Setting Foot on the Shores of Connemara (23 page)

Now a few years ago the Ordnance Survey made an attempt to quell this riot of place, by building a little concrete pillar on one of these anarchic summits of Iorras Beag, with a socket on its top in which a radar-like instrument could be firmly and indubitably fixed for measuring the distance to identical pillars on
neighbouring
hills and offshore islands. This highly accurate triangulation was a first step towards the production of a new range of maps, which are being derived by photogrammetry,
i.e.
by computer analysis of stereoscopic pairs of aerial photographs. I pile on the technological agony only to heighten the contrast I want to draw, the contradiction between true place, with all its dimensions of subjectivity, of memory and the forgotten, and ‘location’ as
established
in terms of latitude and longitude or of a six-figure map
reference
or some other objective, uniform schema. High-tech
cartography
is a wonderful procedure, and we all draw directly or
indirectly
on a fund of objective geographical information, which has to be underpinned by an exact topographical data base. It was
necessary
that that summit be located with such accuracy; and it has been located to within an inch – to within an inch of its life, in fact. One climbs a mountain, drawn instinctively by the magnetism of the highest point, as to a summit of personal awareness,
awareness
of oneself as a point in relation to as much of space as can be grasped within a maximal horizon. Thus a mountain top is one of
the most sensitive spots on earth, of our feelings for the earth in all their depth, elevation and comprehensiveness. A concrete stub demeans it, in a way that the traditional hilltop cairn does not, that stone memory-bank of all the people who have clambered up to that height. So the Ordnance Survey should find some technical fix to minimize the intrusion of the regime of location on that of place. A compromise could of course be found. We all need the topographic fix, and the occasional fix of immensity – of
something
that perhaps transcends my theme of the nameable and the knowable.

Does that sound like the complaint of some hypersensitive
aesthete
or intolerant environmentalist? I hope not, for my aim is deeper. Enquiring out placenames, mapping, has become for me not a way of making a living or making a career, but of making a life; a mode of dwelling in a place. In composing each of the placename instances I have given you into a brief epiphany, a showing forth of the nature of a place, I am suggesting that what is hidden from us is not something rare and occult, or even augustly sacred, but, too often, the Earth we stand on. I present to you a new word: ‘geophany’. A theophany is the showing forth, the manifestation, of God, or of a god; geophany therefore must be the showing forth of the Earth. In the west of Ireland there is a language and a placelore uniquely fitted to the geophany of that land, with its skies full of migrating alphabets, waves that conspire to lift the currach ashore, its mountains like teeming udders, its foot-chilling bogs, the donkey’s bray of its history, its ancient words piled on hilltops. My work is possible thanks to what I have grasped of the geophanic language of Ireland. My work thanks that language.

The folk of Aill na Caillí used to say that the heron shrieks on moonlit nights because it is frightened by its reflection in the water. This fact, which I heard from the last man to leave this now deserted coastal hamlet in the south west of Connemara, would seem to lead one immediately and deeply into the lives of his
vanished
neighbours and their forebears. Nevertheless the generalities of historical geography are needed for its full appreciation. Fishing and mollusc-collecting in Cuan na mBéirtrí Buí, the bay of the yellow oyster-bank, sailing to Roundstone and farther shores of Galway Bay with turf cut from their commonage, feeding the patchwork of tiny pastures and potato plots around their cottages with seaweed shorn off the rocks, the villagers were as dependent as the heron on the complexities of creek and reef, sandbar and mudbank, neep-tide and spring-tide. I am told that when an
unusually
high tide would wash into the cottage nearest the landing stage, the woman of the house would just pick up the glowing sods of the turf fire and put them in the iron pot hanging on the hook above the hearth until the waters turned and trickled out under the door again. People lived as intimately as fleas in the skirts of the sea, and died there too, unknown to the outside world. Theirs was a harsh and hungry world; the labour necessary to keep life going, to satisfy the landlord’s agent, demanded every daylight hour. Strength was a virtue. A certain round boulder lying on the shore by the landing stage challenged the young men to lift it, prompted boasts about their fathers or grandfathers who had lifted it. The fear of physical failure, of eviction, emigration or the workhouse, must have hung in the night-hours like a cry of despair.

The great resource of these people, their principal comfort, was an intellectual one: talk, the telling of stories, endless commentary
on places and people they knew or had heard of. A close-woven web covering the bare landscape, this rehearsal of lore, a warm and comforting cloak of familiarity the land pulled around itself against the cold night. In Aill na Caillí (the name means the cliff of the hag, where perhaps the ‘hag’ is the green cormorant, not the wise or wicked old woman), the cottage by the landing stage was the resort of the local talkers and listeners; no doubt when the tide came into the house conversation was hardly interrupted for a second by the unusually wet visitor. The people especially prized by these gatherings would have been of two sorts; first, those who made things happen, who generated histories, good or bad, by their energy, courage or rashness, their wit or luck; and then those who could transmit the store of words, the passing boatmen who often spent the night there unlading cargos of rumour, the pedlars who walked the roads and whose anecdotes were the best of the goods they carried, the old men and women who had traveled through time, who remembered genealogies and derivations.

‘Express a life that never found expression’; Yeats’s command to Synge, on dispatching him to the west, was absurdly
Anglocentric
, as Synge must soon have realized; for the life of the common people was not waiting for the English-speaking littérateur to express it; it was and long had been expressing itself
voluminously
, through words and music. But this oral culture was obscured for the outsider not just by the difficulties of the Irish language in its various dialects, but by its dependence upon a
background
of local lore, the assumed familiarity of its audience with placenames and personalities, microgeographies, microhistories. What I am trying to recapture is how the people of Connemara felt their countryside, how they read it. It was like a book in fineness of detail, closeness of print; every corner of it conveyed a message, held a memory. Also it was like a board-game or a card-game – you knew every place and person by repute in all their relationships; if you did not, you took steps to complete your hand, your set of pieces. An old woman I have heard of would walk a dozen miles to get a verse of a song she didn’t know. I am hooked on this game too – after seven years of research, I still go to absurd lengths to fill in some little corner of my jigsaw puzzle of Connemara.

I will illustrate this density of reference through stories and verses about four names much talked-of in nineteenth-century
Connemara: those of a smuggler, a rebel priest, a land-agent family, a wandering rhymer. But time itself is shrivelled and feeble-witted nowadays, and we have not the patience to sit by the smoky turf fire with the rain dripping through the thatch, while a language we no longer understand mutters and hawks and spits in the ashes, and stops to redden its clay pipe. Therefore I translate, and abbreviate, and document, and contextualize.

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
céil
í
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:

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:

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!’

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: