Setting Foot on the Shores of Connemara (22 page)

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.

Can certainty be reached? There is a myth of ultimate
authority
for the placenames of Ireland, recorded in a Middle Irish work of the twelfth century,
Agallamh
na
Seanórach
or
The
Colloquy
of
the
Ancients.
This tells of how St Patrick meets a band of tall men with huge wolfhounds, who it says were not people of one time or one epoch with the clergy; in fact they were the last of the Fianna, the followers of the Celtic hero Fionn Mac Cumhaill, in their
immense old age. They wander all round Ireland with the saint, telling him the name of each place and the story behind the name. At the end of each story St Patrick calls for his scribe and says, ‘“By thee be it written down all that Caoilte has uttered,” and written down it was.’ This represents the handing-over of the land and its meanings by paganism to the new religion, a profound symbolic linking of the historical and modern to its timeless
legendary
hinterland, enacted in terms of placelore. St Patrick, bishop, is the guarantor of the truth of the interpretations inscribed under his watchful eye. Note the patriarchal significance of the saint’s episcopal staff here, as the ultimate symbol from which all others derive their stability of meaning. But the saint’s staff or
bachal,
the shepherd’s crook, is itself a question-mark. There is a tempting resonance in the idea that all interpretations are open to question, that certainty is endlessly deferred. One hears of the ‘death of the author’, the impossibility of grounding literary readings in the intentions of the writer – and no author is as deeply under the sod as the originators of placenames. But, to be sensible, in the majority of cases one can arrive by historical and linguistic inquiry, by guesswork and emendation, by hook or by St Patrick’s crook, at what we might as well call truth.

At the same time, misinterpretation is part of the life of a placename. I heard recently of a Connemara farmer who was expounding the local placenames to a visitor; after a series of
fascinating
elucidations he summed up by saying grandly that the farmer without Irish is a stranger on his own land. Unfortunately, on examination, most of his derivations were duds, linguistic impossibilities. Nevertheless they were genuine meanings, one- or two- or three-word poems the man had grown out of his own land. We are all prone to error, we are all strangers on our own land. As language changes course like a river over the centuries, sometimes a placename gets left behind, beached, far from the flood of meaning. Then another meander of the river reaches it, interpreting it perhaps in some new way, revivifying it. The sound may have to be bent to allow this to happen. Eventually the
original
meaning may be for ever irrecoverable, or it may only be accessible to the learned. Locally, or at a personal level, it is still a name, a pointer, a misdirection perhaps, to the place. How many times could it happen, that the sound and the sense do this dance
around each other? Corruption of the name, it is called; but
corruption
is fertility.

In Ireland O’Donovan himself, the greatest Irish scholar of his age, presided over the systematic corruption of Irish placenames. He was working for the Ordnance Survey (the section of the Army charged with mapping the land, under British rule, in the 1830s) and after the surveyors on the ground had noted down the
placenames
from the locals as best they could, it was O’Donovan who checked the earlier textual and cartographical sources, and, having decided on the correct Irish form of each name, wrote down not the Irish but the anglicized form that was to appear on the map; it was the great betrayal, for as he himself noted, many of these names become very indistinct when transcribed in English
phonetic
values. Of course O’Donovan personally was not the
originator
of government policy in the matter; this process of
anglicization
had been going on since Strongbow, was not challenged until the rise of the Gaelic League a century ago, and still proceeds today. But emblematically we may take the Ordnance Survey’s reduction of the placenames to meaningless syllables of English as the second great trauma of the sense of place in Ireland. Brian Friel’s
Translations
is the mythical expression of this second fall. The first, St Patrick’s appropriation of the ancient Celtic lore, was traumatic in that the words, the names, recorded by St Patrick’s scribe – that is, by the whole historical process I am taking him to symbolize – do not have the meaning they had for the followers of Fionn Mac Cumhaill. The landscape of the Celts was inhabited by the wonders and terrors of nature. When one of the Fianna in
The
Colloquy
of
the
Ancients
tells St Patrick that if the leaves of the wood had been gold, the generous Fionn would have given them all away, he is talking about the magnanimity of autumn. The gods and giants and magical animals that inhabit and give their names to the mountains, forests, marshes and springs are not distinct from the moods and potencies of those places themselves. But in St Patrick’s redaction, the version transmitted to us by the
missioners
of monotheism, the wisdom of these many gods is reduced to fables, to amusing tales, to placenames. Then comes O’Donovan, a few minutes later, as it were, and further reduces the placenames to sounds emptied even of their residual
meaningfulness
, to whispering husks.

Is all this just two steps in the advance of reason? An example: Glasgeivnagh Hill in the Burren. The anglicized map-name tells us nothing, not even how we are to pronounce it. Behind it lies the Irish
Glas
Ghaibhneach,
meaning the grey cow. The legends of this fabulous cow concern its inexhaustible productiveness. No vessel could be found that it could not fill with milk, until someone determined to outwit its good nature tried milking it into a sieve. When it failed to fill the sieve the cow died of mortification. The waterfalls that drop from the grey-green limestone hill of
Glasgeivnagh
into the lush little valley called Teeska are
Seacht
Srotha
na
Taosca,
the seven streams of the overflowing. The hill itself with these silvery outpourings is the cow and its unfailing milk, and not just that but an image of the nurturing Earth itself, in its
vulnerability
to abuse and insult. Placenames then are the last faded ghosts and echoes of powers and words of power we have let lapse almost into oblivion. With such consequences as this, that just across the valley from the hill of the sacred cow, at Mullaghmore, the authorities want to build a visitors’ centre for the coachloads of tourists, right in the middle of an exquisite and unspoiled
landscape
. That would be the real milking of the Burren.

But even anglicization is not enough to flatten the life out of a name entirely. Yeats’s ‘lake isle of Innisfree’ is I suppose
Inis
Fraoigh,
island of heather; but the attraction of his little poem has a hidden source in that syllable ‘free’. One doesn’t dream-visit his isle for its heather but for its freedom from the cares of the city. That selective amplification of the name’s previously unnoted
resonance
is the imperious act of a major poet. But in the Irish names, and particularly in the west where the language still lives or at least has not long withdrawn, and the names are still pronounced properly even if not comprehended, we are surrounded by poetic acts as by the flowers of the field. I always record local opinions of the meanings and origins of placenames, even though some
professionals
would regard this as naive credulity. In the east of Connemara there is a townland called Doirín na gCos Fuar, the small wood of the cold feet. Why, I do not know; a
cos
can be a small measure of land, and in south Connemara
‘na
cosa
fuara’
is a term for very poor people; but maybe neither usage is relevant here. Fortunately the locals have the complete explanation. It seems that once a shepherd went into this wood in search of lost
sheep, and he was attacked and eaten by a bull; all that was ever found of him was his two boots, with the feet still in them. A macabre invention, indelibly connected with an otherwise
unremarkable
place. Though in fact the name has other associations for me. I remember first visiting Doirín na gCos Fuar when I was mapping Connemara. An uninhabited wasteland of cut-away bog, dark ranks of conifers in the distance, the autumn afternoon
dimming
and rain in the air; it looked intolerably dreary, and I had to steel myself to leave my bike by the roadside and set off to tramp across it. At the very first step off the road my foot sank into liquid mud, and as I felt it oozing down inside my Wellingtons I thought, ‘
Doirín
na
gCos
Fuar
!’

Thus we, personally, cumulatively, communally, create and recreate landscapes – a landscape being not just the terrain but also the human perspectives on it, the land plus its overburden of meanings. A placename is a few words piled up to mark a spot, draw attention to it, differentiate it from the unmarked; a few stones that fall down after some generations, perhaps for someone to pile them up again, into a different shape. There is a difference between a mere location and a real place, between a placename and a map reference; there may even be conflict between them. Iorras Beag in Connemara, the hill in whose evening shadow I live,
clarifies
this issue for me. This is the westernmost of Connemara’s hills; beyond it is only a low-lying stony peninsula, and rocks and breakers and the Atlantic horizon. The top of the hill is an inchoate terrain of criss-crossed fault-valleys and fretful pinnacles. At twilight in particular this is a disorientating, spooky place; wherever you stand, there is another peak looking over your
shoulder
. One of these almost-summits is relatively distinctive, though: An Goibín Géar, the sharp little gob or snout; it sticks out at one side of the hill and once you have had it pointed out and named by a local inhabitant, it is a landmark on the skyline above the village. It is not marked on the Ordnance Survey maps, so I made a point of climbing up to it and standing on it to take some compass bearings of landmarks in the surrounding lowland in order to pinpoint it for my own map. But my compass seemed to have been turned inside out; I could not make head or tail of the bearings I was getting. Later I mentioned this to a geologist and he explained that such a peak attracts lightning, and here the rocks
must have been magnetized by a lightning strike. This added to the interest of An Goibín Géar for me. The act of naming, or of learning its name, strikes a place like lightning, magnetizing it, attracting observations and the accumulation of placelore. But in this instance the point of enlightenment had become a place of
bewilderment
. Among the dancing peaks of Iorras Beag, An Goibín Géar resisted my attempt to locate it. Perhaps others long before me had felt this shape-shifting quality of those summits, for another of them is called Tower an Phúca. I think the English word ‘tower’ is used here and in other hilltop names, rather than the Irish
túr.
The
púca
is of course a sort of fairy; it is the goatish practical joker of the Celtic spirit world, that sneaks up behind you, suddenly shoves its head between your legs, carries you off on a wild caper around the countryside, and dumps you, dizzy, in some distant glen, as in the south Connemara song,
Marcíocht
an
Phúca,
the ride of the
púca.