Setting Foot on the Shores of Connemara (5 page)

In my face, the Atlantic wind, bringing walls of rain, low ceilings of cloud, dazzling windows of sunshine, the endless transformation scenes of the far west. Underfoot, dark crystalline stone, one of the many summits of a dragon-backed hill, the last, beyond which the land tails off into a bleak peninsula, clusters of foaming rocks and a lonely lighthouse. And spread below, to the north, a bewildering topography of lakes lost in bogs, across which scarcely less
comprehensible
maps of cloud-shadow race inland, towards mountain ranges. Eastwards, a wrinkled golden spread half unravelled by the sea, dotted with the tiny white rectangles of human habitation; off this, to the south, islands, the nearer ones gold too, those on the horizon grey-blue; finally, closing the south-east, another land, of hills the colour of distance itself.

The hill is Errisbeg, which shelters the little fishing-village of Roundstone from the west wind, in Connemara; the portion of the world’s surface visible from its summit comprises the suite of landscapes grouped around Galway Bay which it has been my wonderful and wearying privilege to explore in detail over the last fifteen years, the Burren uplands in County Clare, the Aran Islands, and Connemara itself. Most recently I have been
enquiring
out the names of those lakes that lie on the dark plain below like fragments of a mirror flung down and shattered. The elderly men who used to herd sheep, fish for brown trout or shoot the white-fronted Greenland goose out in that labyrinth can recall about two dozen of the names of the larger lakes, and there are a similar number whose names I am beginning to despair of, not to mention countless little ones, all within an area of about thirty square miles. One is called Loch Beithinis, birch-island lake; for while the lakes themselves are often hard to find among the slight
undulations of the bog, the wind-shaped domes of the dense little woods on their islands are visible from greater distances. Crows nest in most of these islands, and the occasional merlin; some are heronries, and the trees of one have been reduced to skeletons by the droppings of generations of cormorants. The vegetation of these ungrazed patches suggests that but for the omnipresent sheep at least the better-drained parts of the low-lying blanket boglands would be covered with a forest of sessile oak, holly, yew, birch and willow. As elsewhere, it is human activity that
determines
the texture of what appears at first glance to be untouched wilderness, a fact that complicates the conservationist case
somewhat
. However, this area, which is becoming known as
Roundstone
Bog, having been spared by forestry and commercial
turf-cutting
so far, should most certainly be preserved as it is; apart from its ecological uniqueness, it harbours one of the rarest of resources, solitude.

One road winds across this bog, along which the traveller can enjoy a sky undivided by wires. I can just make it out from Errisbeg, clambering around the knoll called Na Creaga Móra, the big crags, famous in botanical literature as the station of a heather, Mackay’s Heath, discovered here by the self-taught Roundstone botanist William McCalla in 1835, and otherwise only known from Donegal and Oviedo in Spain. The other rare heathers of
Roundstone
Bog are the Dorset Heath, of which half a dozen tussocks here constitute the entire Irish population, and the Mediterranean Heath, which grows in the streaming valleys of Errisbeg’s
north-east
flank, and in Mayo, and is otherwise restricted to Spain and Portugal. It is the warm breath of the Atlantic that fosters such southern exotics in this almost tundra-like terrain.

Following that road with my eye, I see it disappear north-
westwards
, where the Protestant spire and the Catholic spire of Clifden show above low hills, the western decrescendo of a symphony of mountains all along the skyline. Due north of me, the Twelve Bens huddle like sheep; there are in fact eleven summits of between 1700 and 2000 feet in height, with names like Binn Bhán, white peak, and one which is not a peak but a massive lump, called Meacanacht, probably from an obsolete Irish word meaning a lumpy thing. While the sharper tops are of quartzite, a rock resistant to weathering and inhospitable to vegetation, Meacanacht
is of kinder stuff, a schist that breaks down into clayey soil; its southern face is green, and rare alpines lurk on its north-facing precipices. Farther east and separated from the Bens by the
majestic
Inagh Valley are the Mám Tuirc mountains, a line of peaks forming the boundary between Connemara proper and its eastern province, the Joyce Country. Mám Tuirc itself, the pass of the boar, towards the northern end of the range, is hidden from me by the Bens, but I can make out the broad saddle of Mám Éan, the pass of birds, near the southern end, where the ancient Celts used to celebrate the festival of Lughnasa at the beginning of
harvest-time
. Later this site was Christianized, and legend brings St
Patrick
there to bless the lands west of it from that vantage point. For the Pattern Day festivities that succeeded to Lughnasa, Connemara and the Joyce Country would meet there, to pray, to drink poitín, to enjoy a blackthorn-stick fight. A few years ago the clergy
imposed
the alien rite of the Stations of the Cross on Mám Éan, but even while the priest is conducting the ceremony folk faithful to the old ways still clamber into St Patrick’s Bed, a hollow of the steep hillside only a few feet away from the new marble altar, and turn round seven times, sunwise.

Although the clustered Bens and the oblique line of the Mám Tuirc peaks look unrelated when one clambers among them, their essential unity is clear in this view from Errisbeg. They are the remains of one great ridge running from east to west, which dates from the Caledonian period of mountain building some 450 million years ago, when two of the plates that make up the earth’s surface were slowly driving against one another, the resultant crumpling being the origin of the mountains of Scandinavia, ‘Caledonia, stern and wild’ itself, the northern half of Ireland, and Newfoundland. A sandstone of even earlier date was pinched in the interior of a giant fold here, and recrystallized under immense pressure to produce the unyielding quartzite of the Connemara peaks. Clay and limestone materials caught up into the outer layers of the fold were metamorphosed into the softer schists and marble that have worn down since then to form the lower land south of the
mountains
, the corresponding but narrower valleys north of them, and the broad north-south corridor of the Inagh Valley. The blackish crags of Errisbeg itself are of gabbro, a dense basic rock that came up molten from the earth’s mantle some tens of millions of years
before the Caledonian convulsions. The lovely cone of Cashel Hill rising from the head of the bay east of Roundstone is of the same rock, and there are a few similar dark hills north of the Bens, including Dúchruach, the ‘black stack’, that lowers over the wooded valley and lake of Kylemore, a sympathetic backdrop for the nineteenth-century gothic fantasy of Kylemore Castle. Thus there are dark hills both north and south of the pale quartzite mountains, preserving the approximate symmetry of Connemara about its east-west axis.

The Ice Ages, starting about one and a half million years ago and perhaps not all past yet, have carved up all these variously resistant rocks into the welter of forms that meet the eye today, excavating the valleys between the mountain ranges and the great fiord of Killary Harbour that divides Connemara from the Mayo uplands to the north. Some of the material removed by the
glaciers
was dumped when they melted back, in the form of the low rounded hills of boulder and clay called drumlins by geographers. These isolated hills, usually of green, arable land, contrast vividly with the dark level bogs on which they are stranded, and they all have individual names. In western Connemara such a hill is an
imleach
, perhaps from their rather sharply defined rims (
imeall
‚
a rim). From Errisbeg I can identify several of them, including Imleach na Beithe, the drumlin of the birch, and Imleach Caorach, sheep-drumlin, near Ballyconneely to my west.

So, one prehistoric collision of continents, a few hundred
million
years of erosion, and my almost equally drastic geological
oversimplifications
, suffice to explain the look of things to the north of Errisbeg. But this tousled fringe of Connemara to the east of me – can any generalization hold it together? Immediately below is Roundstone Bay, most of which is occupied by an island, Inis Ní, which is not quite an island since there is a causeway and a bridge leading into it, and even before that was built people could walk into it over the seaweed-covered rocks when the tide was out – though, on the other hand, very high tides still overrun its lower parts and make three islands out of Inis Ní. And Roundstone Bay is only a side-issue of Cuan na Beirtrí Buí, the bay of the yellow oyster-bank, which goes on to divide again, facing the incoming salmon with a choice between the outlet of the famous Ballynahinch River fishery on the west and Cashel Bay on the east,
which delivers them into the Gowla River and the hands of the Zetland Hotel’s guests. Beyond this dilemma is a broad headland with the ancient name of Iorras Aintheach, the stormy peninsula; it carries the villages of Carna and Cill Chiaráin, and to the south spawns various islands, some isolated and deserted since a
generation
or two ago, others linked to the mainland by causeways and still populated, others exactly halfway between these two
conditions
, being accessible at low tide and occasionally reoccupied by the last of their former inhabitants, who gather winkles round their shores or take cattle out to graze their sandy wind-eroded pastures. A little farther out is the most precious stone of all this stony
littoral
, the bare low dome of St Macdara’s Island, with its minute oratory dating back almost to the age of the hermits who sought out such inaccessible retreats all around the coasts of Connemara. Eastwards again, more ramifying bays, with islands strung together by causeways or proliferating out into the waters of Galway Bay itself, delighting and defying the map-maker.

All this topographical extravaganza has been carved out of granite, which was intruded into the pre-existent rocks a little over 400 million years ago, at the end of the Caledonian
mountain-building
period. It is criss-crossed with joints and faults, which the sea has exploited to bite off archipelagos and prize open the creeks that traverse it in all directions. Without these seaways, as I will show, it would be as sparsely inhabited as the boglands and
mountains
farther inland, whereas in fact it is the most densely peopled region of Connemara. But in spite of the cottages and bungalows strung out along its web of roads and boreens, this is an
intimidating
landscape, of glinting pinkish or golden-brown rock-sheets
polished
by the Ice Ages and strewn with glacial boulders,
interspersed
with tiny saucer-shaped tillage plots of black waterlogged soil, and interrupted everywhere by dark stony or muddy shores on which high tides pile unbelievable masses of yellow seaweed. This growth of knotted wrack or yellow-weed as it is called locally is one of the factors that has made life possible on the acidic granite, for large amounts of it were harvested, both for fertilizing the land and for burning to kelp, the main source of industrial alkalies in the eighteenth and of iodine in the nineteenth century; it was the money paid out by the agent of a Scottish kelp-firm
resident
in Cashel that kept hundreds of families just above starvation
level in the 1880s. Even today one can see rafts of weeds being towed into quays all round that intricate coast, for sale to a factory in Cill Chiaráin as a source of the alginates used in thickening agents for foods, paints and cosmetics.

Another resource of this apparently unfavoured coast was its covering of bog, which had developed on the impervious granite as it had on the metamorphic rocks inland. That covering is almost entirely stripped away now, through generations of cutting of the turf that was shipped out of hundreds of little harbours to be burned in Galway city or on the other side of Galway Bay where there is no peat covering the rocks. But to develop this theme of the strange process by which the bareness of one landscape made another bare, I must now look south, to those islands that lie like clean steel blades along the horizon, so utterly different from the rusty twistings of south Connemara.

Seeing the three Aran Islands from Errisbeg, wrapped in their mist-coloured cloaks of monkish remoteness and simplicity, it is hard to credit that fifteen hundred people live out there, manning an up-to-date trawler fleet, profiting from tourism, and farming those obdurately stony little fields reclaimed from the bare crags. As I watch, a line of light seeping under the islands from the bright horizon seems to be easing them free of even what tenuous relationship to mainland realities the sea can mediate, and floating them back to the time when
Ára
na
Naomh,
Aran of the Saints, was a source of inspiration to the monasteries of western Europe. The tall cliffs of Árainn or Inishmore, the largest of the islands, are turned away from the mainland to the south-western Atlantic spaces; remembering the many days I spent exploring them, I feel the thunder of the billows in their recesses and hear the fierce clamour of a peregrine falcon sweeping along their sheer faces. And beyond the islands is the Burren, with its flower-strewn hills rising in sweeping terraces to breezy plateaux, cross-hatched by four thousand years of wall-building! Marvels beyond description! I turn again to geology, mother of earth-sciences, for some
unifying
approach to them.

The essential oneness of the three islands and the Burren is clearly discernible from Errisbeg; the islands are built of a number of thick, horizontal layers of rock that correspond to those of the Burren and have evidently been separated from it by long-acting
agencies that have otherwise not disrupted their strata. Whereas the visual turmoil of Connemara is a memory-trace of the
mountains’
travail, those sober levels to the south are the petrified
after-image
of a long-departed sea. A hundred million years after the Caledonian events, this area lay under a subtropical ocean, the waters of which pullulated with shelled creatures, from dot-sized foraminifera to brachiopods as big as saucers. Their remains, piling up together with the corals of the sea-bed for countless generations and compressed into limestone under their own weight, eventually totalled a thickness of over half a mile. Earth movements evidently changed the depths of those Carboniferous period seas from time to time, as there are thin strata of shale, formed from the mud of shallow coastal waters, between the strata of limestone, and even beds of clay, showing that the surface occasionally rose above the water long enough for a soil to form, only to be submerged again. Eventually, some 270 million years ago, a final upward heave
abolished
that sea, and since then climates ranging from the tropical to the glacial, and the surges of the modern Atlantic, have been eating away at the limestone, leaving the three islands and the
dissected
plateau of the Burren, which are even now being reduced in level by half a millimetre or so every year through the solvent action of the rain.