Setting Foot on the Shores of Connemara (3 page)

The islanders tend to mistrust the offices of the outside world, on the whole with good cause, and as this was my first visit to Inis Oírr I felt it more than ever necessary to explain to everyone what I was up to. Maybe I imagined an initial reserve, but in any case it dissolved as news of my activities got round, and my explorations were interspersed with hundreds of conversational encounters, from the barrel-shaped old salt directing four men stretching canvas over the framework of a currach in his boatyard on the foreshore, to the lighthouse keepers in their isolated quarters at the back of the island, from Seán an Siopa (Seán of the shop), the unofficial king of the island, sitting massively by his fireside and rolling forth grand diplomatic utterances with his eyes shut, to the blue-robed zealots, the ‘Danes’ (Mary’s Followers of the Cross, they call themselves), who questioned me closely about the times of mass in the big island.

Then it was time for me to leave the islands to their motionless voyage and stony cargoes, and go to London, where I would have space to piece together my sketches, notes and sodden
OS
sheets. A motorboat was to take me across to the Clare coast, but as Joe the boatman lingered in the pub watching a football match on
television
, and the sky darkened, I became more and more doubtful about this first step of the journey. I had seen the little fibreglass boat battering about in the waves against the quayside for some
days with a fender sagging loose and the canopy hanging on by one bolt. A couple of tourists in the pub were also in two minds as to whether to leave or not, but Joe persuaded them to stay, saying that he would be back for them in the morning. Eventually we set off down to the quay, and as we looked out into rain and prancing waves Joe surprised me by saying, ‘That’s the last they’ll see of me!’ It seemed that the weather was breaking up and that if we had waited for them to make up their minds it would have been too late to cross before dark. The only other passenger was a pretty little American girl besotted with the rugged Joe. It was to be a wildly exciting crossing. Once we had left the shelter of the island nothing was visible in the mist but huge waves chasing up from behind us. I watched how Joe negotiated our way through the seas: holding to his course through the smaller waves, keeping a lookout over his shoulder for swells breaking at the top, and when one of the regular successions of three big seas came,
steering
away from the first, letting the second lift us stern first – they were much bigger than the boat – and pivoting on its top to head down the other side and face into the third. The only time he
faltered
was when the girl started to caress his knee; a mass of water exploded into the boat, and he pushed her aside with an oath. After an hour or so the Cliffs of Moher loomed up out of the gloom, and soon we were running into the little cove of Doolin through a narrow gap between a rocky peninsula and an islet smothered in breakers. We spent that evening listening to the famous local folk-musicians in the pub, and when we came out a gale was howling. Two rather drunk youngsters drove us down through lashing rain to see how the boat was faring; it was
swooping
to and fro agitatedly, and a violent sea was threatening to break over the quay and swamp it. Outside the feeble circle of light from my torch I could see nothing but huge white-topped swells rushing past. Joe put on a lifejacket, clambered down and sprawled on the nose of the lurching boat hanging tyres over its bows. With the lads larking about among mooring-ropes in the darkness, I was really frightened that my adventure would end in tragedy, but I pulled them back from the edge, and with much shouting and hauling and tying and untying of ropes we got the boat turned around and moored bows outwards, and nobody was drowned. I slept that night in a caravan that seemed about to take
off from the foreshore, and woke to sunshine and the roar of
toppling
breakers. Then I hitched a lift to Shannon, and flew to the cloistral calm of London.

My task now was to make good my analogy of the ‘well-formed concept’ and to objectify it as a map. Because I knew little about normal cartographical procedures, the problems of conveying information intelligibly were not to be solved by ready-to-hand techniques; rather they appeared as opportunities for expressing my feelings about the islands. In choosing line-weights and
typefaces
I had in mind not so much legibility as the Aran landscape, the beauty of which lies in its crystalline delicacy of detail always on the point of dissolution into vast luminous spaces. The
commercially
available mechanical tints seemed inadequate symbols for beautifully shelving beaches and the ever-changing
interpenetrations
of rock and water, and I preferred to let my pen run on for hours in minute lyrical effusions of dots and twirls. All around the coast, a fiction, the high-water mark, posed a similar problem; rather than indicate it by a line I relived with my pen the hourly give-and-take of land and sea. Drawing the cliffs was a strange experience; as I reconstructed them from my sketches I found myself becoming dizzy over these half-inch abysses; no doubt it would have been easier to search out aerial photographs, but my instinct was to keep as close as possible to my experience of them. I had tended to think of my approach as consisting in the closest possible identification with the object, but that, I now came to
believe
, is not quite the case. While I was exploring the islands my dreams expressed the process in sexual metaphor; my distinctness from the object was preserved, but at a limit beyond which lay a threat of self-loss. Now in the act of drawing my aim was to achieve the same intimacy of physical contact with the emergent image as I had reached with the reality. – But all this is to
formalize
in retrospect a practice that was tentative and instinctual, and indeed to fill up with ideals the blanks on the resultant map.

In the basic geographic act of mapping I find three
conjunctions
: that of the place mapped with the one who maps it; that of the mapper with the map itself; and finally that of the map with the mapped – this last a confrontation that tests the worth of the first and second. I returned to Aran in the spring with the first printed copies of the map, which have been on sale here since. It
is too early to say much about the outcome. In a superficial way the map has been a success with tourists; in fact I sometimes wonder if in many minds I have merely substituted concept for reality. Last year when I met visitors they were usually lost and making a difficult acquaintance with the island, whereas this year I pass group after group huddled over the map with their backs to the view. As for myself, I have become a minor object of touristic interest, perhaps the only one not marked on the map. As I sit at my desk writing this, I hear the driver of a passing jaunting-car pointing out our house to his ‘load’ of tourists: ‘The man who made them maps lives there!’ Individual visitors have told me the map has enhanced their appreciation of the islands, which is
gratifying
, but more important to me is the generous response of the islanders, who have examined it minutely and with no trace of a wish to find fault. I know that the map has been ‘read’ to old men by their sons or grandsons, and I am always relieved to hear that one or other of the fishermen has confirmed my naming of rocks and inlets he has known all his life. Finally, I know that many copies have been sent off to ‘the exiles’ in Britain, Australia and the USA, and this makes me both proud and sad.

For some years I have spent a few weeks of each spring and autumn walking the southern coast of Connemara. It is a strange region. Granite, harsh-edged, glittering, shows its teeth everywhere in the heathery wastes and ridged potato fields, and even between the houses of the shapeless villages. The peaty, acidic soil is
burdened
with countless boulders left by glaciers that came down from the mountains immediately to the north during the last Ice Age. The land has been scrubbed raw, by the ice, by the Atlantic gales, by poverty.

South Connemara was very sparsely peopled in early times, judging by the fewness of its archaeological sites. To the
merchants
of mediaeval Galway it was a lair of pirates, of the ‘Ferocious O’Flaherties’. Some of those dispossessed of better lands by the Cromwellians in 1650 or hunted out of Ulster by the Orangemen in 1795 settled in this unenviable quarter. By the nineteenth
century
a teeming and periodically starving population was crowded into a narrow coastal strip, fishing, gathering molluscs on the shore, growing potatoes in tiny plots of black waterlogged soil which they fertilized with seaweed, and cutting turf, the only fuel this treeless land affords, from the vast bogs that made the interior almost impassable and otherwise sterile. The sea’s deeply
penetrating
inlets were their lanes of communication and bore the trade they depended on, the export of turf to the stony and fuelless Aran Islands, the Burren in County Clare, and to Galway city. By the beginning of this century the bogland near the coast had been stripped to bare rock.

Modern times have introduced other resources – tourism, some
light industry, the teaching of Irish in summer schools, the dole – but the pattern set by that old coastal folklife, a human tidemark between the two sustaining desolations of the sea and the bog, has not been obliterated. From the little mounds of shells left by
Neolithic
winkle-pickers, to the newest bungalow, a daydream of
California’s
blessed clime, sprouting between two knolls of wet rock and already weatherstained, the dense record of life has been
scribbled
in the margin of the sea. Only the very shoreline itself, now that the main roads passing by half a mile or so inland have drawn habitation away from it, has been left a lonely place, a long
graveyard
for the black skeletons of the wooden boats that used to throng the waterways.

This shoreline is of incredible complexity. The two little fish
ing
villages of Ros a’ Mhíl and Roundstone are only about twenty miles apart, but, even estimating from a small-scale map and ignoring the fifty or more sizeable islands in the bays and off the headlands, there are at least two hundred and fifty miles of coast between them. It was this strange geography, like a rope of closely interwoven strands flung down in twists and coils across an
otherwise
bare surface, that brought me to the region; I had a
conception
filling my head of the correspondingly strange map I could make of it, in which all the density of reference would cluster along one line between two almost blank zones, and that line so convoluted as to visit every square inch of the sheet. And having selected this particular stretch of coast because its near
unmappability
perversely suggested the possibility of mapping it, I had felt the idea of walking its entire length impose itself like a duty, a ritual of deep if obscure significance through which I would be made adequate to the task of creating an image of the terrain.

In the first month of days of walking I covered perhaps a quarter of the way; the going is not easy. At that stage I wrote some pages which I have now looked over, as I pause between the end of walking and the beginning of drawing, and try to recall those first steps towards the heart of Connemara.

I carry with me on this tangled tightrope of a journey the dozen sheets of the six-inch Ordnance Survey map that cover the area, on which to note my finds – a few rare plants, a number of
archaeological sites, endless hundreds of tiny landing-stages, and above all the Irish placenames I collect from the people of the region. As these maps were last revised eighty years ago I also have to mark in new buildings and paths, which sometimes
involves
compass-work and the pacing-out of distances. But on the whole the mensurational side of cartography is not my concern; in my efforts to see a little farther into this terrain I stand, if not on the shoulders of giants, then on those of an army, for the original Survey, made in the 1830s, was carried out in the style and with the manpower of a military operation, which in various of its aspects is just what it was. This horde of men who tramped over the countryside with theodolites and chains so adequately
measured
its lengths, breadths and heights that I am free to concentrate on that mysterious and neglected fourth dimension of cartography which extends deep into the self of the cartographer. My task is to establish a network of lines involving this dimension, along which the landscape can enter my mind, unfragmented and undistorted, to be projected into a map that will be faithful to more than the measurable.

The principles of this subjective triangulation of the world are only now beginning to become expressible for me as I work on this, my third, map. I can throw a glancing light on them by saying that the base-triangle of the system is that formed by the three
church-towers
of Proust’s Martinville, and for the discovery of its other significant points I have to rely on the sort of magical illumination that produces sometimes poetry and sometimes jokes – but when I use the word ‘magical’ of my procedures it is only as a blank to hold a space open until I find some more penetrating adjective.

Magic is a tool more easily mislaid than a compass. In my anxiety to miss no tricks on the exactly scientific level, I sometimes go out overburdened with the desire to find classifiable elements of the scene, which I can post off in the form of neat lists to the helpful experts who advise me on archaeology, botany, geology, placenames and so on; and then I merely succeed in blurring for myself the location of those more elusive places, the rivetholes through which I will be able to fasten my experience of the
territory
to my expression of it on paper, that are only spotted through a mobile reposefulness of mind. In fact after the first week of tramping arduous miles of solitude, with a very thin file of reports
to show for the effort, having forgotten the ritual element in this endless walking and come to regard it as merely a means, which was proving inefficient, of finding curiosities, I was almost ready to admit that this wearisome muddle of land and sea was unmappable by my pedestrian methods. Worse still, the inner recesses of these bays, which from the various hilltops I climbed to get a conspectus of the country looked like the roots of a marvellous silver tree winding far into the rich darkness of the hinterland, had, when investigated in detail, slimy shores of black mud tidemarked by gigantic heaps of khaki seaweed, which seemed to multiply the miles by the accusation of insanity.

But by degrees, under the hypnosis of repetitive days, my
perceptions
changed, and all that had seemed to stand between me and my object – the steep rocky promontories, the ankle-turning shinglebanks, the slithery penetralia of the inlets – became instead part of what I was there for, the shore itself. Then the various incidental difficulties such as the field-walls and drainage ditches that came right down to the water’s edge, and even the banks of seaweed, no longer impeded me psychologically, and my body ceased to notice them as physical obstacles. I saw with interest how the walls were continued onto the foreshore by little ramparts of piled boulders linking outcrops of rock, to stop the cattle
wandering
at low tide. I heard the drainage channels beginning to murmur as an exceptional tide of the autumn equinox, silently brimming and gleaming along the land’s edge like the rim of water about an over-filled glass, reached into them and perturbed their stagnation. And the incredible bulk of seaweed itself took on an explanatory role as I realized the influence it has had on the fine structure of the coastline – for in the old days it was the only
fertilizer
used on this sour land, and there is a spot corresponding to each cottage and in places to each field where boatloads of it used to be landed, so that long stretches of the coast have been
remodelled
in ways so slight they eluded my eye at first, by the removal of a few stones here to make a navigable passage to high-water mark and the piling up of a few stones there to make a tiny quay.

Thus, in this region commonly said to be bare of archaeological interest, the shore revealed itself as a human construct, the work of numberless generations, in which it was tempting to discern the superimposition and entanglement of evolutionary sequences. There
are landing-places even more primaeval-looking than those little hummocks of boulders at the field’s edge, for where the thick blanket-bog of the interior comes down to sea level it ends in strange soft black cliffs which collapse here and there to form little muddy harbours, out of the walls of which the gnarled roots of long-buried forests protrude as weird but handy bollards. Farther up the scale are more substantial dry-stone jetties built by energetic families, and the handsome masonry piers, famine-relief work of the last century, some of which have been given a twentieth-century topping or cladding, and finally the huge and precisely geometrical concrete acreage of the new EEC-grant-aided harbour works at Ros a’ Mhíl, which has probably come into existence over the centuries by progressive improvement of some little alignment of boulders or a twisted bog-oak root now reburied deep in its foundations.

But beyond all these fascinating explanations of itself, the shore drew me on by the mesmeric glittering of its waters; the days of walking became a drug, until I felt I was abandoning myself to the pursuit of this glittering for its own sake, that I welcomed every conceivable complexity of interplay between land and sea. I devoured distances, although I was working in finer and finer detail. Such a labour of mind and body is at first crushingly exhausting, rises to bliss as the activity fuels its own source of vigour, and then a point of satiety is reached rather suddenly, it is time to break off, go home, and lie for a spell under waves of tiredness.

‘Interdigitation’ is the fine term I overhear the scientists using for the way in which one natural zone meets another along a complex boundary of salients and re-entrants; the close-set come-and-go of its syllables is almost enough to convey the word’s meaning, but etymologically it is a little inadequate to such cases as this
Connemara
coastline where land and sea not only entwine their crooked fingers but each element abandons particles of itself temporarily or permanently to the clutch of the other.

An outline map of this area showing nothing but the boundary between land and water might well be misread unless it indicated
which was which. To the bays that ramify into inlets and creeks correspond the peninsulas with their subsidiary headlands and spits; the lakes of the bogland are sometimes linked into
archipelago
-like sequences, as the major islands are joined by causeways; there are matching ambiguities too, lakes that become inlets at high tide, and islands that can be reached on foot when the tide is out. This last category appealed to me even more than the true islands I had to hire a boatman to reach.

When a few years ago I was mapping the Burren uplands on the south of Galway Bay, and even earlier during a time of
walking
in Provence that found expression in a series of geometrical abstract works rather than a map, I had become aware of certain experiences of the traveller that do not depend on anything in the nature of the terrain apart from its topography. The most easily conveyed of these is that high point of awareness one reaches in crossing a pass, where the line of the knowable, leading over from the lowland already traversed to that just being revealed, is
intersected
by the axis of the heights on either side which are left unvisited and unknowable by this journey. The completing of a circuit of an island is another of these purely topographical
sensations
, the promises and illusions of which I am exploring at length on the Aran Isles. In Connemara I identified a third, this visiting of quasi-islands by foot.

A little anxiety sharpens the business. Such a visit is an island in time too, a narrow space allotted by the tides; will the slight pressure one is under help to crystallize one’s impressions or merely crumple them? Sometimes one has to wait for the parting of the waters as for the curtain-up of a play, which wakes high expectations. Some of these intermittent islands of Connemara are still inhabited, but only by one or two people, and so to visit them is to visit a person, and the topography of ‘walking out to islands’ becomes an image of personal contact, a metaphor one lives out in concrete reality. I remember vividly two such intertidal episodes, one played out in a suite of green fields beached on wide sands, the other on a rocky pyramid among plunging, folding, silvery rivers of ebb and flow.

I had chosen a day of spring tide for the first of these
occasions
, and although I suppose this made little difference to my ration of time to be spent on the island, it certainly heightened the
stealthy drama of the unsheeting of the sea’s bed. I loitered about the deserted strand wondering where was the best point from which to strike out for what was still an island half a mile offshore. The seaweedy rocks I picked my way along did not link up into a route, the sandy-bottomed pools between them were too deep to wade, and nothing seemed to be changing. Then far away on shining levels near the horizon, I saw a pair of little figures
trudging
outwards – women going to gather winkles round the island. I had been aiming off at entirely the wrong angle; I went back along the shore and followed in their steps over freshly rippled sand and fleeting shallows. The island put out a gangplank of damp gold towards me, but as I approached it seemed to retire behind the pale sand-cliffs of its dunes.