Burren and have evidently been separated from it by long-acting agencies that have otherwise not disrupted their strata. Whereas the visual turmoil of Connemara is a memory-trace of the mountains’ travail, those sober levels to the south are the petrified after-image of a long-departed sea. A hundred million years after the Caledonian events, this area lay under a subtropical ocean, the waters of which pullulated with shelled creatures, from dot-sized foraminifera to brachiopods as big as saucers. Their remains, piling up together with the corals of the sea-bed for countless generations and compressed into limestone under their own weight, eventually totalled a thickness of over half a mile. Earth movements evidently changed the depths of those Carboniferous period seas from time to time, as there are thin strata of shale, formed from the mud of shallow coastal waters, between the strata of limestone, and even beds of clay, showing that the surface occasionally rose above the water long enough for a soil to form, only to be submerged again. Eventually, some 270 million years ago, a final upward heave abolished that sea, and since then climates ranging from the tropical to the glacial, and the surges of the modern Atlantic, have been eating away at the limestone, leaving the three islands and the dissected plateau of the Burren, which are even now being reduced in level by half a millimetre or so every year through the solvent action of the rain.

  Subsequent movements of the earth’s crust, perhaps connected with the opening up of the Atlantic Ocean, have exerted lateral forces on the limestone beds, fracturing them in a system of vertical cracks of astonishing regularity, the major ones running south-south-westwards, the minor set at right-angles to them. Flowing rainwater has enlarged these into fissures of all widths up to two feet or so, subdividing the rock outcrops into rectangular slabs, or, where they are very close-set, a rubble of small block
s. So the surface, with whatever shallow soil it carries, is extremely efficiently drained. But while the limestone is vulnerable to rain, the shale and clay bands are more impermeable. On a hillside it is the limestone exposed between two of these bands that will be removed first, while that overlain by the bands will persist longer, so the hillside is eaten away into great steps; such at least is one scenario that has been proposed to account for the terraced formation of the Aran Islands and the higher regions of the Burren. Therefore the clay and shale is exposed all along the feet of the steep scarps or low cliffs that run across the hillsides, and the rainwater that sinks through the creviced limestone layers and is then conducted sideways by the impervious shale bubbles out in springs at the foot of these cliffs, washing the shale or clay out with it to add a little soil to the attractions of these particular levels. Even from Errisbeg I can see how the lines of white dots, the cottages and bungalows along Aran’s roads, follow the terraces, keeping their heads down below the ridge-line that shelters them from the prevailing south-westerlies.

  As neighbours, the Aran Islands have come to be closely related in culture to south Connemara; most importantly, both speak Irish, and indeed between them they carry most of the language’s hopes for the future. But ecologically and archaeologically Aran belongs to the Burren, limestone being the determining factor. Nearly all the Burren’s famous flora is shared with the islands; the mountain avens is absent from Aran but most of its other alpine or northern species such as the spring gentian are present, while the roseroot (in Connemara exceedingly rare and found only on certain cliffs near the mountain-tops) flourishes on some exposed areas of crag right down to sea-level. There are plants peculiar to Aran too. In the wind-and rabbit-mown sward of the highest clifftops one can find the purple milk vetch, recorded nowhere else in Ireland and which is perhaps a relict of the tundra vegetation of immediately post-glacial times. And since modern agriculture can hardly enter Aran’s tiny fields, some weeds still occur that have been exterminated almost everywhere else; I have even found the penny-cress, whose transparent disc-shaped capsules used to delight children of previous generations in many rural areas.

  Despite such multicoloured mitigations, though, much of Aran is a desolation of bare stone, like the Burren. But in both places the sheer number of prehistoric monuments shows that this cannot always have been the case. For instance in the islands there are five megalithic tombs of the type known from their shape as wedge tombs and usually dated to the Late Neolithic or Early Bronze Age. Then there are no fewer than seven great stone cashels, including the promontory fort of Dúchathair and Ireland’s most spectacular prehistoric site, Dún Aonghasa, whose three roughly concentric semicircular ramparts abut onto the edge of a dizzy cliff above the Atlantic, and which is visible in silhouette even from Errisbeg. Both these forts have arrays of set stones before them, an apparently defensive feature that suggests, by analogy with similar cases in Iberia, an Early Iron Age date. The dozens of stone huts or clocháin and scores of stony mounds that could well be ruined huts, suggest that the Early Christian period here was settled and prosperous. In mediaeval times the O’Briens, the dominant force in Munster, had three tower-houses on the islands (which they lost to the O’Flahertys of Connemara in the 1550s). The O’Briens also added a Franciscan friary to the already venerable monasteries of Árainn. The record of settlement in the Burren is similarly continuous, and recent studies in environmental archaeology (such as the analysis of soil material from beneath ancient walls and tombs) is tending to reinforce the impression that the limestone lands remained fertile and productive long after bog had begun to form elsewhere, and that their present bareness is not so primordial as it looks.

  The story in Connemara is intriguingly different. Here, early cultures left abundant traces, but then the trail almost peters out. Middens of seashells, looking much like those in the Dingle peninsula now thought to be of Late Mesolithic or Early Neolithic date, occur on several of Connemara’s shores. Just below Errisbeg, for instance, the sandy spit between the back-to-back beaches of Dog’s Bay and Port na Feadóige (the bay of the plover) was evidently a resort of those early food-gatherers, for in the eroded dune-faces one can see blackish layers full of bones, winkleshells and the heat-shattered stones of hearths. And whereas only a few years ago the received opinion was that Connemara has little to offer the archaeologist apart from a small number of megaliths in the north-west, a spate of recent discoveries has shown that in the Neolithic and Bronze Ages the valleys giving onto the bays of Streamstown and Ballynakill were almost as populous as the Burren. This Atlantic coastal area was then, as it still is, the most prosperous part of Connemara, because of its deposits of glacial till and scattered outcrops of metamorphosed limestone. Some of these finds have been revealed by turf-cutting, and close to many of them one can make out the walls of fields that predate the growth of the bogs. It was perhaps the arsonist clearance methods of these early farmers, coinciding with a climatic change from a warmer, drier post-glacial period to the cool, wet times we still enjoy today, that proved too much for the great forests that formerly covered the land and whose roots can be seen in the bottoms of the turf-banks.

  However, the evidence for later settlement is more scattered and ambiguous. There are about a dozen promontory forts, stone cashels and earthen raths, nearly all on or near the western coast, none of them comparable with the great forts of Aran. More characteristic of the region is the widely scattered score or so of crannogs (cashel-like lake-dwellings on wholly or partly artificial islands). Perhaps there were unenclosed forms of settlement too, that have left little trace, or perhaps the onset of bog development was already concentrating life on the teeming trout-lakes south of the Bens. In any case, it is as if Connemara had become a quieter place, when the Burren and Aran were humming with energy. After the Iron Age, settlement seems to confine itself to the coast. The monks of the island hermitages and seashore communities were notoriously averse to neighbours – tradition repeatedly tells of them departing out of hearing of one another’s bells – so the ragged periphery of a deserted Connemara must have suited them well. The seven tower-houses (chiefly of the O’Flahertys) were all on the coast, with the exception of one centrally placed on the lake-island of Ballynahinch, and as far apart as could well be. The bogs, by sealing off the interior, had deprived the coast of its supportive hinterland, and vast tracts of central Connemara remain virtually desolate to this day. But while Connemara was wrapping itself in bog, the Burren and Aran remained hospitable throughout, until continuous millenia of intensive farming reduced them to naked rock, perhaps as recently as the Middle Ages. The difference between limestone on the one hand and metamorphic or igneous rocks on the other has been a dominant factor in this divergence of the fate of these two lands throughout the rainy centuries of the Atlantic regime: limestone drinks water, granite hoards it.

  But then came a strange reversal of fortunes. Since at least the seventeenth century the only source of fuel for the limestone side of Galway Bay has been the peat covering the granite side, and throughout the centuries of Ireland’s huge population growth every niche of the south Connemara coastline sheltered a tiny harbour exporting the region’s turf to Galway, to Kinvara, to some little landing-stage corresponding to each village of the Aran Islands and the Burren coast. The nineteenth century was the heyday of the Galway hookers, the tar-black wooden workboats with their famous tannin-brown sails, capacious bellies and lines honed by generations of experience of lee Atlantic shores. In 1836 there were just over three hundred sailboats working out of harbours from Roundstone to Ros a’ Mhíl, engaged in fishing, general trading, and the carriage of turf; the seaways of south Connemara were brimming with activity. Even today elderly Aran Islanders look back nostalgically to the beautiful sight of the approach of the turfboats bringing their winter warmth. Many other goods crossed the bay in the hookers too: Aran potatoes in payment for turf, poitin from Connemara, limestone itself brought back as ballast in the empty boats
and burned in kilns on the seashore for lime to whiten the houses and sweeten the land of Connemara. Cattle from the mainland used to be taken across to winter on the islands, where they fared better on the dry crags than in the sodden rushy fields of home. On the other hand the Aran farmer used his (Connemara) pony mainly in the winter for carrying fodder to the cattle out on the ‘back of the island’, and for carting seaweed to the fields as fertilizer or to the stacks for kelp-making; in the summer when grass and water were short he could send it back to its native hillsides. Invisible goods were carried in the turfboats too: stories, songs, love even, mixing the folklore and the gene-pools of granite-country and limestone-land. As two different metals dipped in acid can power a voltaic cell, so all this life-force was generated by the differences between granite and limestone, in the common medium of scarcity.

  But it was a precarious symbiosis, as the view from Errisbeg reminds me. Just across Roundstone Bay I see a cluster of roofless walls on a desolate promontory: Rosroe, An Ros Rua, the reddish peninsula. ‘Rua’ is a common placename element here, and the reddishness is that of poor, bracken-infested, land, of nitrogen-deficient vegetation. Rosroe depended entirely on its turf trade, and got its potatoes in Aran rather than plant them at home; so, according to local oral history, it ‘went down’ in 1845, the first year of the Great Famine, while other villages survived longer. In those years many Connemara people fled to Aran, lived in little caves of the inland cliffs and worked for their keep, until the bailiffs drove them out; for it is said that Aran, with its better soil, its degree of insulation from potato blight, and its variety of seafood sources, lost nobody through hunger, while in south Connemara in particular the famine grave in the thicket or among the stones of the foreshore is a constant if obscure element of local geography. And as the recurrent years of ‘distress’ settled into the chronic misery of the ‘Congested Districts’ of the turn of the century, the winning of turf proceeded with ever greater desperation; by the late nineteenth century the outer parts of the south Connemara archipelago known simply as Na hOileáin, the islands, had not even fuel for themselves, and the stoniness of the limestone lands had been brought back like an infection to An Cheathrú Rua, the ‘reddish quarter’, and the other peninsulas pointing out to Aran like ever bonier fingers.