Setting Foot on the Shores of Connemara

by Tim Robinson

  It is a dreadful story that is legible in the hard face of south Connemara, but it has a brave footnote, with which I will close; a brown sail in the bay below brings it to mind. The working life of the hookers dwindled to an end only as recently as the 1960s, though by then most of them were mouldering away in obscure creeks, irrelevant to the age of lorries, which had rendered the old seaways of Connemara obsolete, and of the various fuels that were reducing turf to a historical curiosity. But since then there has been a remarkable revival of interest in these fine boats; several have been prised out of the mud and restored, and a new generation of boat-builders is recalling almost lost traditions of craftsmanship. All summer long the hookers, one or two centenarians among them, sail from regatta to regatta around Connemara, with visits to Cill Rónáin, and, the high point of their season, to Kinvara for Cruinniú na mBád, the ‘gathering of the boats’. This movement, which might seem to be of merely specialist interest, is one of the psychologically most important developments of recent years in these communities, putting the wisdom of the old side by side with the energy of the young, and undoing that dire equation spelled out by Synge between hateful poverty and all the old graces of Connemara life.

  4

  Crossing the Pass

  Seen from the Aran Islands, from Galway city or from Kinvara, the Burren imposes itself as an entity; its battered walls, rising steeply from the waters of the Atlantic or Galway Bay, or from the stony plain of Gort, which is almost as low and level as the sea itself, admit no doubt as to where it begins. Ambiguity creeps in only from the south, with the gentle rise of the shale-and-bog country and its irregular cessation, revealing the limestone strata underlying it; hence towns like Lisdoonvarna and even Lahinch can quibble their way into the region. But the word boireann means a rock, or a place composed of rocks, and to be true to ancient intention one should confine the name to the limestone region, with the reluctant inclusion of the shale-capped back of Slieve Elva, which runs into it from the south and rises just a little higher than the rest of its hills.

  However, once one is within the Burren, this geological prescription is not enough to guarantee a sense of its unity. The region is a plateau sundered by valleys, some of which open onto the sea and others close in on themselves, and its heights are all so close to the thousand-foot mark that none offers a panorama of the whole. In my initial explorations I felt that the place was outmanoeuvring me, that wherever I penetrated, it withdrew and lurked elsewhere. But then, one still, sunlit, autumn day (a day, it turned out, that had come down through hundreds, perhaps thousands, of years) I was privileged to hear the vast, slow heartbeat of this place of rock. I had been visiting the ruins of Corcomroe Abbey, where in the early thirteenth century the Cistercians had coaxed the stones of the Burren into conformity with the spirit of Gothic Europe, and I was walking back to the farmhouse I was staying in at Lough Rask near Ballyvaughan. As I climbed the pass from Turlough, a herd of cattle was being urged up the rugged track ahead of me; the cries of men and barks of dogs rang to and fro between the bare hillsides. At the saddlepoint their way diverged from mine and wound on up into the heights. I paused to let the afternoon achieve its perfection, and felt the wholeness of the Burren like a fruit mellowing on the branch.

  I learned later that this was one of the two dates upon which the Burren year hinges, for it is the uplands that provide ‘winter-age’ to graze the cattle on, while in summer they are kept near the houses in the lowlands, where they are more easily watered and their calves tended. It was a pattern I was familiar with from the Aran Islands, though there the seasonal movement between the crags and the little patches of improved land around the houses is of smaller compass. Perhaps it was the Celts, whose unit of wealth was the heifer and whose stonework is everywhere in the Burren, who initiated this alternation between upland and lowland pastures, or rather the particular form of the custom that marks this region. For what I saw that day was the exact opposite of the ancient practice once general in western Ireland.

  The two seasons of the Celtic year were articulated by the movement of cattle and their attendants between winter quarters in permanent lowland settlements and the mountain pastures habitable only in summer. In Connemara, for example, the O’Flaherty chieftains and their retinue took up residence in temporary dwellings every May, and this custom of ‘booleying’ (from buaile, a milking-pasture) persisted among the peasantry until late in the last century, it being the womenfolk who spent the milking and buttermaking season in little huts of stones and sods on the hillsides while the men attended to the tillage, fishing and kelp-burning below. But the Burren is different. A spell of hot weather that would make the Connemara hills delightful will reduce the Burren’s uplands of thirsty limestone to waterless deserts; conversely in winter when Connemara’s hillsides are streaming quagmires, the Burren’s are relatively dry underfoot, and the Burren farmer can take advantage of the residual Gulf Stream mildness that plays around his land, and leave his cattle out of doors.

  Of course the visitor who drives into the region past its northern hillsides, which from a distance look like the flanks of giant salmon closely armoured with silvery-grey scales, or from the south along roads that cross square miles of the bare rock-sheets so aptly called ‘pavement’, must wonder how any human or animal could survive on what such a terrain has to offer, winter or summer. But as it happens the harder, purer limestones that take on such a hostile polish occur mainly on the lower and intermediate levels, and so make a disproportionate contribution to one’s first impressions, while the upper strata are of a dolomitic limestone, richer in magnesia, and break down into a light soil supporting a nutritious vegetation. Also, even the barest-looking areas have pockets of lush grazing here and there around the springs and seepages at the feet of the scarps that run across the hillsides.

  This pass that, crossed with a time-hallowed day, gave me a hint of the specificity of the Burren, is called Mám Chatha, the pass of battle, for history has penetrated it, as I shall tell. A walk that winds through it will supply themes enough for this brief evocation of a region that exceeds it in all dimensions. I begin at Turlough, the village south-east of it, and end at Lough Rask, to the north-west.

  A turlach is a hollow in which a lake comes and goes, not fed by streams but filling and emptying from below through openings in its bed as the general level of groundwater held in the fissured rock fluctuates in sympathy with the rainfall. Since the phenomenon is almost unknown outside the limestone region of western Ireland, the Irish term has been adopted generally, anglicized as ‘turlough’ on the natural but mistaken assumption that the second syllable has something to do with loch, a lake. The village is named from a fine example of a turlough, and there is another just north-west of it; between them they exhibit most of the strange features of this unusual landform.

  Since different plants can tolerate different degrees and frequencies of immersion, the flora of a turlough is arranged in zones that follow the contours of the hollow. Where a turlough is surrounded by hazel scrub the diminutive forest will stop short around its rim as neatly as if trimmed by a landscape gardener, and its inner face will be embellished with flowers of hawthorn, rowan and guelder rose. Slightly lower comes a contour line of a blackish moss with the musical name of Cinclidotus fontaniloides, which is diagnostic of periodic flooding. The grassy bowl within is usually well grazed and rich in flowering herbs; the common sorts of violet are replaced at the lower levels by the pallid Viola persicifolia, a rarity in Ireland, where it is almost restricted to this specialized station in life. In the centre, pondweeds grow in the muddy dregs around the natural drainholes.

  Sometimes in summer one finds that the empty bowl of a turlough is sheeted in what looks like whitish blotting-paper laid over the vegetation; I remember being baffled by the phenomenon when I came across it for the first time in the Aran Islands. It is made up of the matted and bleached remains of microscopic algae, which have multiplied countlessly in sun-warmed water and then
been left high and dry when the turlough emptied. Algal paper, as it is called, can appear with mysterious suddenness; in Germany, where it has been recorded only about a dozen times, it is called meteor paper, as people imagined it had fallen from the sky.

  A bare limestone landscape without surface streams, in which the drainage is subterranean, is termed a karst, from the name of such a region in Yugoslavia. The Burren is a karst that has been worked over by glaciation; the bowls of these turloughs are depressions that have been gouged out by the glaciers, or are formed in deposits of glacial drift. Other karstic and glacio-karstic features of the Burren can be seen on the hillsides around Mám Chatha, such as, to the east of the pass, a row of steep conical pits which were once swallow-holes of some long-vanished stream, and a ravine formed by the collapse of a cavern excavated by water flowing underground. These impressive works of water date from a time when the shale strata that still overlie the limestone farther south were much more extensive than they are today, for erosion is slowly stripping them away. A stream running off the impervious shale will be acid with bog-water, and on reaching the limestone will soon (i.e. over many hundreds of years) dissolve itself out a swallow-hole by eating away at the fissures and enlarging them; the rest of its journey to the sea will be underground, with perhaps some reappearances in turloughs and springs. As the area covered by shale contracts, the stream will abandon its first swallow-hole and punch through another one closer to the retreating boundary of the shale; one can see the process at work today around the margins of Slieve Elva (and it is because of their creative implication with the limestone topography that one must include such shale areas in the region to be thought of as the Burren). This is the location of the famous potholes and caves of the Burren, which the wet-suited experts can follow for, in one case, over eight miles. Their latest discovery has been of a section of dry cave near Doolin, which can only be entered through an opening on the sea-bed and a quarter of a mile of submarine passage; the river that formed this system must have been flowing when sea-level was much lower than it is now, perhaps at the end of the last Ice Age. For the family party on a Sunday outing there is Aillwee Cave south of Ballyvaughan, farther west along the ridge from Mám Chatha; here one can stroll through over quarter of a mile of tortuous caverns, sprigged with tastefully illuminated stalactites.

  Just east of the summit of the pass are the scars of old opencast mining of fluorspar, the glossy purple crystals of which can still be turned up in the spoil. Fluorspar is formed out of calcite (the pure white and crystalline form of calcium carbonate) by the action of hot fluorine gas, and the fact that at one time there were such fumes rising through the fissures here is part of the evidence for the existence of granite deep down under the limestone. In fact it seems that the Burren is underlain by an extension of the granite that is exposed on the north side of Galway Bay. Perhaps it was because of this solid basement that the limestone strata were so little disrupted by the Hercynian uplift, some 270 million years ago, that left them as a plateau with just a slight southwards inclination. Only at the two ends of the upland area is there substantial folding or faulting; the giant steps with which the last hillside of Árainn descends into the sea are slightly warped and cleft by little rift valleys, while the terraced sides of Mullach Mór, a hill in the south-east of the Burren, are so curved as to make it look like a layer-cake that has sunk in the cooking.

  But it is on the nature of what is immediately underfoot, the broken stone of such hillsides as these around Mám Chatha, that the Burren’s paradoxical fame for barrenness and floral luxuriance is grounded. The limestone offers plants some very specialized habitats, of which two form a strikingly complementary pair. Down in the grykes, as the enlarged fissures are called, all is shadowy, still and dank; ferns such as the hart’s-tongue and maidenhair thrive in this atmosphere from a Victorian bottle-garden. But the horizontal surfaces (the clints) between the grykes are dry and brilliantly sunlit, exposed to strong winds and searchingly grazed by cattle, goats and rabbits. Wherever a thimbleful of humus has accumulated some plant will root, of a sort adapted to these spartan conditions rather than to, say, the hurly-burly of a buttercup-meadow. Thus, close to the maidenhair fern, which is a plant of the mild, Atlantic side of southern Europe, one finds here species associated with severe sub-arctic or alpine climates, such as those two stars of the late May Burren show, the vivid blue spring gentian and the delicate, ivory-silk-petalled mountain avens. A profusion of the usual lime-loving plants, notably thyme, various saxifrages, eyebrights and orchids, occur on all but the barest surfaces; even the most uncomfortable-looking rubble puts forth woodsage and the lovely burnet rose. Right next to these one finds plants such as heathers that prefer more acidic conditions colonizing deeper, better-drained pockets of soil from which the high rainfall has leached out the lime. Sheltered slopes of neglected land carry dense hazel scrub, and it is worth fighting one’s way through its outworks of bramble to see the miniature forest glades, dim, green, bewitched by moss and lichen, where wood-anemones flower virginally in the spring and the rarer broad-leaved helleborine more sophisticatedly in high summer. It is easy – but sometimes rewarding – to get bewildered and go wrong by 360 degrees, in such viewless thickets. When I was exploring around the turloughs described above, in the course of making my map of the Burren, I got lost in the hazel, and decided to work my way up slope to climb out of it. After an hour or so of disentangling myself from endlessly intricate snares, I emerged high on the hillside south of Mám Chatha at a point that would no doubt very seldom see a human being. There, something stirred in a bush ahead; I froze, and after a few minutes a badger came out to root and snuffle about in the rough grass. It took no notice of me as I stepped lightly after it, stopping when it did and waiting for it to move on, as if I were walking a wheezy lapdog in a park. When I went round ahead, it came within a yard of my toecaps before backing off with a throaty hiss of surprise, but then carried on foraging as before. Eventually I had to tear myself away from the occasion – and just a hundred yards farther up the hill found a grove of tall flowers that I did not immediately recognize; they were in bud, and I unrolled one enough to glimpse yellow within: Meconopsis, the Welsh poppy, never recorded in the so zealously botanized Burren before, and miles from any possibility of being a garden escapee. That was one of my best crossings of those hills; I flew down to Lough Rask as if winged with delight, and later I commemorated both encounters on my map, with a just detectably four-footed emblem of the animal, and the Latin name of the plant, secreted among my penwork clints and grykes.

  On another crossing of the same hills, I was groping my way down in torrential rain to Mám Chatha from the south when I came across an ancient stone-walled enclosure about a hundred yards across, which was not marked on the Ordnance Survey maps nor mentioned in the almost exhaustive one-man survey of the Burren ‘forts’ conducted by the Clare archaeologist T.J. Westropp in the 1900s. It consisted of a very dilapidated and irregular semicircular arc of wall springing from the face of a steep scarp crossing the slope just above the saddlepoint of the pass. Whether its purpose had been military, watching over the pass, or peaceable, for the coralling of cattle at a half-way stage of their seasonal migrations, I could not tell. It is only one (but a very large and unusual one) among hundreds of walled enclosures, some of them magnificently situated and visible from afar, others so degraded and enmeshed with more recent fences that it takes a trained eye to distinguish them from the fields around them.

  The majority of the three or four hundred ringforts in the Burren are roughly circular and often about twenty yards across, with simply built drystone walls a few feet thick, and they served as cattle yards around small huts, the individual farms of Iron Age and Early Christian times. But a number of them are more imposing, with walls up to five or six yards thick, rising in two or three terrace-like steps inside; a few of them still retain their lintelled doorways. Some are surrounded by one or two outer ramparts, while Baile Cinn Mhargaidh near
Kilfenora has an abattis of set, slanting stones around it like the two cliff-forts of Aran. Despite such forbidding externals these great cashels may not have been built with warfare in mind; their outworks may have reflected communal prestige; their interior terraces, it has been suggested, are better adapted to viewing ceremonials within than repelling the foe without. Perhaps such monuments served various purposes, sacred and profane – but since the Celts who built them could not confide their intentions to writing, less is known about the cashels of the Burren than about the pyramids of Egypt. Cathair Mhaol, the ‘low-topped (i.e. dilapidated) fort’, at the foot of the slope just west of Mám Chatha, is typical of these almost anonymous ruins. Like so many others it is deeply obscured by thickets; to fight one’s way through them, groping to and fro until one can stretch out a hand to the mighty masonry, is to experience the past in all its difficulty of access and indubitable reality: here was the pride of some well set-up community, and it lies overthrown among thorns.

  But it is not just individual monuments, the scores of cashels and hundreds of lesser ringforts, that lie waiting attention in the Burren; there are webs of ancient field-walls, large tracts of the agrarian landscape from which such monuments drew their sustenance, a stone document of the life of that Late Iron Age and Early Christian period, still legible despite all the layers of overwriting. And interwoven with that message there are earlier ones, from the Bronze Age and the Neolithic, smudged and torn but not indecipherable. Not one of the Burren’s sixty or so wedge tombs has been investigated, but the famous ‘dolmen’ at Poulnabrone, a portal tomb with a huge and rakishly poised capstone, which has had the misfortune to be adopted as a touristic mascot of the region and featured in a thousand vapid come-ons, has been excavated and turns out be five hundred or a thousand years older than had been thought, dating from the Middle rather than the Late Neolithic. Modern’ archaeological techniques could well overturn all current assumptions about the course of settlement in the Burren, but the prospect of anything more than a cursory survey of the monuments of this, one of the world’s richest and most complex prehistoric landscapes, are fading for lack of funds.