Setting Foot on the Shores of Connemara (27 page)

The view from Roundstone, or from Errisbeg, the hill overlooking Roundstone Bog – consists mainly of heather, and so I'll restrict myself to heather today. I will describe a sort of chain dance of plants and humans, interlinked by their roles in the odd history of discovery of the rare species of heather found here. This then is a cultural ecology, with comic interludes.

For the amateur like myself the identification of these rarities is tricky. Here's the trick. Hold the specimen in one hand and insert the following key:

The reason you don't have
E.
ciliaris
in your hand is because it's only found in one spot, which is a state secret, and it's illegal to pick it. In general these Ericas are best told apart by their extreme similarity to the common sort,
E.
tetralix.

I cannot deal with their ecology, their curious Atlantic
distribution
, the puzzles of whether or not they show up in the pollen record since the Ice Age, or any of the sensible questions that make them endlessly fascinating to botanists. Instead I'll tell the story in which they figure in conjunction with some human
characters
. I start with the tall one,
E.
erigena,
which used to be called
E.
mediterranea,
and also
E.
hibernica.
In English it is the
Mediterranean
Heath, though its affinities are more coastal Atlantic than Mediterranean. However, I can reveal that its real name is French Heath. At least, a shepherd here has shown me a little stream valley on the north east of Errisbeg called French Heath Tamhnóg. A
tamhnóg
is a small
tamhnach,
a patch of cultivated or cultivable land in the middle of a bog. This patch may have been cleared as a summer milking pasture, a ‘booley', in the old days, but now it's a small forest of Mediterranean Heath, and no doubt some farmer or shepherd heard from a visitor and misremembered its name. Apparently this plant was first collected by the great Welsh Celticist and natural historian Edward Llwyd, who visited Connemara in about 1700. Then it was rediscovered here by J.T. Mackay, the director of the TCD botanical garden, in 1830. Those pioneer botanists didn't do things by halves; Mackay sent a hundred and fifty samples of it to Sir W.J. Hooker at Kew. When Robert Shuttleworth, a young English medical student acting on Mackay's behalf, came here in the following year, he collected a cartload of it. However, there was and is plenty; as Shuttleworth writes, ‘I found
E.
mediterranea
covering a very large extent. My young guide told me that on St Patrick's Day the whole bog was white with it.' Oddly enough it did have a use, which is still remembered. A botanist called Tomlinson writing in 1910 records that ‘the heath had in many places been ruthlessly uprooted, and was lying about in withered heaps'. He subsequently discovered that this had been done by the small farmers of the surrounding lowland in order to procure suitable bunches for potato ‘Spraying' purposes, most of those concerned being too poor to purchase spraying machines.

That ‘young guide' mentioned by Shuttleworth could have been Roundstone's native botanist, William McCalla, to whose grave all botanists visiting Roundstone make pilgrimage. My
information
on him is drawn from papers by Alan Eager and Maura Scannell, and by Charles Nelson. McCalla's father kept the hotel here; he was a retired veteran of the Peninsular Wars against Napoleon, a Scot, and a great drinker. Roundstone was largely a Scottish foundation. The Scots engineer Alexander Nimmo, who designed the harbour here for the Fisheries Board and planned the road system of Connemara, bought the lease of this area and sublet
plots to people who would build houses along the street; he is also said to have brought in Scots fishermen and fishwives. There was soon a Presbyterian community here, and young McCalla, who was born in about 1814, was educated to be a teacher in a Presbyterian school nearby, funded by the Martins, the big landlords of
Connemara
. The various botanists who stayed at his father's hotel, and the interest caused by the discovery of
E.
mediterranea,
may have influenced him to study botany. Soon the experts were finding him an invaluable guide and a source of specimens. Then he began making his own discoveries. Collecting litter for his cattle one day he noticed a slightly different heather on a hillock called Na Creaga Móra, in Roundstone Bog a few miles north of the village. When Charles Babington, the Cambridge botanist, visited in 1835 McCalla took him to see
E.
mediterranea,
and the next day showed him the new heather. Babington was very impressed by McCalla; he wrote that ‘this young man, although labouring under very great difficulties, has by his own exertions, and with an almost total want of books, obtained a very complete knowledge of the geology, mineralogy, conchology, and botany, of the
neighbourhood
of Roundstone'. Babington also sent samples of the heather to Mackay, who forwarded them to Hooker at Kew, saying that McCalla ‘promised to be a useful person in the country.' Eventually it was named
E.
mackaiana
after Mackay, who one could say was indirectly responsible for its discovery through his encouragement of McCalla.

However, McCalla was not content just to be Mackay's ‘useful person in the country'. He soon went to Dublin and worked under the botanist David Moore for the Ordnance Survey, but after a few months he was dismissed for giving away specimens of finds to Babington and William Thompson. That seems harsh punishment for a minor indiscretion; perhaps the naive young Connemara man had strayed into the field of some professional infighting.

After that he worked supplying specimens to Dr Scouler of the Royal Dublin Society, and then at Scouler's suggestion he wrote to Hooker at Kew proposing himself as leader of a botanical
expedition
to New Zealand. Hooker was impressed enough to agree to pay him at the going rate of
£2
per hundred species, even though his testimonials were mixed. Moore wrote that McCalla was an indefatigable collector
etc.,
but ‘he wants industry, taste, and a due
sense of honorable and faithful motives. So much so that I fear he will lose many of his specimens after they were collected and
statements
by him will require to be received with the very greatest care.' Scouler was prepared to finance the expedition, or at least to put up the
£
20 fare to New Zealand, and another
£
20 for 30 reams of paper. However, McCalla never quite got around to setting off. Scouler was annoyed to find that he had started collecting algae for sale and had caught a cold in the process. He felt that McCalla was perfectly honest – and unlike his father never touched the drink – but ‘he is far too simple and from his ignorance of business habits apt to be imposed upon.' Scouler still hoped that ‘this wild man I have caught in Cunnemara' would soon be on his way – but a couple of months later McCalla was again under doctor's orders at Malahide, having got soaking wet gathering algae. Eventually Scouler wrote to Hooker that he had given up on McCalla, whose ‘incorrigible habits of procrastination and his cowardise … have worn out my patience. He made it a point to do nothing today which could be deferred until tomorrow and to do nothing for himself while there was a chance of someone else doing for him.' McCalla candidly agreed with this assessment, acknowledged that Scoulter was justified in withdrawing his patronage, thanked him, promised to repay the money he had received, and came home to Roundstone. His big adventure was over.

After that he worked on his algae, on which he was an expert, and in 1845 published the first of two volumes on the topic, which won him a silver medal. In the following year another of the rare heathers was discovered, probably on Na Creaga Beaga, the small crags, the next hummock to the west of Na Creaga Móra, the big crags, where
E.
mackaiana
grew. A visiting botanist found the plant, but it was McCalla who identified it as the Dorset Heath. These were the Great Famine years; Connemara was being
depopulated
. Yet there were still visitors, and McCalla made a bit of a living selling them prepared specimens of the locality's famous flora, until, in 1849, he was carried off by the cholera epidemic that followed the Famine. He was aged thirty-five. His tomb is in the Presbyterian churchyard, up the lane to the north of the Protestant church. The chapel, the Kirk, itself was knocked down some decades ago, and McCalla's tomb is the most notable of the few that are still traceable. But it is in danger of falling down; and
it would be fitting if the botanical community made a move to
restore
it.

An odd fact about
E.
mackaiana
is that it was discovered in Spain just months after its discovery in Ireland. That's an
impressive
victory for the theory of Morphic Resonance – you remember that some years ago this theory was propounded to explain such observations as that once a new chemical substance has been
crystallized
for the first time, it suddenly becomes easy for laboratories all over the world to do the same; similarly once something abstract has been thought out in one place, the same idea will strike elsewhere. This all comes about through the propagation of morphic fields, fields of pure form, through space. If you prefer something less exotic than Morphic Resonance, it would be interesting to enquire out the personal networks, interlinking with the Roundstone one I am talking about, centering perhaps on Hooker, which by spreading general ideas about classification and specific floristic expectations, brought the discriminating gaze of botany to bear on the same rare plant at the two ends of its range at the one time.

I skip back to the discovery of
Erica
ciliaris,
the Dorset Heath. (I am basing myself here on an article by the late Professor Webb.) Everything combined to make this discovery harder and harder to credit. First, in 1839 a Mr Nash of Cork had sent out specimens of three rare heaths he said had been found in his own county. When Babington unexpectedly visited Cork and wanted to see these marvels, Mr Nash's excuses were varied: the site for
Erica
ciliaris
he said had been ploughed up; that for
Daboecia
cantabrica,
St Dabeoc's heath, had been burnt over; that for
Erica
mackaiana
had been destroyed by baryta mining. Then J.F. Bergin found the unfamiliar heather in Roundstone bog that McCalla identified as
E.
ciliaris,
and later McCalla showed it to another botanist, J.H. Balfour of Edinburgh, who very briefly announced its existence in an article in
The
Phytologist
in 1853. But thereafter for a long time, although several eminent botanists came to search for it, none saw the plant, and doubts arose. So Balfour came back to try to confirm the record, and got very confused as to which bridge he had found it near, along the road across the bog north of Errisbeg. Eventually he came to the conclusion that he had identified the correct bridge, but the stream there had now been banked and the site destroyed. Subsequent writers were of the opinion that Bergin
had been ‘the victim of an imposition' (was McCalla the suspect?) and that Balfour's specimens had been mislabelled in the Edinburgh herbarium.
Erica
ciliaris
was thenceforth filed among ‘unverified records and missing plants'.

When David Webb was working on the distribution of
E.
mackaiana
in Roundstone Bog, he kept an eye open for other things too, and became convinced that the
ciliaris
record was incorrect. Then in 1965 he accompanied a student, Michael Lambert, to a place where the latter had noted some ‘very large
E.
mackaiana'
– and it turned out to be
E.
ciliaris.
(The version I heard was that Webb and his students were standing in the bog, and Webb said he didn't suppose there was much chance of finding
ciliaris
among all these thousands of acres of heather, and one of the students said, ‘What about this?' – pointing at their feet – and there it was, immediately identifiable, of course, by its being just the same as all the rest.) Now, there are only about five
tussocks
of it, covering an area the size of a tabletop. It is more or less where Bergin claimed to have seen it, but the site only matches Balfour's description if one assumes he was completely muddled when he mentioned a bridge nearby. Is it the same colony, that has been stumbled on three times in a century and a half? It was nearly wiped out by a fire shortly after Webb's
rediscovery
of it; it is also very vulnerable to disturbance and even to the interest of professionals, who all want just a little sprig of it. A local naturalist has told me that to ensure its survival he has taken bits and planted them on various islands: I think he is lying, but future finds of it might be suspect, and so might the present known station. Did McCalla have access to specimens of
ciliaris?
Might he have been tempted to use them to renew his flagging career? A libellous suggestion about Roundstone's native son! Roundstone Bog has been repeatedly traversed by experts engaged in mapping the distribution of
E.
mackaiana,
and no other
ciliaris
sites have ever come to light. The one known station is close to the road, which looks suspicious. On the other hand if it were not close to the road it would most likely never have been seen.