Setting Foot on the Shores of Connemara (13 page)

Interestingly enough, the next day I heard the same story in English, almost a word-for-word equivalent, from a man on the other side of the same hill. But I suspect that this is the exception, and that an enormous proportion of the old lore is lost when the Irish language ceases to be spoken. In this case, though, a rather haunting story had been transferred from the Irish to the
English-speaking
culture without loss; and now I have transferred it
further
, into print. That is one function of my work, this translation of the dense web of place-lore out of speech and memory into the world of books and maps, and it is a troubling aspect of the
enterprise
.

I am of course not the first to have woven Connemara places into the stuff of writing. When I was exploring Ros Muc, and reading Patrick Pearse’s short stories, many of which he wrote in his holiday cottage there, I came across an example of how
intricately
knotted together landscape and literature can be. Pearse often used the topography of Ros Muc symbolically, and almost as if he could assume that everyone else was familiar with it, as Dante could rest on certain commonplaces about Jerusalem and Rome; this was overweening in Pearse, but the quality of his stories is not negligible and there are of course extraliterary reasons for
examining
them. His story ‘Na Bóithre’, the roads, is particularly full of placenames; it mentions almost every townland and village in the neighbourhood except Ros Muc itself, which always appears in Pearse’s fiction as Ros na gCaorach, the peninsula of the sheep, rather than the peninsula of pigs. Perhaps he felt that sheep were more poetically suited than pigs to his rather pastoral vision of life in Connemara, or perhaps he was just over-sensitive to mindless English or Ascendancy jokes about the Irishman and his pig. In any case it is likely that the
muc
refers to the hogback hills of the
locality
rather than to pigs. To understand ‘Na Bóithre’ and to extract
from it some significances Pearse himself may not have been aware of, it is necessary to go into details of its
setting
and the occasion that prompted it. Nora, the girl-child heroine of the story, lives in An Turlach Beag, near the school, from which roads diverge. In my
diagram
(Fig. 6) summarizing the story’s explicit geography as a rudimentary labyrinth, I have indicated these various villages with arrows rather than dots, for they are
named
in the text primarily as places people come from or go to; they are directions, like Guermantes in Proust. These roads represent the choices or destinies life offers. However, Pearse is extremely repressive in the choice he thrusts upon his heroine, and was in fact more concerned with his own destiny while writing this story, as I shall show. The story begins with a
fleá,
a festivity, in the school, organized by a regular visitor known as the Man from Dublin. Nora is told to stay at home and mind the baby while her parents and brother go off to enjoy the fun. Rebelling against her lot, she cuts off her hair to look like a boy, and ventures out into the darkness. She has to hide from the people dispersing from the
fleá,
and then takes the road which would lead out into the wide world. But by the time she has reached a place Pearse calls Eileabhrach she is tired and frightened; she steps aside into a wood there, and faints, and has a vision of Christ’s agony in the Garden of Gethsemane. She longs to help carry the cross – but at that moment her father finds her, and takes her home. She is wandering in her mind for a month, but when she comes to herself she asks for the baby to be put in the bed with her, and vows never to leave her family again.

6. Places and directtons tn Pearse’s ‘Na Bóithre’.

The message is unambiguous: stay at home, girl, and bear children; the excitements and sufferings of the roads of life are
Man’s portion. But under this bit of patriarchal
indoctrination
is another level of significance, only legible in the light of the real-life event that prompted the story, and the detailed
geography
of Ros Mue – both matters few if any of Pearse’s readers could be aware of. First, the event: Pearse himself had organized such a
fleá
in the school of An Turlach Beag, in
opposition
to some entertainment of too English a tone
mounted
by the Viceroy, Lord Dudley, who used to come for fishing holidays to Inver Lodge near Ros Muc. Pearse was delighted with the success of his evening, and later based the story of ‘Na Bóithre’ on it (he finished it only in the summer of 1915 and it was published a few months before the Easter Rising and his own execution). So the ‘Man from Dublin’ of the story is Pearse himself. Secondly, the local geography of Ros Muc, the next layer of the labyrinth, which I show wrapped around the schematic map of the story (Fig. 7). Eileabhrach is in fact the wooded area south of Loch Eileabhrach – the name is properly Oiriúlach, perhaps from
foithriúil
and signifying a place of thickets – which lies in the angle between the road leading out of the Ros Muc peninsula and the main road passing by from east to west. The Ros Muc road goes around the east of the lake, and Pearse’s cottage was rather isolated, on the west of the lake. So, if Nora’s hallucination of Christ had been prompted by her actually seeing a man in the wood there, that man would most likely have been Pearse himself, taking a shortcut home after his
fleá
. Since Nora is a fiction, so is her vision, and so is any rationalization of it; the last-named exists only in our reconstruction of Pearse’s mind. His self-identification with Christ the Redeemer is well known; here is an unusual demonstration of it, emerging through an interpretation of a projection into a hallucination in a fiction. He must have been full of forebodings of his forthcoming Easter self-sacrifice at the time of writing this story. The wood of Eileabhrach was evidently his Garden of Gethsemane.

7. Ros Muc, showing the position of Pearse’s cottage.

A terminological footnote: literary theory is in part a study of intertextuality, the understanding of a given text in its web of
relationships
to other texts – relations of influence or rebellion,
quotation
, parody, plagiarism,
etc
. By broadening the connotation of the word ‘text’ one can include here the work’s relationships to other symbolic structures, such as placename systems. But by no amount of stretching can the concept of a text be made to cover the basic topography of an area. There is something the theses of geography are about, of which a conceptualized landscape is an interpretation, that is not a message, not a map; it is not oriented along the vector of intention to communicate which distinguishes messages from many other things we humans like to receive as messages; it stands beyond and behind our desire to make sense of it. I lack a term for the business of explicating a text in its relationship to the
non-textual
, but I do not accept that the world, or even human life, is texts all the way down.

Returning to Pearse’s Ros Muc for a moment: in another of his stories, ‘An Bhean Chaointe’, the wailing woman, there is repeated mention of ‘An Glais Dubh’, the black stream. Enquiring locally, I found this to be a muddy ditch now culverted under the main road a couple of miles east of the Ros Muc turning. In the story there is a lonely, crazy widow-woman living just beyond it. She is for ever expecting the return of her son, who will never return as he has died while in prison in Galway. Whenever the narrator of the story encounters this woman, he has just passed the Glais Dubh; it stands for the grief and mental confusion that separates the widow from the rest of the community. As a symbol it works well enough in the fiction; what about its symbolic effect in the real landscape? Well, since nobody except the immediate locals even knows that there is in fact such a place, until now it has had no geographical potency whatsoever. But the insistent and almost systematic use of Ros Muc placenames in Pearse demonstrates his urge to appropriate this landscape, to make it the theatre of his moralities. The project founders on his early death, and on the fixated juvenility of his prose. Nevertheless, the attempt is of
historical
importance. Had Pearse succeeded in his foundation of
1916 Ireland, Ros Muc might have become its ethical map, its mythic theme-park – for better or for worse.

My business in making maps is not just the recording of all the oddities and singularities I pick up on my way along convoluted walks like this one through Connemara. I, too, want to create meaning, but meaning of a specifically geographical sort. So, I am particularly interested in or excited by the points at which the thread of my explorations crosses itself, as it were, from various directions, and can be knotted firmly, that is, memorably, in a way that elevates a mere location to the status of a place. A good example, all the better for being rather complicated, arises at Garraunbawn, a townland near Ballynakill in the north-west of Connemara. According to the placenames experts at the Ordnance Survey, ‘Garraunbawn’ is an anglicization of the Irish ‘An Garrán Bán’, meaning the white thicket, or the fallow thicket;
garrán
, a shrubbery or thicket, is a common element in placenames.
However
, in the OS archives are the original ‘field notebooks’ kept by the surveyors who first mapped this area in 1839, and in one of these I found a note that the Irish name of this place was ‘An Gearrán Bán’, the white horse.
Gearrán,
meaning a gelding or small horse, is close in sound to
garrán,
a shrubbery, and the
difference
between them is lost, like so much else, in anglicization. Further, the old notebook said that the townland took its name from that of a rock, but did not record where this rock was. Also, a very elderly former resident of the locality had told me a story about a white horse that came out of Garraunbawn Lake; a man had caught it and saddled and ridden it, and then he had taken the saddle off and hung it over a rock, and the horse had galloped off and plunged into the lake again. The mark of the saddle, my informant said, had remained on the rock. Unfortunately he didn’t know exactly where this rock was, nor its name. Also, I had heard from an archaeologist that there was a standing-stone in this
townland
, on the top of a hill. There are a number of standing-stones dating from the Bronze Age, about 4000 years ago, in north-west Connemara, several of them on the tops of small glacial hills or drumlins; such a hill occupies most of the townland of Garraunbawn. What the significance of these stones was is, of course,
difficult
to know; some may have marked important burials, or they may have been ritual sites, or territorial markers.

All this information, fragmentary but intriguing, was already in
my mind by the time the thread of my explorations led me through Garraunbawn one beautiful autumn evening. It is a particularly lovely area, gentler than most of Connemara, its lanes sunk between banks rich with wildflowers. I pushed my bike up the lane that crosses the hill, and just at the top of the slope I glanced through a hole in the hedge, and there in a field was the
standing-stone
. It was about five feet high, of milk-white quartz, dappled with grey lichen. In the twilight it looked exactly like the rump of an old white horse, peacefully grazing. Veins of quartz, formed in more turbulent geological eras by hot water seeping up fault-planes of the country rock from deep in the earth, carrying silica in
solution
and depositing it in pure crystals, occur here and there throughout Connemara. There is a quartz dyke exposed on the shore of an island near Garraunbawn in Ballynakill Bay, from which big boulders of quartz occasionally roll out as the coast is eroded back by the waves; perhaps some Bronze Age people rafted such a piece across and lugged it up half a mile of hill to set it up in Garraunbawn. No doubt until the last century, and the building of Garraunbawn House, it was the most prominent object in the neighbourhood. In fact I am sure it was the mythical white horse itself; the surviving version of the story in which the man hangs the saddle over the stone is an attempted rationalization of an older magic tale, which surely identified the horse with the stone. So, at that moment, looking through the hedge at the old stone horse cropping the grass on the hilltop, I could tie together a geological and an archaeological strand of Connemara’s prehistory, and follow the efforts of later generations to make sense of that stone, first by means of a legend of an otherworldly horse, and later by tidying up a story already half forgotten and fossilized in a placename
misunderstood
and gelded by officialdom. For this place is not An Garrán Bán, the fallow thicket, but An Gearrán Bán, named from its ancient, perhaps totemic, white horse of stone, which has been ridden over the 4000 years of its existence by various meanings we can only guess at. The restoration of such an icon of a locality’s specificity is the deepest gift a cartographer can offer, to our eroded modern consciousness of place.