Setting Foot on the Shores of Connemara

by Tim Robinson

  27 In view of this theory it is odd that the only dream Synge’s diary records from Aran was of a riot in connection with the Dreyfus case, which was agitating Paris at the time.

  10

  Listening to the Landscape

  On the other edge of the Atlantic there is an island roughly the shape and size of Manhattan, called Árainn, one of the three Aran Islands, off Galway Bay, where I lived for many years. From it I could see the quartzite peaks of Connemara, on the north of the bay, and the grey limestone plateau of the Burren, on its south. It seems strange now to be talking about those quiet little places, here in this roaring city, on the edge of this vast continent. And to be discussing in New York the language, Irish or Gaelic, that is still spoken in Aran and Connemara, but only by a few thousand people, in fact to be bringing you merely a few words from the local dialects of that language, words that are falling into disuse – perhaps that needs some explanation. My excuse must be that I came to that narrow island and that dying language from the great cities and the great languages of Europe, and found in them something that I am still trying to understand, and am anxious to pass on. Heard something, I should say, rather than found. The language and the place, the landscape, spoke with one tongue, and spoke of something that is in danger of being forgotten by the busier languages and places of the world.

  To get over an initial embarrassment about it I should also explain that the fairly fluent if grammatically limited Irish I picked up when living in Aran has decayed a good deal over the last few years when I have been living in an English-speaking part of Connemara and although I have no difficulty in reading and understanding Irish I fear to speak it in public, lest my pretention to know something about Irish placenames look absurd. If I am to declare what the Irish language, and in particular the placenames, have meant to me as a wanderer in that language’s natural habitat, I must rely on your forbearance.

  I’ll begin with some moments – which in my memory have become symbolic – of my first encounters with Irish, after M and I moved from London to the Aran Islands twenty years ago. One of the first remarks the village blacksmith, Mícilín an Gabha, made to us after showing us round the bare, damp, cottage we had rented from him in Árainn, was that the wild geese flying southwards over the island in the autumn make every letter of the alphabet in the sky; first a huge A, then a B, and then, as he put it, ‘a burst of them’ make a C. He thought this was remarkable, since those geese had never been to school. I would have thought it remarkable too, but the best I ever saw the wild geese do in all the autumns we spent in Aran was the occasional síneadh fada, the stroke marking a long vowel in Irish writing. But the idea of the sky’s teaching us the language remained with me. The Irish language as an emanation of the land of Ireland, of that segment of the earth’s surface and its moody skies, is the theme I want to explore tonight.

  Micilín spoke English competently, but his sentences, sparse, short and sturdy, seemed to rise up out of a continuum of sotto-voce murmurings like jutting rocks in a foaming sea. This flux of obscure phonemes, I realized by degrees, was Irish, from which his English was being translated, with great loss. By listening to him, and to the men chatting with him at the forge while their ponies were shod, I began to pick out words, and so identify topics, even if what was said about these topics was still carried away from me by the streams of sound. I remember a significant step towards acquisition of understanding. I had asked an old man the name of a certain well – for the absurdity of my curriculum vitae is that I started collecting Irish placenames before I could understand Irish – and he had told me it was Tobar an Asail, the well of the donkey. And then he added: ‘Thit asal isteach ann fadó.’ (‘A donkey fell into it long ago.’) It was the first sentence of spoken Irish, outside the classrooms of Irish courses, that I completely understood. Thit asal isteach ann fadó. As dense and foursquare as a limestone block, a stone from the ruins of the past – but with that mysteriously evocative momentary prolongation of the word fadó. The voice of history itself, telling how all things fall.

  Another moment, from a later stage of the process: I was going into Inis Oírr, the smallest of the Aran Islands, in one of the local boats called currachs – flat-bottomed canoes that can be run up onto a sandy beach. At that period the old cargo ship that served the islands used to hang about off shore while the currachs came out and ferried both goods and passengers to the beach. A very calm, silent afternoon – it must have been out of season as I was the only non-islander in the boat. As we neared the strand the men lifted their oars and the currach hung motionless, little waves running in under it, clucking, like chicks under a hen. The islanders were exchanging murmurs, so quietly that if I had not learned some Irish I might not have realized anything was being said at all. They were discussing the individual waves, looking for one a little bigger than the rest on which to run the currach up onto the beach so that I could leap out dryshod. I heard the man in the prow whisper to the man in the stern, ‘Fan nóiméid, tá ceainnín beag eile ag gobadh aníos fút anois’ (‘Hold on, there’s another little one pushing up under you now’). A still moment, drifting on a neaptide of time – and then a surging stroke of the oars and they were shouting at me to jump: ‘Anois! Amach leat go tapaidh!’

  These images I am offering you – the wild-goose chase of the alphabet in the sky, the waves whispering to each other under the currach, the donkey uttering seanchas from the well – are little myths, to tempt you to hear the language as if it were spoken by the landscape. For me it was so from the beginning, as I shall explain. But is there any more defensible, objective truth in the idea of a deep connection between a landscape and its language? Is it in any way more true of Irish than of, say, French or German? An Irish philosopher, John Moriarty, recently told me that among the things that had not happened to the Irish language were the Renaissance, the Reformation and the Enlightenment. If this be true it is so only with many partial exceptions and qualifications. But, letting ourselves be swept along with the huge generalization, it would mean that Irish is a language less dominated by the prestige of the book, less individualistic in its stance towards the absolute, less hospitable to analysis, than those neighbour languages which were the immediate sites of these cultural upheavals. And these upheavals, these floods of thought, not only left rich deposits in those languages, but swept much away that had come to be seen as obsolete and valueless, and which we now feel the want of. So the obverse of these limitations might be that Irish is more eloquent by the fireside than in the lecture hall, more apt to conviviality than solitary self-definition, happier in the phenomenal and emotional world than among abstractions. Of course in any living language there are speakers and writers who swell its vocabulary and bend its structures. Life, for a language, is continuous self-transcendence. Nevertheless, each language has its own core of native strength and sweetness, and perhaps in the case of Irish this is to be identified with its immediacy to experience, and in particular with its closeness to the land. If in the following examples I concentrate on land of a stony nature it is because of Ireland I only know Aran, the Burren and Connemara, which are all of stone, and if in the Irish language I concentrate on nouns, it is because I only know nouns, having picked up them up like so many coloured stones.

  Stones, then. Clock (stone) is a fine word, a solid, lumpy two-fistfuls of sound. I love also the expressive suite of words for different sorts of stony place: clochar, clochrach or cloithreach, creig (in Aran a creig is an area of bare limestone pavement; the plural is creigeanna, but I have heard the magnificent form creigreachai), cragán or criogán (which is something between a creig and a field), leac or leic, meaning a flagstone or flat sheet of rock, with the plural leacrachai, and leacht, which usually means a cairn or monument but in Connemara can mean the same as leac. Also: scairbh and screigín, both meaning rough stony places, and scailp (in Aran a scailp is usually a fissure in the limestone, but can be any sort of stony declivity or hole), with the marvellously rugged plural scalpr
achaí. Aran is of course the headquarters of these harsh words in cr and scr and cl, the islands being totally composed of creigeanna and scalprachai. Many of the little green fields of Aran have been reclaimed from bare rock by spreading sand and seaweed on it year after year to build up the soil. Tomás Ó Direáin, brother of the well-known Irish language poet from Aran, Máirtín Ó Direáin, has a little poem about an Aran man reclaiming a leic, a flat sheet of rock, beginning

  Féach é ina sheasamh ar an leic,

  Atá liath agus lom

  (See him standing on the flag/ which is grey and bare)

  and ending with nursery-rhyme simplicity:

  Le allas a bhaithis

  Le fuil a chroí

  Déanfaidh sé talamh

  As na scalprachaí.

  (With the sweat of his brow, with the blood of his heart, he will make land out of the – scalprachaí! I defy anyone to find an adequate translation for the word.) Nursery rhymes can be explosive, though; they have to be handled carefully. Here we have ‘land’, the earth, being made out of the blood of the heart – the blood of self-sacrifice through labour, not the blood of self-sacrifice in battle, the blood Patrick Pearse thought would warm the heart of the earth, but disturbingly reminiscent of it. In talk about land and language, there is always a whiff of this third element, blood, and the three have historically made up a deathly stew. This dark context of my theme is one that, having glanced into, I must now step around – with perhaps this note of caution to myself: When talking about the land or the landscape speaking, do not forget that this is only a metaphor, suggestive in some contexts and baleful in others, and that in fact the speaking is made up of the speech acts of countless individuals, each one in its unique historical and social setting. My own ‘listening to the landscape’ has included listening to hundreds of farmers, housewives, fishermen, shopkeepers, and the odd professor of Irish too.

  The most immediate connection between language and reality, the one first made by children and by language learners, is that of naming things. Placenames are the interlock of landscape and language. As mentioned, I started collecting placenames in the Aran Islands before I could understand a word of the language; this was perhaps because Micilín the blacksmith was so anxious to impart his knowledge of them. This zeal for communication of the lore that it seemed was no longer finding an audience in the local community, and so was discharged on me, demanding of me that I take note and record it for ever, is an imperative force I have felt again and again over the twenty years of work that grew out of those initial conversations in the smithy of Aran. This work was not what I had in mind when I came to Ireland; there is an element of compulsion in it, something I did not know of in myself, perhaps still do not know of, which answers to something in this landscape. Or perhaps the landscape saw me coming. So in my diaries for that first winter in Aran I find notes on the boundaries or mearing walls of villages whose names I have spelled out in ad hoc English phonetics, with scrappy explanations of the names, some of them completely misunderstood. It is usual to have a degree in Irish, and to know something of Old Irish too, before tangling with the complexities of placenames. Of course as I became aware of the difficulties I took to consulting experts. Most of the obscure or arguable cases have been submitted to the judgement of several specialists – the result often enough being several different opinions, or rather suggestions, for no one who knows the subject would be dogmatic about interpreting a name without visiting the place itself. Armchair speculations about the meaning of placenames, without visiting the locality to hear the exact pronunciation and to observe the topography or any other salient characteristics of the place, are necessarily inconclusive.

  This is because placenames are semantically two-pronged; they not only have a referent, like any proper name, i.e. the place they denote, but most of them also have a connotation; they make a condensed or elliptic remark about the place, a description, a claim of ownership, a historical anecdote, even a joke or a curse on it. And so they may only reveal their meaning in the physical and historical context of the place. When I was mapping Connemara I was puzzled by the names of two uninhabited townlands out in the wide expanses of the bog: Tullaghlumman More and Tullaghlumman Beg. A tulach is a small hill – in Connemara most tulacha are sizeable drumlins in fact – but these areas were labyrinths of lakes in level bogland. According to John O’Donovan, who was the Ordnance Survey’s expert on placenames for the first survey in the 1830s, Tullaghlumman meant ‘Lomán’s hill’ – for whenever O’Donovan could not otherwise interpret a placename he would derive it from some personal name, and he invented an amazing number of peculiarly named persons in the process. But one day I was out walking the bog with a shepherd from Roundstone, and when we stopped to catch our breath and admire the view he pointed out a rocky knoll in the distance, and said ‘That’s Tulach Lomáin.’ It was a very small eminence, only noticeable even in the huge encircling flatness of bogs and lakes because of a large outcrop, a sheet of bare rock, on one side of it. Back at home, in the dictionary I found the word lomán, rock outcrop, evidently from lom, bare. So a very minor feature, but one visible from afar, a useful landmark to shepherds, had given its name to a large area. On that same day we passed a small lake up on the side of a steep hill, called Loch Roisín na Róige, a name nobody could explain or translate for me. Climbing beyond the lake, we followed a little ravine cut by a streamlet that flung itself down waterfalls, which my companion told me was called the Róig. And that solved the crossword puzzle of the landscape, as if a ‘down’ word had given me the vital letter in the ‘across’; for róig means a sudden rush or attack, and where this aggressive little stream drops into the lake a little peninsula or roisín has been built up out of the stony material it has ripped out of the mountainside. Loch Roisín na Róige, the lake of the little point of the Róig or onrush; it encapsulates the dynamics of the geography. For me it is also a memento of a vigorous day’s walking and talking with one of Connemara’s mountainy men.

  Interpreting such placenames sends me to the dictionaries; the landscape examines me in the language. Often, though, the dictionaries cannot help, as particular usages are so localized as to have escaped their nets. Here’s an interesting example from the biggest of the three Aran Islands, Árainn itself. The word scrios occurs in dozens of placenames in the western half of Árainn, where it apparently means a broad expanse of land not much broken up by field walls; Micilín tells me one could say ‘Nach breá an scrios talún atá agat!’ (‘What a fine scrios of land you have!’) I haven’t heard it anywhere else. There is Scrios na gCapall, the scrios of the horses, Scrios Buaile na bhFeadóg, the scrios of the milking-pasture of the plovers, and Scrios an Teach Beag, the scrios of the small house. (Grammatically speaking, it should be Scrios an Tí Bhig, but Aran placenames are not so fussy about genitive cases as the grammar books, and who am I to correct them?) I haven’t found any connection between this usage and the various dictionary meanings of the word scrios: destruction, scrapings, a light covering of soil etc. Another highly localized word from Aran is creachoileán or creachalán, applied to a number of big slab-shaped offshore rocks, rather grim-looking and dangerous, and all well-known to the currachmen; there’s An Creachoileán Mór, the big creachoileán, and An Creachoileán Báite, the drowned or submerged creachoileán, for instance. Tom O’Flaherty, Liam O’Flaherty’s brother, in one of his stories of Aran fishermen, renders creachoileán as ‘rock of woe’ (as if from creach, ruin, loss etc.), but I don’t know its true derivation, nor of any instance of it outside of the Aran Islands. Some of these dialect words have other senses elsewhere. In the west of Connemara everyone would understand an imleach to be a glacial hill, a drumlin, whereas in other parts of the country, and in the dictionaries, it means marginal land. A caorán in south Connemara is a small roundish hill of moorland; elsewhere it is a moor in general. In the Aran Islands a réalóg is an unenclosed patch of good land in the middle of a creig; the word is still understood in Inis Meáin
in this sense, but not in Árainn, although it occurs in dozens of placenames there. I particularly relish this linguistic parochialism, as part of the connubiality of land and language; these are words one learns, not from the resources of the library, but from the woman carrying her milkpail up to the cow on the caorán, the farmer who has his sheep on the imleach or his potatoes in the réalóg, or from the fisherman who nearly got drowned off the drowned creachoileán.

  Of course I could be wrong about any one of the placenames I have published, even if no one else is in a position to prove it. I don’t mind putting question-marks by the names on my maps; and if I have made mistakes, I have at least recorded the material on which someone better equipped than myself can make a better guess. But if I waited until academically impregnable certainty is attained, there would never be a map. However, I keep a special copy of each of my published maps, on which I note my cartographical sins of omission and commission as they come to light; I call it the Black Copy. There will always be another edition, an afterlife in which these things can be made good, or at least a more informed guess can be made.