Setting Foot on the Shores of Connemara

by Tim Robinson

  THE SMUGGLER

  I begin with the famous Captain George O’Malley, An Caiptín Máilleach as he is known in Irish, born in 1786 in Ballynakill or Baile na Cille, ‘the village of the church’. Connemara in general was more prosperous then than in later years, and that remote north-western corner has patches of a mellower geology than the rest; green hills of glacial till and sheltery valleys of limestone-derived soils soften its asperities. Also, its coastline, its deep and winding inlets running to the foot of trackless mountains, might have been drawn by nature with smugglers in mind. So, the O’Malley ladies and those of their neighbours such as the Coneyses of Streamstown and the O’Flahertys of Renvyle, went in silks, and even common boatmen sported extravagant high hats brought in from Guernsey. It was not until the 1820s that new roads allowed the influence of civic authority into the region, and the inhabitants blamed the roads for the subsequent economic decline. In fact the cycle of years of ‘distress’ and those of mere chronic want, that culminated in the Great Famine, was ushered in by the agricultural depression following on the end of the Napoleonic Wars, the collapse of kelp prices when alternative sources of alkali became available to Britain, and the coincidental disappearance of the herring shoals that had brought an international fleet of fishing boats to Killary Harbour. These changes must have given the memories of Captain O’Malley‘s most active days a varnish of nostalgia even while he lived.

  Two songs attributed to the Captain are still sung in Connemara, one of them in praise of his boat, the other in praise of himself. The traditional singing of the west of Ireland, called sean-nós, the old way, sounds strange to our ears as it uses modes other than the major and minor ones we are familiar with, but it is worth persevering and learning to appreciate its expressive qualities. These are uniquely allied to the rich and complex phonetics of the Irish language. Hear the difference between ‘Captain O’Malley’ and, properly pronounced, ‘An Caiptín Máilleach’ – it is as if the syllables of Irish have more space inside them. In fact there are Irish words so spacious you could hold a céilí dance in one syllable and a wake in another, without mutual interference. The art that explores these spaces inside words is sean-nós. In print, and in translation, I can only explore the outsides of such words.

  ‘An Caiptín Máilleach’1 is a series of scenes from a smuggling voyage. The first verse gives the course, by various islands and headlands; the Captain makes fine music out of the placenames:

  Thart le Rinn an Mhaoile, sios ‘un Crua’ na Caoile,

  An Cloigeann le n-a thaobh sin is Trá Bhríde ina dhiaidh.

  Renvyle (how their quality is lost in the anglicized forms of these names!), with its castle that one of the Captain’s forebears Grace O’Malley half-felled with a cannon-shot from a galley; Cruach na Caoile, now called Deer Island, uninhabited in the Captain’s time except for a herdsman watching over the red deer the Martins of Ballynahinch bred there; Cleggan, where a martyred saint picked up his severed head (cloigeann), washed it and put it back on; Trá Bhríde, Bridget’s strand, the fishing village that was to lose sixteen of its menfolk in the sudden storm of 1927 – it would take a book to unpack the stories in these names. Then, as the Captain steers his boat past the Aran Islands, the breeze becomes a gale, waves roar and flash, the sky quakes and fog thickens; if the planks could speak they would tell a dreadful tale of how only they stand between the crew and death. The crew are looking at the Captain’s forehead for signs of hope, but all he can do is to carry on under sail while the boat still floats. His hands are torn from endlessly hauling ropes, the skin and flesh are pulled off the bones – but if the Son of God has decreed their death there’s no avoiding it, and they’ll all go to Paradise together:

  Tá mo lámha stróicthe go síoraí ag tarraingt rópaí,

  Tá an chraiceann ‘gus an fheóil tóigthe amach on gcnáimh;

  Ach más é an bás a gheall Mac Dé dhúinn, cen gar atá dhá shéanadh,

  Acht a ghoil go flaithis Dé dhúinn ar aon stáid amháin.

  Then, the storm having abated, they land their cargo of Jamaica rum, tobacco and silks; he can have whichever girl he sets his heart on, the ship is shaken from stem to stern but what does it matter, they’ll finish the song and drink their dram. Finally he relives the dangers they have overcome – water-guards, revenue cutters, spies, treacherous pilots – but: ‘I am George O’Malley, a sound man of Grace’s stock – My cargo was landed with ease, no thanks to any of them!’

  Ach is mise Seóirse Ó Máille, fear maith de bhunadh Ghráinne –

  Cuireadh i dtír mo lucht go sásta, agus ná raibh maith acu dhá chionn.

  Years ago I came across an old reference to a manuscript autobiography of Captain O’Malley said to have been written in the workhouse at Westport where he died in 1865. But, having heard the very groaning of planks and clapping of sails echoed in the words of his song, it was difficult to credit the existence of any such work; as a creature of stormy myth he seemed as unlikely as the Flying Dutchman to have left tangible documentation of himself. However, when I was mapping the Captain’s haunts I made a point of asking the local inhabitants for any knowledge they had of him, and one day to my amazement Eileen O’Malley of Cleggan answered me by producing a weighty boxful of paper – the Captain’s memoirs, in seven volumes each of three or four hundred closely typed pages. This huge work has never been published, and I subsequently learned that at least two scholars have played with the idea of editing it for publication and have retired defeated by its verbose braggartry, as I myself have been. This typescript copy, evidently made many decades ago, had been passed down to Professor T.S. Ó Máille of University College, Galway, as head of the O’Malley clan. The next time I called in on Tomás, as I did now and again in search of counsel on problematic placenames, I discussed the document with him. He was dubious of its genuineness; he felt that the Captain was unlikely to have been able to write, and that much of it was inherently incredible. Indeed the Captain’s adventures during the Napoleonic Wars – when he is pressed into the English navy, captured by a French privateer, imprisoned in the Tower of St Malo, and later with hundreds of other prisoners marched in chains hither and thither about Napoleon’s collapsing empire – or in the Caribbean where his shipmates persuade him, much against his conscience, to lead them in leasing a ship for a season of piracy, in which they are very successful until they lose all their loot to a bigger pirate vessel – might perhaps prove to have been lifted from other memoirs. However, I can vouch for the accuracy of the references to people and places in the early chapters; his adversarial dealings with Captain Morris of the navy, his involvement with the Coneys family in the basking-shark fishery, and above all, his father’s relationships with his financial backer, Anthony O’Flaherty of Renvyle, place George O’Malley in the real Connemara of the early nineteenth century.

  But for me, obsessive topographer, the document is chiefly valuable for exactly situating the place of George’s birth, which had eluded all my local enquiries, and for the curious detour through the Otherworld by which it does this. It was clear from various hints and conjectures I had come across that the O’Malley home was near Keelkyle in Ballynakill parish, but nobody could confirm this, much less identify the site of the house. The memoirs certainly point to Keelkyle, though without naming it. George’s earliest memory is of watching his father sailing into his home bay pursued by the coastguard cutter, and turning his boat suddenly to dart through a narrow passage between an islet and the shore and head out to sea again, leaving the coastguards to blunder on and run aground on a sandbank – whereupon he magnanimously comes back, throws them a rope and hauls them off, a gallantry of which they are so appreciative that they shake his hand and ask no questions about his cargo. The course of this adventure inscribes itself without difficulty on the map of Ballynakill Bay. But a more precise clue (pointed out to me by the historian Sheila Mulloy, who has looked into the memoirs) is the reference to a fairy hill on his father’s land and ‘within eighty
yards of the hall door’. Now there is in the townland of Keelkyle at the head of the bay a curious abrupt knoll between the coast road and the sea (almost opposite a craftshop that advertises itself as ‘possibly the best craftshop in the west’, and is therefore known as the Possibly Shop). The knoll is called Dúinín Mór, and although I never heard locally that it was regarded as a dwelling-place of the fairies, this was formerly a familiar fact; indeed, according to a story preserved in the Department of Folklore in University College, Dublin,2 a Clifden man going by on his way to Letterfrack intervened to stop a fight between two men, who turned out to be the respective kings of the Dúinín Mór fairies and those of Cathair an Dúin, an Iron-Age promontory fort on the Renvyle peninsula, also regarded as a fairy fort. The quarrel, like so many in Connemara, was over seaweed-gathering rights, and the traveller undertook to mediate:

  ‘I’ll settle the question for you,’ said the travelling man, ‘if you accept.’

  ‘We’re happy to accept,’ said the pair of them.

  ‘Well,’ said the man, ‘let the people of Dúinín Mór come and cut seaweed from Letterfrack west until they come as far as Gob an Rosa, and let them go across the bay there and cut the seaweed opposite Gob an Rosa on the Leitir side and round by Damhros until they come back to Dúinín Mór again. And the Cathair an Dúin people,’ said the man, ‘they can cut the shore west of Gob an Rosa and then cross the bay to Leitir and cut that shore until they come to the Cora, the place where the Dúinín Mór people started to cut on the Leitir side.’

  ‘We’re satisfied,’ said the two kings. ‘We’ll accept that.’

  So Dúinín Mór was a well-known factor of the supernatural economics (and tales about it no doubt had an ideological role in local power-politics); hence we now know pretty exactly where the Captain was born. It might seem odd to fix a human address by reference to a fairy dwelling, but the aura of the uncanny can outlast historical memory. In fact, although the knoll is no longer thought of as a fairy fort, it is still a locus of the numinous. In 1987 a statue of the Virgin Mary was installed in a little ‘grotto’ on its roadside face, and shortly afterwards reports that the statue was moving caused crowds to gather. Men in suits of fundamentalist darkness materialized, I remember, to oversee the devotions and control the traffic jams. They were servicing a cult older than they knew.

  THE REBEL PRIEST

  Despite the sturdily nationalistic tone in his memoirs, Captain O’Malley seems only to have been caught up accidentally by the history and politics of his times. But the Connemara he grew up in was full of refugees from that history. In 1798, forever known as the Year of the French, General Humbert’s expeditionary force landed at Killala in Mayo, and initiated a rebellion against British rule that was crushed with great brutality. Many of the rebels fled from Mayo, where the British yeomanry were hunting for them; some got away to France, probably with the help of George O’Malley’s father and other smugglers, while others lurked for years in the mountain fastnesses of Connemara.3 One of them was a Johnny Gibbons, who hid out in a scailp or cave, still called Scailp Johnny, on the forested hillside of Kylemore near Ballynakill. In the end he foolhardily went back to Mayo to attend a wedding, and while he was asleep someone soaked his pistols in water and sent for the redcoats. When he was about to be hanged, he cried out, ‘Ah Connemara, my five hundred farewells to you; no treachery would have come to me had I stayed with you!’ In the aftermath of the Mayo rising the chief prosecutor of the United Irishmen, as the rebels were called, was the Honorable Denis Browne, brother to Lord Altamont of Westport House, and he went about his task of having people hanged with such enthusiasm he earned the nicknames Soap-the-Rope and Donncha an Rópa. The blind poet Raftery, the most famous itinerant rhymer of his time, curses him in a song about the men on the run in Connemara.4 The verse is very fierce; he says he’d like to shake hands with Denis Browne, not out of friendship but to string him up with a hempen rope and stick a spear in his big belly – and threatens that many of the lads driven overseas would be returning in uniform, with a French drum beating for them:

  A Dhonncha Brún is deas chraithfinn láimh leat

  agus ní le grá duit acht le fonn do gabháil,

  cheanglóinn suas thú le rópa cnáibe

  agus chuirfinn mo spiar i do bholg mór.

  Mar is iomdha buachaill maith a chuir tú thar sáile

  a thiocfas anall fós is cúnamh leo,

  faoi chultai dearga agus hataí lása

  is beidh an droma Francach ag séinm leo.

  In another verse he names some of the men on the run, describes their sufferings out in the bogs ‘under thirst and dishonour, and the cold of night’, and cries ‘shame’ on those who didn’t help them, for unless Christ wills otherwise, they will succumb.

  Tá Johnny Gibbons is ár nAthair Maol’re

  agus iad á gcaomhúint amach faoin móin,

  faoi thart is faoi easonóir is fhuacht na hoíche

  is nil fiú an bhraoin dí acu ná dram lena ól.

  Ní mar sin a chleacht siad ach fuíoll na bhfuíoll

  agus shoraidh díofa nach dtug aire dó,

  is rímhór m’fhaitios mura bhfuil ag Iosa,

  go mbeidh siad síos leis, agus tuilleadh leo.

  There are caves and traces of former cottages associated with the many escapades of this Athair Maoilre, or Father Miley, whom Raftery mentions, scattered over the region from Clifden to Carna, and one can still pick up fragments of his story from living mouths. Fr Myles Prendergast was an Augustinian friar from Murrisk in Mayo, who joined the French on their landing at Killala. After the defeat of the rebellion, he and Johnny Gibbons and another man of the Gibbons family were imprisoned in Castlebar. The story of their escape was recorded in the 1930s from an Irish speaker in Carna:5

  When Father Miley was in prison he and the Gibbonses cast lots to see which of them would knock out the gatekeeper. It fell to Father Miley, but he didn’t intend to kill him. The gatekeeper was asleep. They had no weapon but a sledgehammer and he hit him on the head with the sledgehammer thinking not to kill him but put him into a deep sleep or a faint. It happened that he killed him with the blow. They took the key off him, opened the lock, and the three of them escaped.

  Father Miley and his companions made their way to Connemara, where, according to one of Denis Browne’s anxious reports, Valentine Jordan and other rebel leaders who had returned from exile in France ‘resided openly and in perfect security with a number of other inferior rebels resident there’. In another letter, Browne writes, ‘It is my duty to repeat to your Excellency that this Province is not safe while Connemara is a secret asylum for outlaws of all descriptions.’ Despite Browne’s offering considerable rewards for their capture, in 1803 he had to report that

  there are still in the mountains of Connemara John Gibbons (Jnr), Fr Myles Prendergast and Valentine Jordan, whom it would be very desirable to arrest and send away. Gibbons is mad, Jordan feeble and penitent, and the friar the only one that could again do harm, being a most daring character of desperate courage and some influence arising from his sacred function.6

  Indeed it seems that Fr Prendergast was recognized as the parish priest of the western parish of Moyrus, and near Clifden (or rather, since the town of Clifden did not exist at that time, near the hamlet of Ballinaboy just south of it), there is a glacial boulder, a huge cube of ragged marble, on which it is said he used to celebrate the mass. It stands on a dry patch in the middle of a very wet bog, a place from which any soldier or suspicious person could be seen while still far away. Again according to the Carna folklore, a spy tracked the priest to a house in Doire Bhrón, a few hundred yards from the mass rock, and Father Miley, guessing that this man’s intentions were not friendly, shot him. Recently a local historian enquired about some stones sticking up in the bog close to the old bridle-path by Doire Bhrón, and got the reply, ‘That’s the grave of the man the curate shot!’7

  The many stories of Father Miley’s sojourn in Connemara add
up to a tale of mounting weariness and despair. Always fearful of treachery, he would shift from valley to mountainside, from house to cave, at any rumoured sighting of strangers. The yeomanry were quartered at Ballynahinch, but it was Ballynahinch that held his only hope of peace. Richard Martin, who was the largest landowner in Connemara as well as being the Colonel of the local Volunteer regiment and Galway’s representative in Parliament, offered to get Father Miley a pardon from the government, for although the Martins were by that period anglicized gentry, their relationship to their tenantry was still coloured by the ancient mutual attachment of clan and chieftain, and their Protestantism was skin-deep, a cover adopted in order to be able to hang onto their estates at a time when Catholics’ lands were being expropriated. But Father Miley would not accept a pardon unless his fellow outlaws were included, and that could not be done, and Martin could only advise him to move on, to the peninsula of Iorras Aintheach in south Connemara.

  One of Martin’s bailiffs, Liam Barra, owned a shop in Carna, the principal village of that quarter, selling salt, ropes, tar and so on to the fishermen, and had the genial habit of offering a free hornful of poitín to anyone who could drink it. One day Father Miley was drinking in the shop with another bailiff, and they quarrelled. The two bailiffs seized the priest and tied him up in the cellar, and went off to fetch the Yeomanry. But while they were away a servant-girl called in another man, who crept into the cellar and cut him free. Father Miley ran off along the shore, pursued by the Yeos, and his subsequent escape is still retold, with as much fidelity to place and personal names as in this version from the 1930s: