Setting Foot on the Shores of Connemara (2 page)

After a few weeks I got into my cartographer’s stride, and often finished off the day’s work by walking part of the northern coast, where the fields come down to a varied shoreline of sandy bays, shingle banks and rocky promontories. This shore is more
frequented
than the other, and here and there I would meet a man pulling rye for thatch or spraying potatoes against the blight, who would be ready to talk. Most farms here are of twenty or thirty difficult acres and only support perhaps an old couple whose
children
have gone away to America or are off with the trawlers, or one of the many bachelors too old to marry now, and for these people farming is a life of solitary days. One evening I met an elderly man who showed me where the sea-kale, almost extinct in the wild in Ireland, still grows. After viewing this
prehistoric-looking
cabbage thrusting up through the heavy shingle, we stepped over a little wall into a field where he had a few heaps of carraigín, a seaweed gathered between the tides which makes a sort of blancmange when boiled with milk. It has to be left out to bleach for a few days before being packed and sent off to the buyer, and ‘I’d leave it out for another night if only I knew it wouldn’t rain,’ he said. Rain, it seemed, would rot it, and the trouble of picking out the bad bits would be added to that of picking out the winkles, and at the price it fetched it was hardly worth it. He fingered his chin and peered at the gathering clouds; I felt equally forlorn in this ancient dilemma. Eventually we propped the sticky half-dried masses against a wall so that the wind could blow through them, and left it to fate.

Apart from the trawlers there are a number of small
half-deckers
working out of Cill Rónáin, drift-net fishing for salmon in
June and July, and lobster-potting until the weather breaks up in autumn. I often watched them throwing out the pots as I walked along the shore. One day I saw one of these boats coming into the bay at Cill Mhuirbhigh at an unusual pace, towing something big and heavy. By the time I had hurried round the bay the crew had hauled some sort of a monster out of the water and were hacking it open. It was a basking shark that had become entangled in their nets and which they told me they had ‘drowned’ by towing it behind the boat. This fish, a harmless plankton-eater that can grow up to thirty-five feet long, used to be harpooned by the islanders for the oil of its liver; Robert Flaherty had reconstructed the hunt for his film
Man
of
Ar
an
. There is still a basking shark fishery off Achill Island, and the oil, which has some engineering uses, fetches a high price, while the fins, we hear, go to Chinese restaurants. Recently a Norwegian trawler had been seen poaching for basking sharks around Aran, and our fishermen had decided to take a closer look at one. They spilled out the liver, which would have filled a couple of suitcases, and stuck their fingers in its
eye-sockets
and twiddled its huge eyeballs; then they tumbled the corpse back into the water before I had a chance to take a bit of fin home for our dinner. This incident led to a brief revival of the fishery in the following year, but fortunately the catch was not even sufficient to cover the cost of the diesel expended in scouring the seas for the elusive prey, and the project was abandoned.

As well as its fishing fleet the village of Cill Rónáin turned out to have more points of interest than I had expected, though I recorded them with mixed feelings as they were mainly relics of the bad old days – barracks, courtroom, coastguard station, pound – all now adapted to better purposes. The contrast between this weighty apparatus of extortion and the resources of the community to which it was applied reminded me of the accounts of armed constabulary being landed on the islands to carry out the eviction of an old woman or the sequestration of a cow, within the memory of some still living. Nowadays two gardaí, seldom in uniform, work from a small room in the huge empty coastguard station, the courtroom is a café and the barracks a pub.

By the end of the summer I had covered Árainn and was ready to leave for Inis Meáin. The Gal way steamer calls at the two smaller islands two or three times a week on its way to or from
Cill Rónáin. It cannot dock at either island but drifts offshore while goods and passengers are ferried ashore in the famous Aran currachs – keelless canoes of lath and tarred canvas, nimble as a seal among waves and rocks but alarmingly fragile-looking to the tourist who has to jump into one as it lurches up and down outside the steel door in the steamer’s hold. On this occasion I was the only stranger going ashore, and the boatmen extorted a pound from me, saying that it was so rough I wouldn’t have got ashore at all but for the fine crew I had.

The landing-place in Inis Meáin is exposed, and the island is more frequently cut off in winter than is Árainn. It is the least visited and least changed of the islands, and here the harshness of Aran triumphs over its milder aspects. It is unbelievably stony; I think of Inis Meáin as the Delos of the Rain God. The
north-facing
terraces, which in the big island are largely cultivated, here extend below the line of villages in successive rims of bare rock several hundred yards wide, and the ‘back of the island’ behind the ridge-line is made oppressive by countless field-walls too high to see over. In many of the fields superfluous stone has been built into big rectangular stacks, to clear the sparse grass. All around the south and south-west coast, storms have moved massive blocks of stone, many of them the size of cars or cottages, up the shelving shore, and assembled them into a huge dyke; one can walk outside this ‘storm beach’ on utterly barren sheets of rock swept bare of loose stone, which towards the very exposed south-western
headland
are two or three hundred yards wide. Out on the rim of this lugubrious grey-green desert, a glittering plume of foam leaps up again and again as waves rush into a cavern below. There are cliffs along the west-facing coast, increasing in height as one goes
northwards
; here the storm beach is actually on the clifftop, and only fades out where the cliffs are over a hundred feet high and the waves cannot scale them. At this point there is a ruinous structure of rough stone blocks, perhaps once a lookout’s hut, called Synge’s Chair. Here the writer J.M. Synge used to sit and watch the seabirds circling and screaming below; I often came to rest in the same spot, envying him his stormy creative height.

Synge’s coming to this desolation, just before the end of the last century, to find the stories and the language of the plays he was to write in later years, symbolizes the return of Ireland to its
origins, for this stony island nourished one of the roots of
nationhood
. The Irish language, suppressed, starved and despised, nearly died in the last century; its revival was a necessary step in the fight for independence, and Inis Meáin was one of the places to which the cultural nationalists turned in search of the language through which the nation could rediscover its identity. At that period so many scholars and writers lodged in the one cottage that put up visitors that it became known as Ollscoil na Gaeilge, the University of Irish. One young man who stayed there was Pádraic Pearse, who was to proclaim the Republic in the rising of Easter 1916. How, then, does modern Ireland repay its debt to such places? In the pub, weather-darkened faces are illuminated by the flicker of TV; images of speed and sexuality are received in
non-committal
silence. On the slip in the driving rain four children huddled together in a plastic sheet watch as the currachs are run out into the waves, taking off the last of the summer visitors. Is Inis Meáin to die? Soon these children will follow, to jobs in Galway, Birmingham, Boston – anywhere but Inis Meáin.

Having seen those last visitors off into the mists, I found myself weather-bound for a few days, and sat in the kitchen
deciphering
the blotches in my notebook while the woman of the house huddled in her shawl, knitted and took snuff. Sometimes a neighbouring lad would come in and sit by the range in silence, bending sideways to let his spittle drool onto the hot plate and sizzle into a little pancake. Gathering that I was a ‘scholar’, another man called in to put his problem to me, perhaps just to pass the time. The lobster season was ended and it was time to tow his wooden tank full of lobsters now moored by the slip across to the Clare coast. There one dealer was offering
£
1 a pound for full-sized lobsters only, and another was offering 80p a pound for all lobsters above and below the legal limit. Which was the better deal? ‘Well, how many small ones have you?’ – ‘Maybe a couple of dozen.’ – ‘And how many big ones?’– ‘By Jesus, I haven’t a clue!’ So I had to fall back from mathematical to moral argument, and as the weather didn’t clear enough for lobster-delivery during my stay I never heard the outcome. My reputation as a scholar must have survived, however, for when an unprecedented event occurred one Sunday I was urged to record it, because ‘That day should be in History!’ Every Sunday the curate from Inis Oírr is
brought across by currach to celebrate mass in Inis Meáin, and the honour of this sometimes dangerous task devolves upon each of the Inis Oírr households in turn. Recently a new household had come into existence, a lay community of young Catholic
enthusiasts
, men and women, collectively known as ‘The Danes’ because their leader was Danish; they sang psalms at all canonical hours of day and night, fished from a catamaran, built their own currachs to a modernized design, and in everything they did were a source of endless speculation to the islanders. Then they claimed their right to bring the curate across, and the curate, who was new to the islands, accepted the offer. The men of Inis Meáin who went down to the slip as usual that day to greet him were amazed and amused to find that his crew included two girls. He himself was unaware of the sensation caused by this jolting of ancient
observances
and prohibitions. As the procession to the chapel passed the cottage I was staying in, a lad broke off from it to run in with the news: ‘There were women in the curate’s boat!’ – and I was told that it would be worth my while writing it down, which I now do. And as an historian should, I note the date of this event: 15 September 1974.

There is quite a lot of social interchange between the two small islands, and my hosts’ cottage, at the top of the road leading down to the slip, was well placed for observing it; the lady of the house spent much time scanning the seaways through binoculars. One misty evening – my last in Inis Meáin – we were all at the door anxiously watching the return of a currach with some lads who were banned from the Inis Meáin pub because of ‘blackguardism’ and had gone to do their drinking in Inis Oírr. Their progress was slow and irregular, but they made land at last, and came up the hill past our cottage all clinging to the cab of a tractor. Shortly
afterwards
they sent a child down to us to borrow a butcher’s knife, which the man of the house handed over with evident reluctance. When next we looked out into the gathering murk, they were down on one of the great creigs below the village, with a cow and a shotgun. One of them took uncertain aim at the cow’s forehead, there was a bang, the beast fell, kicking and slithering on the wet rock, and toppled off the conveniently flat place they had chosen for their butchering into a deep gully. They leaped down to finish her off with a hammer, waving at us to come and help; we shrank
back into the doorway. For an hour or more they were hacking and tugging at the carcase, and later that evening on our way to the pub we passed them standing in the drizzle by the roadside, with a heap of raw meat that steamed in the cold air, drinking mugs of Guinness out of a white plastic bucket; I recognized them as the brave crew that had brought me safe to shore. The next day, as I was saying goodbye to my host, we saw a raven circling above the creig, and he observed sagely, ‘Nothing happens
unknown
to the raven!’

I crossed to Inis Oírr by the trawler that takes over the
inter-island
connection when the steamer is withdrawn for servicing at the end of the season. As at Inis Meáin, the currachs come out to ferry travellers ashore; on this occasion there were few passengers – an Icelandic geologist, an elderly man from the Folklore Commission, and myself – and only one currach was launched, which had to go to and fro several times. The landing is on a wide shelving beach, giving the island a welcoming aspect; as the currach nosed into the sand two men grasped me by the elbows and flew me ashore. When I think of boat-days on Inis Meáin’s dismal shore I remember a dog on the rocks howling at the
breakers
crashing in out of the fog; Inis Oírr’s boat-day, however, I see as a sort of garden-party, a talkative gathering on a brilliant expanse of smooth sand watching the trawler or the steamer beating to and fro offshore, and the currachs bounding in over a festive sea. White houses scattered in a wide arc around the
foreshore
, and behind them a bright craggy hill bearing a picturesque ruined castle – a gleam of sunshine on all this transports one for a moment to the Mediterranean. But beyond the skyline begins the same grey criss-cross of walls and scraggy fields, slowly declining to a storm-battered shore. A monument to the power of the sea, there is the sixty-or seventy-yard-long hulk of the
Plassy,
a freighter that struck a notorious rock off the east coast of the island a few years ago and eventually drifted ashore. Successive storms have lifted her higher and higher and now she stands
bolt-upright
on the storm beach several yards above normal high tides, and appears to be sailing across dry land. Her hull is broken open and one can step into the hold; her cargo for this motionless voyage is huge boulders.

Behind the livelier aspects of Inis Oírr as compared with Inis
Meáin – the better-stocked shops and less spartan lodgings, the animation brought by children from mainland schools who spend a summer month here learning Irish – there is the same sad
wasting-away
of a community losing its lifeblood through emigration of the young. The girls go first; it is easier for them to get jobs in hotels and shops. Not long before my visit the socially conscious young curate had written an appeal to the authorities to do something about this desperate situation, instancing the fact that there was just one girl of marriageable age left, to twenty-six young men. I fell into conversation with an island girl soon after my arrival, and asked ‘Are you she?’ No, she was not; she was just home for a holiday from her job in Galway, and anyway, she said, ‘I couldn’t marry any of those lads; they’re all my first cousins!’ An
exaggeration
no doubt, but one that points up the problems facing a
dwindling
community. This year the curate has to report that there are no marriageable girls at all in Inis Oírr.