Setting Foot on the Shores of Connemara (28 page)

Botanists will not reveal this location to the casually curious. I had to persuade a botanist – we'll call her Erica – to show me the site, which she would only do on condition I was blindfolded. So off we went in her all-terrain vehicle for hour after hour, driving
round and round, me bouncing around in the back with the Kalashnikovs and machetes; I don't know where we went, but three times I smelled Guinness and fish and chips. Then we walked round and round in the bog for hours. Eventually she said ‘This is it!' I was very moved. I can't describe the plant, since the blindfold was not removed; but, to trip over, it feels subtly the same as any other heather.

Meanwhile, mapping the exact distribution of
E.
mackaiana
continues to attract a lot of effort; I'm not sure why. Praeger, David Webb, Maura Scannell and David McClintock, Charles Nelson, and several others, have added to the sum of knowledge on the question; now Micheline Sheehy-Skeffington has just shown me the latest distribution map of it in Roundstone Bog, from Errisbeg to the edge of Clifden, compiled by her student Liereke van Doorslaer. The original site was on the bog road about halfway from Roundstone to Clifden, and the known range has gradually been extended both north and south of the bog road. This has led to it becoming the best known and most controversial plant in the history of Connemara since, say, the potato. Partly because of these rare heathers, the area of lowland blanket bog south of the bog road has long been designated an Area of Scientific Interest. Then in 1987 the
ASI
was extended to take in an area of bog – the same bog – north of the bog road. This was done by the scientists of the Office of Public Works' Wildlife Service. However, the OPW
bureaucrats
then left the redrawn maps sitting in their out-trays until January 1989, and did not even inform the County Council. They excused themselves later on by saying that they were short of staff and the index to the maps wasn't ready. Unfortunately in that period some businessmen of Clifden decided the town needed an airport, and that the ideal site was on the corner of the bog nearest to Clifden. Three months after they had applied for planning
permission
and when their scheme seemed to be well airborne and had gathered enthusiastic local support, it was discovered that the airport site was within the new bounds of the
ASI
. Of course AS
IS
as such had no legal standing, but the Council tended to adopt them into the County Plan, and European funding was being sought, so in practice the
ASI
designation grounded the scheme. A mighty row broke out; single-handedly the
OPW
by its inefficiency had created an anti-environmentalist backlash in Connemara. For
us local environmental activists it was a difficult time; we cursed the
OPW
but had to fight their battle for them to preserve the bog from this intrusion. After a judicial review, which the Clifden
businessmen
quite deservedly won, the whole
ASI
system nationwide has been declared unconstitutional, and is now being replaced by a new sort of designation.

The airport company had, of course, had to commission an Environmental Impact Report. The bit of bog in question was examined by botanists and zoologists and other sorts of 'ists from
REMU
in Cork, and lo and behold
REMU
's conclusion was that in general this was an uninteresting corner of the bog, whose loss would not be of significance. The
REMU
botanist did not notice any
E.
mackaiana
on the site, although the nearest known station at that time was only a few hundred yards away – but the
Connemara
National Park personnel looked over the site as well, and found acres of
E.
mackaiana,
together with its hybrid with
E.
tetralix.
The Environmental Impact Report therefore ended up with this embarrassed mention of the plant: ‘This heather,
including
its hybrid
E.
stuartit
and St Dabeoc's Heath, were identified by
OPW
personnel and validated by
REMU
personnel.' Perhaps it was
REMU
who were the more in need of validation. Of course, then,
E.
mackaiana
became a pawn in the arguments for and against the airport – not an easy argument to conduct on our side, for the airport lobby quickly grasped the essential scientific fact about the stuff, that it's indistinguishable from ordinary heather. It certainly didn't obviously count as interesting ‘wildlife'. As one woman said to me, ‘If the Wildlife Service is so keen on the place why don't they buy it and put some wildlife on it?' Wildlife is zebras and
elephants
, not heather. Another airport supporter used to perform at the public meetings they held in all the villages; he would wave two bits of heather to prove that
Erica
mackaiana
grew all over the mountain behind his own house miles away at Letterfrack. This ridiculous plant it seemed was standing in the way of progress. A poem was written about it in the local paper; I'll give you a few lines from it:

The airport scheme did not get planning permission, and I can tell you
E.
mackaiana
wasn't Connemara's favourite plant; it
became
the symbol of obscurantist and incomprehensible intellectuals and especially of ‘self-appointed experts' with funny foreign names like Matthias van Schouten, who were denying Connemara its place in the twentieth century and wanted it to be depopulated by emigration and overgrown with heather. I think, though,
E.
mack
aiana
will never again bloom as it did that summer. The highpoint was its appearance at the annual Clifden fancy-dress ball: the prize for the best costume went to someone dressed as
Erica
mackaiana.

That concludes this Roundstone set-dance of human beings and heathers. In the last figure, a human takes the appearance of a heather which already bears a human's name.

A raven materially outweighs a peregrine falcon – but in the scales of honour, the invisible scales of air poised above a precipice, the falcon is predominant.

I witnessed this one spring a few years ago, in the Twelve Bens, the mountains at the core of Connemara. I was
accompanying
a friend who was researching the breeding birds of high stony and boggy places, in an exploration of a magnificent valley called Gleninagh which runs up into the heart of the mountain range from the east. The cliff, hung like a great curtain between two peaks of its south-western perimeter, boasts the longest rock climb in Ireland: Carrot Ridge, so named from an episode in which more carrot than stick had to be used to get a certain climber up it. No combination of carrot and stick would induce me to try, but I have walked along the top of it, the col called Mám na bhFonsaí, or the pass of the rims. On this occasion, as we approached the foot of the cliff, a pair of ravens flew out from a crevice high up on its left-hand side, and my bird-man remarked that since the ravens had not built their nest in the prime site, the very centre of the cliff, we could expect to find peregrine falcons nesting there. And sure enough a peregrine falcon soon appeared over the top of the cliff – a much slighter bird, a fluttering dot against the bright sky, insignificant until you noticed how fast it was crossing your visual field – and it dived at the ravens once or twice in a perfunctory way, not seeking to damage them but just to remind them of their place.

In the good old days that the Prehistoric Society
*
exists to commemorate, there would have been a pair of golden eagles on
the cliff as well; but the principle of precedence would have been the same; these things were settled long before human eyes were turned up to them.

It had already been a rich day’s walk. Coming up the track past the valley’s only farmhouse, we had seen the menfolk of the Bodkin family planting their potatoes. Bodkin is an ancient name in County Galway; the family came in with the Normans. However, I don’t believe they have been in Gleninagh for more than a few generations, although to see them building
spade-ridges
, that ran at forty-five degrees up the hillside and seemed to be composed of nothing but stones, one had an impression of a way of life of chthonic immutability. Farther on, we sat down to drink our coffee, on the sunnier flank of the valley. As we rested, my eyes went straying, grazing with the sheep and spring lambs, across the floor of the valley; and were brought up short by a row of little bumps on the profile of a low ridge a few hundred yards away. Something regular, it seemed, something organized,
contrasting
with the sprawling topography of the bog; evidently worth investigating. We splashed across wet places and climbed the bank, which proved to be a glacial moraine crossing the valley; the stream meandering down the valley has had to cut a sharp little ravine through it, about fifty feet deep. And there on the crest of the ridge was a line of six boulders; roundish, sack-shaped, glacial boulders of quartzite. There was no doubt about which way the line pointed; the largest – it was only waist-high – being at one end, and distinguished from the rest by the streaks of white quartz in it. I knew enough to recognize this as a Bronze Age site – there is another very fine alignment in north-west Connemara, and a smaller one in the Joyce Country to the east – and I was excited by the discovery, because nothing of the Bronze Age had at that time been found in central Connemara. So I busied myself pacing it out and taking its compass-bearing, playing the amateur
archaeologist
instead of using my eyes. The orientation was about south-south-west, and did not appear to me to be of much importance, because the line was pointing vaguely at the high wall of
mountains
. In any case I was prejudiced against the idea of the
astronomical
significance of such structures, which I felt was often merely the projection of the archaeologist’s suppressed
superstitions
onto the sensible folk of the prehistoric past.

Unfortunately, my rationalism had blinded me to the evidence of my eyes. Later on I showed the Gleninagh stones to Michael Gibbons, who has made a lot of archaeological discoveries around Connemara of recent years, and he noted that they do not just point vaguely at the mountains, they point precisely at the col, the high pass between two peaks, above the precipice. And, revisiting the site on midwinter’s eve, he observed that the sun sets neatly into that cleft in the horizon, when viewed from the alignment. I returned to Gleninagh myself the next midwinter, to pay my respects, and indeed apologies, to this phenomenon. At two o’clock in the afternoon the sun was already sliding down into the gap between the peaks. The sky around it was dazzling, eating away the black profile of the mountains. It was very difficult to see what was happening, the blaze of light was so intense; light was
bouncing
off the boulders like grasshoppers. The valley was flooded with gold, the Bodkins’ farm was picked out in vivid detail, and,
hundreds
of yards farther up the bracken-invaded hillside behind it, traces of potato ridges, that must have dated back to pre-Famine days when the valley carried a larger population, were equally insistently present, as if the moment were transparent, X-rayed, visibly built up out of layers of the past. Time, in our everyday experience, does not consist of such moments; they are as rare in the general flux as grains of gold in the gravel of our Connemara streams. Perhaps the high light-levels of classic lands produce more of these intoxicating instants in which one feels that all history has been harvested, pressed out and fermented into the wine of the now; but they do occur even here, and sometimes with almost painful sharpness, when a low shaft of sunlight under cloud cover or between mountains transfixes the scene and pins it to the retina. The same must have happened in the Bronze Age; it’s a matter of the eye’s physiology.

By a quarter past two the sun was just above the bottom of the col, and exactly in line with the row of boulders. It was a
spectacular
conjunction of energy and matter. I had no idea how to
photograph
it, but in the viewfinder of my camera it looked like sword-in-the-stone fantasy-fiction. Is it fantasy to believe that, at a level below all cultural constructions and reconstructions, I was experiencing the same illumination that any embodied mind would have been subject to at this place three or four thousand years ago
to the minute? But I was confused and distracted by my delight in having discovered the site – something worth telling the
Prehistoric
Society about! – and irritation that I hadn’t been first with its essential interpretation. And so, to peel off those layers of
ego-investment
and recover the structure of the experience, as an index of human continuity and community since prehistoric times, is my aim in this paper.

The conjunction I have described would be peculiar to
midwinter
solstice; at any other time of year the sunset would be further round to the west. But why had this particular site on the valley bottom been chosen? Consider the situation from the point of view of the sun – a great blind eye that has seen through prehistory, will stare down history and overlook whatever comes after that, but which has never seen darkness, neither night nor the least patch of noontide shade. The sun’s view embraces the illuminated disc of the earth; as the earth turns the Twelve Bens travel in an arc across that field of view towards its north-eastern limb. Just as the mountain peaks are beginning to obscure the sun’s access to the valley behind them, the col between them swings into line and opens up the valley floor; then that window closes by degrees, and the mountains roll on towards the edge of night and sink over it. Now watch the same process through the eyes of the peregrine falcon high in the light-filled air above the mountain-tops. In spring there would be morning sunshine on the cliff-face, but in midwinter it is perpetually dark. As the sun sinks to the
southwest
the evening shadows of the mountains spread across the valley. A silhouette of the two peaks and the col becomes clearly accentuated for a while, and creeps across the broad meander-plain and the moraines, and begins to climb the opposite slopes. The point of that shadow-profile corresponding to the bottom of the col is well defined for perhaps an hour or so and traces out a lengthy locus. Anyone standing on any point of that locus will see the midwinter sun set uniquely into the V of the col. If the
alignment
had purely practical purposes – marking the day from which one starts counting the days of the year, so that one knows when to put the crops in, when to expect the salmon running upstream and the goose-flocks migrating northwards,
etc.,
–
it could have been placed anywhere on that line across the valley.

Thus the practical astronomy of horizons is not enough to
determine the positioning of the stone alignment. But on that locus of possible positions, the actual one, the crest of the moraine, is undoubtedly the one any of us would have chosen; and here we can feel sure that we, too, are seeing through prehistoric eyes. For the eye, alert to spatial balances, visual discontinuities, the rhetoric of visibility, of seeing and being seen, vastly predates all cultural constructions on that organic basis. (In the eye, I include as much of the image-processing, pattern-recognizing, neural networks of the visual cortex as is necessary to make good my argument.) The eye is evolution’s answer to a potential visual field that is a Darwinian arena of life-opportunities and death-threats. Centrality and marginality, openness and closure, balance and imbalance – these states were branded into our nervous systems as fraught with potentialities long before they were conceptualized. The words I use to convey a sense of this place as elevated above and central within the arena of the valley, respectful but not self-abasing before the cirque of mountains, are modern metaphors for ancient phenomenologies. So: this site marks the intersection of an
astronomical
constant with a constant of human spatial awareness; it is in itself ceremonious, observant of the geometry of humanity and the heavens.

Of course only one boulder is needed to mark such a point, given some such distinctive profile of the horizon; the five extra boulders are redundant, part of the generous redundancy that
constitutes
human culture. They are an indication that there was
ceremony
attached to the observation of the midwinter sunset from this point. Nobody could fail to be awe-struck by the spectacle, and no doubt the forces it marshals – the sun, the mountain peaks, the battle of light and dark – were apprehended religiously. Right next to the alignment is a roundish depression, a few yards across and a few feet deep. I had assumed that this was a kettle-hole, a place where a block of ice left over from the waning of the glacier had melted
in
situ
on the moraine. But, if so, why does the only such pit happen to be exactly here? Mike Gibbons suggests that this may have been where precious objects were ritually deposited. And the Bodkins, straightening their backs from their potato ridges, tell me that people used to dig for treasure there, long ago. The Bodkins, although not the absolute aboriginals of this valley, probably know more of their secrets than we ever shall.

But whatever their religious and practical dimensions, the placing of these boulders was an aesthetic act, a response to the sense of place and balance I have credited the prehistoric eye with. The choice of this spot pulls all the forces of the valley together and knots them into a form one can grasp. I’m not talking
ley-lines
or anything mystical here; nothing more mysterious than art, which is mystery enough for me. A site has been created, around which the terrain assembles itself into a landscape – that is, an area apprehended by the eye, taken from a vantage-point. The concept of landscape, we know, is of modern origin, and its connections with Enlightenment objectivity, with the portraiture of estates and the perspectivism of power-relations, have been much discussed; but the roots of its possibility are in the nature of the eye, an organ trained by stick and carrot to command a sphere of vision.

Calendrical functions and religious conceptions wither away with time, but a well-founded aesthetic intervention can grow in stature indefinitely. This privileged site articulates more of the dynamics of the valley than the Bronze Age could have known. Thus, the line of boulders points us back to the precipice, which is where they themselves came from. The precipice is part of a corrie, a glacier’s nest. Imagine the building of this nest, long before humans came here. The prevailing winds off the Atlantic are driving snow over the mountain tops, and the snow is settling and freezing in that sheltered, shadowed, north-east-facing hollow. And then the accumulated mass begins to slip downhill under its own weight. As it inches away it plucks fragments of rock out of the slope behind it. A crevasse opens up between the rear of this newborn glacier and the hillside; more snow drifts into the crevasse, freezes, welds the ice-body to the rock-face again, so that more stones are ripped out. So, over centuries and millenia, the slope is eaten back into a cliff, and the corrie is excavated. The glacier advances, sweeping all before it, so that the valley itself is widened and deepened and given its characteristic U-shaped
cross-section
. And all that rock is slowly dragged away by the ice, and deposited in the sea or in terminal moraines many miles away.

But then the climate changes. Melting-back of the glacier snout outpaces the downhill slippage of ice. Periodically, the retreat of the ice-margin is stalled; for centuries at a time, the glacier pours out its load of crushed stone along a certain front, building up a
great bank of till across the valley. Thus the ridge of the moraine I have described marks a point of temporary balance between those two huge processes. Finally the glacier retires to its nest, and dwindles and dies. The raven and the peregrine begin the sequence of their springtime ritual battles. Human beings, perhaps after thousands of years of farming there, select the stones to build the alignment, from among the countless fragments torn off the mountainside by the glacier and scattered in the valley bottom. They toilsomely drag them up onto the moraine and set them in position – a position carefully chosen after much observation and perhaps already consecrated by some slighter structure. And that act of selection brings the whole valley and its force-field into
aesthetic
oneness. For the first time. The mountains themselves are 460 million years old, and the moraine was built ten or fifteen thousand years ago, but it was in the Bronze Age, say four
thousand
years ago, that this focusing of the terrain into a landscape took place – an event of a new sort, an act characteristic and perhaps definitive of humanity of all times and all places.