by Tim Robinson
Alexander Nimmo, having provided Connemara with a rational road-network and planned the piers that were started at Leenaun, Cleggan, Roundstone and other points as relief-work during the ‘distress’ of 1822, was himself nursing a private project during this optimistic period. At Roundstone, he states in his Coast Survey of 1836,
… as the tenant of the farm on which this pier is situated was very clamourous for damages alleged to be sustained by him during the progress of the work, I ventured at my own expense to purchase up his interest in the lease, as the most likely way to settle his claim; I now hold it by lease under Mr Thomas Martin, and expect soon to have a tolerable fishing village; several people are already settled there, and I am building a store for the purposes of the fishery.
The street Nimmo created there passes above the little cliff that forms the inner wall of his characteristically boldly conceived harbour, and then climbs a hill to admire the much-painted prospect of the Twelve Bens across Roundstone Bay; we owe to him the handsomest of Connemara’s villages, the decisiveness of its layout only superficially obscured by modern developments.
These crowded years of progress were tragically terminated by the Great Hunger of 1845-8, a natural disaster which a grossly malformed society could not mitigate. The peasant population of Connemara, much reduced by the want and pestilence of the 1650s, had been augmented by the Cromwellian resettlements, and by refugees from Antrim in 1796 and Mayo in 1798. The biological rate of multiplication, upon this expanding base, was phenomenal. Population was rising generally in Europe throughout these two centuries, but in few places was the rise so steep as in the poorest parts of western Ireland. Even the periodic famines caused by dependence on one crop, the potato, liable to fail for various reasons, did not check the giddy compilation of short generations. The Connemara gentry, having long conformed to the Protestant church under the pressure of the penal laws that made it impossible for Catholics to pass on their estates undivided, were now almost as distinct in culture from their tenantry as were the Anglo-Irish elsewhere. The master of the Big House, being at once landlord, employer, Justice of the Peace and fount of charity, was unchallengeable. His worthy upkeep was provided for by rents that absorbed all the output of his tenants’ farming, fishing, kelp-burning and cottage industry, for happily the lower orders could live off their amazingly productive potato-beds alone; their teeming marriage-beds, on the other hand, threatened to overwhelm all estate-improvement schemes, and had to be countered by eviction and assisted emigration. The shading and colouring lent by individual cases to this schematic figure of class-relationships faded into insignificance when the potato blight struck. At that time most Connemara people owned nothing (literally nothing, many of them; no cart or donkey, no boat or net, no chair, lamp or bed); when their sole foodstuff turned to black slime, they became paupers overnight. The limited capacities of the British government, civil service and public to respond to, or even conceive of, the cumulative horrors of the next few years in Ireland were soon exhausted. By the autumn of 1847, in Connemara, the public road-works upon which the stonebreaker could earn the price of a bowl of Indian meal had been closed down, overwhelmed by the crush of desperate applicants; the Clifden workhouse was bankrupt and had voided its hundreds of feverous skeletons to live or die in the open; ragged hordes were creeping into Galway to face the long nightmare of the Atlantic; what happened in the mountain valleys and the islands is recorded only by small boulders marking nameless graves.
At this juncture it was revealed to the rector of Wonston in England that the Lord had chastised the Irish with a view to making them ‘come out from Rome’, and that in Connemara in particular there was a potential winning of broken and contrite hearts not to be despised. The Reverend Alexander Dallas set up his Irish Church Mission wherever he had the backing of the Protestant gentry; soup was provided for children attending his schools; some hungry souls ‘converted’, and were damned for it by their parish priests; little colonies of outcasts grew up in the shadow of the rectories, and for three decades, until the venture lost conviction and faded away, the spiritual education of Connemara was the mutual abuse of bigots. One area in the north-west, Letterfrack, was for a time spared this and other post-Famine plagues through the work of a Quaker couple, James and Mary Ellis, who in 1848 were moved to settle there, to demonstrate by personal example how resident landowners could and should stand between their tenantry and the gales of misfortune. Neighbouring gentry grumbled at their paying labourers eight-pence rather than sixpence a day, but the Ellis’s farm and its well-serviced estate village prospered while all Connemara was in decline. Sadly, after nine years of struggle, James’s ill-health and the death of his wife led him to sell out to a supporter of the Reverend Dallas, and return to England.
In secular matters too, Connemara’s agony appeared as opportunity to some English eyes. The Poor Law Extension Act of 1847 had thriftily transferred the whole burden of famine relief onto the local rates, and such top-heavy estates as those of the Martins, the D’Arcys and the O’Neills (as the Geoghegans had renamed themselves) had capsized as a result; the Encumbered Estates Act of 1848 having removed certain legal obstacles, the creditors could now force on sales. The entail of the Martin estate had been broken by Thomas Martin in favour of his daughter, and when he was carried off (by a fever contracted in visiting his former tenants in Clifden workhouse), Mary and her newly wedded husband had fled the avalanche of debt, first to Belgium, and then to America, where she died in a New York hotel after a premature confinement on ship-board. The 192,000 acres of the Martins’ former kingdom were put up for auction in 1849. The Bill of Sale stated that, since the drawing-up of the list of tenants, ‘many changes advantageous to a Purchaser have taken place, and the same Tenants, by name and in number, will not now be found on the Lands’; but not even this sinister assurance was enough to attract bidders. The mortgagees, the Law Life Assurance Society of London, then bought in the estate very cheaply, and by rackrenting and evictions carried on the Famine’s work until 1872, when they sold the lands, with a few small Mayo estates thrown in, for £230,000 to Richard Berridge, a London brewer.
The D’Arcy lands too had been mortgaged to English financiers, the Eyres of Bath, one of whom took over Clifden Castle as his summer residence when the estate fell into their hands. In 1862 the Blakes of Renvyle had to sell off the eastern half of their lands to the heir to a Manchester fortune, Mitchell Henry, who set about taming the wet mountain slopes and housing himself on a princely scale, employing hundreds on his model farm, extensive drainage schemes and the elegant Gothic mansion of Kylemore Castle. Other new proprietors in the relatively encouraging north-western quarter were residents and improvers too, and indeed it is as if an afterglow of the Ellis’s Quaker sense of social responsibility has lingered there to this day.
But at the other extreme, in south Connemara, the granite itself was being stripped bare by the ever more desperate ‘winning’ of turf for sale to Galway city and the turfless limestone areas south of Galway Bay. Here the poorest of Connemara’s poor were still mercilessly harried by the Blakes of Tully and the agents of absentee landlords, including the Berridges themselves, whom the increasingly menacing words and deeds of a no-longer acquiescent tenantry kept away from their new home at Ballynahinch. The Land League, originating in the equally miserable oppression of County Mayo, was beginning to organize resistance to evictions, and in the first days of 1881 a great hosting of tenants on the Kirwans’ estate at An Cheathrú Rua drove off a server of eviction notices and his police escort. Although the Kirwans were still evicting there a decade later, such events as this ‘Battle of Carraroe’ cumulatively extorted reductions in rent and improvements in security of tenure, and forced upon the government a sense that the moral and economic resources of landlordism were inadequate to the needs of these shameful western backyards of the kingdom. In 1891 the Congested Districts Board was set up to further the development of regions that could not in their present state support
their populations, and in Connemara it found everything to be done. Over the next thirty years harbours were improved, small fishing fleets subsidized into precarious existence, herring-curing stations built, lace-making schools opened, and, slowly but inexorably, the landlords bought out, the jumbled small-holdings on their estates rationalized, and the labourer given his own field to labour at last.
This history, for so much of its course a river of sorrows, has flowed through and at times almost swept away a singular culture – not that of the provincial gentry, but of the humble farm- and fisherfolk – a culture which conserved ancient words and ways, and had its matted and tenacious roots in a sense, deeper than any economic or legal realities, of being in its own place. As the Irish language withdrew, throughout the century of famines and modernization, to its present lairs, principally in the south of the region, only a proportion of its oral lore was appropriated by English. But where Irish lives, that tradition is still so voluble in story, song and placename, that one wonders if Connemara’s days and nights were longer formerly, to hear all that was said and sung in them of Connemara. Around the end of the last century that peasant culture came to represent the true Ireland to one wing of the nationalist movement; through Patrick Pearse, who regularly returned to Ros Muc as to a well of inspiration, its values entered into the veins of the republic he declared and died for in 1916, and works in them obscurely still. Since Independence the Gaeltacht (the areas officially designated as Irish-speaking) has been treated with varying small degrees of positive discrimination by the governments of the day, and successive generations of the dedicated, through Raidió na Gaeltachta, local co-operatives and other organizations, have insisted on Irish as a language of modern society and its arts. Despite compromises, defeats and disappointments, despite even the numbing effect of continued emigration, the stony south is now socially more vigorous than any other part of Connemara, apart from the historically and geographically favoured exception of Ballynakill in the north-west; the little turf-harbour of Ros a’ Mhíl has become the county’s major fishing port, and An Cheathrú Rua, with its industrial estates run by Údaras na Gaeltachta, the Gaeltacht Authority, is pulling itself together into a recognizable town.
Emigration, though, is the face in the windows of empty houses throughout Connemara. Youngsters go in search not only of work but the conviviality their depleted villages cannot provide. Grants from Údaras or the Industrial Development Authority help to plant occasional industrial projects in this generally unfavouring far-western ground; some survive and even flourish, while others disappear in a whiff of scandal. The traditional livelihoods of fishing and farming are still basic to Connemara. Many households, whether most of their income is from fishing or bed-and-breakfast or a factory, have a few young cattle in a few rushy fields, which they will sell on as two-year-olds to be fattened in the midlands’ lusher pastures. Like cattle, sheep attract ‘headage’ grants; the shepherds drive their battered cars out along rough tracks and sweep the hillsides with binoculars to check how their black-faced ewes, badged with fluorescent paint, are surviving the gales, the rain and the foxes. There are Connemara ponies on the hills too, especially around Cashel and Roundstone, which will be exhibited and sold at the August show in Clifden. Most households have an allotted strip of bog from which to cut their yearly supply of turf, and in places turf is cut by machine on a commercial scale. Fishing from the smaller harbours, other than Ros a’ Mhíl, is limited by the size of the boats; few of the trawlers are big enough to follow the winter shoals of herring once they have left the coast. Half-decked boats do the rounds of the lobster and shrimp pots and dredge for scallops in the bays, and in summer net the incoming salmon. Over the last ten years the rafts of mussel farms and the cages of salmon and sea-trout farms have multiplied, first in the sheltered inlets of the south coast, and now, as the engineering is developed, in more exposed positions. Carna and Na hOileáin in the south are suddenly earning comparatively good money from locally, nationally and internationally based fish-farming companies, while western villages like Roundstone have so far tended to resist the intrusion of alien technology into their pure waters. Most lucratively of all, if only for a few brief summer weeks, Connemara unites the harvest and harvest festival of tourism; restaurants and craftshops open, there are dances, deep-sea angling contests, horse races, pony shows and, best of all, the regattas to which the famous old brown-canvassed, tarry-hulled Galway hookers come sailing out of the past.
All that I have briefly told happened within view of the Twelve Bens, an elemental, constant, presence that would, if the status of the Earth had not been usurped, instil our daily ways with a certain thoughtfulness, like a great cathedral among busy streets. The free-flowing beauty of this landform has been more slighted by the material progress of the last forty years than by centuries of neglect; it is time to redress the balance. When in the 1950s the powerlines marched out across Connemara’s vaporous spaces, their assertion that the remotest cottage was part of modern Europe did as much to maintain human presence there as the dole, but the landscape shrank under the lash. More recently rectangles of pine forest have reduced some of the finest mountain glens to banality, with little or no prospect of economic compensation – an ugly mistake, which should be undone by removing the worst examples and helping the blemished land tone back into harmony with the rest. Everywhere in Connemara there are potential conflicts over the sharing-out of its resources; the fertilizers and silt washing down streams from forestry plantations are inimical to famous salmon rivers, the traffic to and from new industries breaks down pleasant old roads and bridges, the fencing of sheep-ranges impedes the freedom of hill-walkers, the chemicals and detritus from fish-farming cages may threaten traditional shellfish beds. The present enthusiasm for mariculture could ebb, leaving a tidemark of dereliction around Connemara’s shores. Prospecting licences covering nearly all of Connemara have in the last few years been issued to Irish and international mining companies, who have scented gold, and the ruthless technologies needed to extract it from huge amounts of ore could be unleashed on our hillsides. A current proposal to site an airport in unspoiled country near Clifden focuses a contradiction between the facilitating of tourism and the conservation of what the tourists come for. Another much criticized development, the scattering of cottages and bungalows along the network of roads on the coastal plains, which appals the city visitor who misidentifies it as surburban sprawl, perhaps deserves more sympathetic understanding than it usually receives. As a new social form, much in need of aesthetic education but full of human potentialities, its evolution is traceable from the breakup of the estates, when their clusters of hovels were replaced by isolated cottages each on its own strip of land; now those households have moved down to the roadside and acquired cars, or emigrated and sold out to the holiday population that enlivens these areas for the brief summer but leaves them dark-windowed through the long winter.
All these difficulties of Connemara life can be mitigated, and perhaps the present work, that images the oneness of the place and projects the dimension of the past onto the surface of the present, may hint at the spirit in which modern life and its habitat could be reconciled. But there is much more at stake than the rationalization of land-use, for Connemara is not just the sum of its resources; it stands aside from and ahead of our quarrelsome human purposes, being part of what we live for as well as what we live by. It is in fact something difficult to speak of in our present condition of civilization. How can I indicate this Connemara, but as the edge of brightness that follows a cloud-shadow across the mountainside, or the stillness of a lake before the trout rises?
6
Interim Reports from Folding Landscapes
Although I have been making maps for a dozen years now, cartography, in the sense of a general desire and competence to make maps, remains alien to me. The maps I have so far undertaken cover all the land I can see from where I live, and are elaborated and externalized versions of the mental sketchmaps one m
akes to situate oneself, cognitively and emotionally, in a new locality. Since it was the disorientating nature of the place I had opted to live in that urged me to map it, I should begin this brief retrospect with a hint of its strangeness to one coming there directly from London. The Aran Islands are three chips of limestone off the Burren, the paradoxical character of which is well indicated by the name of its ruined abbey, ‘St Mary of the Fertile Rock’. However, the islands are more on speaking terms with Connemara, sharing with it the honour and burden of a language in retreat, carrying an oral tradition older than Christianity. The Atlantic batters, caresses, bewilders and depresses the two mainlands and lavishes its attentions on the islands in particular. That will do; that is already more than I knew when I arrived in 1972, to live in a hamlet an hour’s walk west of the little port of Árainn, the largest of the islands.
