Setting Foot on the Shores of Connemara (6 page)

Subsequent movements of the earth’s crust, perhaps connected with the opening up of the Atlantic Ocean, have exerted lateral forces on the limestone beds, fracturing them in a system of
vertical
cracks of astonishing regularity, the major ones running
south-south
-westwards, the minor set at right-angles to them. Flowing rainwater has enlarged these into fissures of all widths up to two feet or so, subdividing the rock outcrops into rectangular slabs, or, where they are very close-set, a rubble of small blocks. So the surface, with whatever shallow soil it carries, is extremely
efficiently
drained. But while the limestone is vulnerable to rain, the shale and clay bands are more impermeable. On a hillside it is the limestone exposed between two of these bands that will be removed first, while that overlain by the bands will persist longer, so the hillside is eaten away into great steps; such at least is one scenario that has been proposed to account for the terraced
formation
of the Aran Islands and the higher regions of the Burren. Therefore the clay and shale is exposed all along the feet of the
steep scarps or low cliffs that run across the hillsides, and the
rainwater
that sinks through the creviced limestone layers and is then conducted sideways by the impervious shale bubbles out in springs at the foot of these cliffs, washing the shale or clay out with it to add a little soil to the attractions of these particular levels. Even from Errisbeg I can see how the lines of white dots, the cottages and bungalows along Aran’s roads, follow the terraces, keeping their heads down below the ridge-line that shelters them from the prevailing south-westerlies.

As neighbours, the Aran Islands have come to be closely
related
in culture to south Connemara; most importantly, both speak Irish, and indeed between them they carry most of the language’s hopes for the future. But ecologically and archaeologically Aran belongs to the Burren, limestone being the determining factor. Nearly all the Burren’s famous flora is shared with the islands; the mountain avens is absent from Aran but most of its other alpine or northern species such as the spring gentian are present, while the roseroot (in Connemara exceedingly rare and found only on certain cliffs near the mountain-tops) flourishes on some exposed areas of crag right down to sea-level. There are plants peculiar to Aran too. In the wind-and rabbit-mown sward of the highest clifftops one can find the purple milk vetch, recorded nowhere else in Ireland and which is perhaps a relict of the tundra vegetation of
immediately
post-glacial times. And since modern agriculture can hardly enter Aran’s tiny fields, some weeds still occur that have been exterminated almost everywhere else; I have even found the penny-cress, whose transparent disc-shaped capsules used to delight children of previous generations in many rural areas.

Despite such multicoloured mitigations, though, much of Aran is a desolation of bare stone, like the Burren. But in both places the sheer number of prehistoric monuments shows that this cannot always have been the case. For instance in the islands there are five megalithic tombs of the type known from their shape as wedge tombs and usually dated to the Late Neolithic or Early Bronze Age. Then there are no fewer than seven great stone cashels, including the promontory fort of Dúchathair and Ireland’s most spectacular prehistoric site, Dún Aonghasa, whose three roughly concentric semicircular ramparts abut onto the edge of a dizzy cliff above the Atlantic, and which is visible in silhouette
even from Errisbeg. Both these forts have arrays of set stones before them, an apparently defensive feature that suggests, by analogy with similar cases in Iberia, an Early Iron Age date. The dozens of stone huts or
clocháin
and scores of stony mounds that could well be ruined huts, suggest that the Early Christian period here was settled and prosperous. In mediaeval times the O’Briens, the dominant force in Munster, had three tower-houses on the islands (which they lost to the O’Flahertys of Connemara in the 1550s). The O’Briens also added a Franciscan friary to the already venerable monasteries of Árainn. The record of settlement in the Burren is similarly continuous, and recent studies in environmental archaeology (such as the analysis of soil material from beneath ancient walls and tombs) is tending to reinforce the impression that the limestone lands remained fertile and productive long after bog had begun to form elsewhere, and that their present bareness is not so primordial as it looks.

The story in Connemara is intriguingly different. Here, early cultures left abundant traces, but then the trail almost peters out. Middens of seashells, looking much like those in the Dingle
peninsula
now thought to be of Late Mesolithic or Early Neolithic date, occur on several of Connemara’s shores. Just below Errisbeg, for instance, the sandy spit between the back-to-back beaches of Dog’s Bay and Port na Feadóige (the bay of the plover) was evidently a resort of those early food-gatherers, for in the eroded dune-faces one can see blackish layers full of bones, winkleshells and the
heat-shattered
stones of hearths. And whereas only a few years ago the received opinion was that Connemara has little to offer the
archaeologist
apart from a small number of megaliths in the north-west, a spate of recent discoveries has shown that in the Neolithic and Bronze Ages the valleys giving onto the bays of Streamstown and Ballynakill were almost as populous as the Burren. This Atlantic coastal area was then, as it still is, the most prosperous part of Connemara, because of its deposits of glacial till and scattered
outcrops
of metamorphosed limestone. Some of these finds have been revealed by turf-cutting, and close to many of them one can make out the walls of fields that predate the growth of the bogs. It was perhaps the arsonist clearance methods of these early farmers, coinciding with a climatic change from a warmer, drier post-glacial period to the cool, wet times we still enjoy today, that proved too
much for the great forests that formerly covered the land and whose roots can be seen in the bottoms of the turf-banks.

However, the evidence for later settlement is more scattered and ambiguous. There are about a dozen promontory forts, stone cashels and earthen raths, nearly all on or near the western coast, none of them comparable with the great forts of Aran. More
characteristic
of the region is the widely scattered score or so of crannogs (cashel-like lake-dwellings on wholly or partly artificial islands). Perhaps there were unenclosed forms of settlement too, that have left little trace, or perhaps the onset of bog development was already concentrating life on the teeming trout-lakes south of the Bens. In any case, it is as if Connemara had become a quieter place, when the Burren and Aran were humming with energy. After the Iron Age, settlement seems to confine itself to the coast. The monks of the island hermitages and seashore communities were notoriously averse to neighbours – tradition repeatedly tells of them departing out of hearing of one another’s bells – so the ragged periphery of a deserted Connemara must have suited them well. The seven tower-houses (chiefly of the O’Flahertys) were all on the coast, with the exception of one centrally placed on the lake-island of Ballynahinch, and as far apart as could well be. The bogs, by sealing off the interior, had deprived the coast of its
supportive
hinterland, and vast tracts of central Connemara remain virtually desolate to this day. But while Connemara was wrapping itself in bog, the Burren and Aran remained hospitable throughout, until continuous millenia of intensive farming reduced them to naked rock, perhaps as recently as the Middle Ages. The
difference
between limestone on the one hand and metamorphic or igneous rocks on the other has been a dominant factor in this divergence of the fate of these two lands throughout the rainy
centuries
of the Atlantic regime: limestone drinks water, granite hoards it.

But then came a strange reversal of fortunes. Since at least the seventeenth century the only source of fuel for the limestone side of Galway Bay has been the peat covering the granite side, and throughout the centuries of Ireland’s huge population growth every niche of the south Connemara coastline sheltered a tiny harbour exporting the region’s turf to Galway, to Kinvara, to some little landing-stage corresponding to each village of the Aran
Islands and the Burren coast. The nineteenth century was the
heyday
of the Galway hookers, the tar-black wooden workboats with their famous tannin-brown sails, capacious bellies and lines honed by generations of experience of lee Atlantic shores. In 1836 there were just over three hundred sailboats working out of harbours from Roundstone to Ros a’ Mhíl, engaged in fishing, general trading, and the carriage of turf; the seaways of south Connemara were brimming with activity. Even today elderly Aran Islanders look back nostalgically to the beautiful sight of the approach of the turfboats bringing their winter warmth. Many other goods crossed the bay in the hookers too: Aran potatoes in payment for turf, poitin from Connemara, limestone itself brought back as ballast in the empty boats and burned in kilns on the seashore for lime to whiten the houses and sweeten the land of Connemara. Cattle from the mainland used to be taken across to winter on the islands, where they fared better on the dry crags than in the sodden rushy fields of home. On the other hand the Aran farmer used his (Connemara) pony mainly in the winter for carrying fodder to the cattle out on the ‘back of the island’, and for carting seaweed to the fields as fertilizer or to the stacks for kelp-making; in the summer when grass and water were short he could send it back to its native hillsides. Invisible goods were carried in the
turfboats
too: stories, songs, love even, mixing the folklore and the gene-pools of granite-country and limestone-land. As two different metals dipped in acid can power a voltaic cell, so all this life-force was generated by the differences between granite and limestone, in the common medium of scarcity.

But it was a precarious symbiosis, as the view from Errisbeg reminds me. Just across Roundstone Bay I see a cluster of roofless walls on a desolate promontory: Rosroe, An Ros Rua, the reddish peninsula. ‘Rua’ is a common placename element here, and the reddishness is that of poor, bracken-infested, land, of
nitrogen-deficient
vegetation. Rosroe depended entirely on its turf trade, and got its potatoes in Aran rather than plant them at home; so, according to local oral history, it ‘went down’ in 1845, the first year of the Great Famine, while other villages survived longer. In those years many Connemara people fled to Aran, lived in little caves of the inland cliffs and worked for their keep, until the bailiffs drove them out; for it is said that Aran, with its better soil,
its degree of insulation from potato blight, and its variety of
seafood
sources, lost nobody through hunger, while in south
Connemara
in particular the famine grave in the thicket or among the stones of the foreshore is a constant if obscure element of local geography. And as the recurrent years of ‘distress’ settled into the chronic misery of the ‘Congested Districts’ of the turn of the century, the winning of turf proceeded with ever greater
desperation
; by the late nineteenth century the outer parts of the south Connemara archipelago known simply as Na hOileáin, the islands, had not even fuel for themselves, and the stoniness of the
limestone
lands had been brought back like an infection to An Cheathrú Rua, the ‘reddish quarter’, and the other peninsulas pointing out to Aran like ever bonier fingers.

It is a dreadful story that is legible in the hard face of south Connemara, but it has a brave footnote, with which I will close; a brown sail in the bay below brings it to mind. The working life of the hookers dwindled to an end only as recently as the 1960s, though by then most of them were mouldering away in obscure creeks, irrelevant to the age of lorries, which had rendered the old seaways of Connemara obsolete, and of the various fuels that were reducing turf to a historical curiosity. But since then there has been a remarkable revival of interest in these fine boats; several have been prised out of the mud and restored, and a new
generation
of boat-builders is recalling almost lost traditions of
craftsmanship
. All summer long the hookers, one or two centenarians among them, sail from regatta to regatta around Connemara, with visits to Cill Rónáin, and, the high point of their season, to Kinvara for Cruinniú na mBád, the ‘gathering of the boats’. This movement, which might seem to be of merely specialist interest, is one of the psychologically most important developments of recent years in these communities, putting the wisdom of the old side by side with the energy of the young, and undoing that dire equation spelled out by Synge between hateful poverty and all the old graces of Connemara life.

Seen from the Aran Islands, from Galway city or from Kinvara, the Burren imposes itself as an entity; its battered walls, rising steeply from the waters of the Atlantic or Galway Bay, or from the stony plain of Gort, which is almost as low and level as the sea itself, admit no doubt as to where it begins. Ambiguity creeps in only from the south, with the gentle rise of the shale-and-bog country and its irregular cessation, revealing the limestone strata underlying it; hence towns like Lisdoonvarna and even Lahinch can quibble their way into the region. But the word
boireann
means a rock, or a place composed of rocks, and to be true to ancient intention one should confine the name to the limestone region, with the reluctant inclusion of the shale-capped back of Slieve Elva, which runs into it from the south and rises just a little higher than the rest of its hills.

However, once one is within the Burren, this geological
prescription
is not enough to guarantee a sense of its unity. The region is a plateau sundered by valleys, some of which open onto the sea and others close in on themselves, and its heights are all so close to the thousand-foot mark that none offers a panorama of the whole. In my initial explorations I felt that the place was
outmanoeuvring
me, that wherever I penetrated, it withdrew and lurked elsewhere. But then, one still, sunlit, autumn day (a day, it turned out, that had come down through hundreds, perhaps
thousands
, of years) I was privileged to hear the vast, slow heartbeat of this place of rock. I had been visiting the ruins of Corcomroe Abbey, where in the early thirteenth century the Cistercians had coaxed the stones of the Burren into conformity with the spirit of Gothic Europe, and I was walking back to the farmhouse I was
staying in at Lough Rask near Ballyvaughan. As I climbed the pass from Turlough, a herd of cattle was being urged up the rugged track ahead of me; the cries of men and barks of dogs rang to and fro between the bare hillsides. At the saddlepoint their way diverged from mine and wound on up into the heights. I paused to let the afternoon achieve its perfection, and felt the wholeness of the Burren like a fruit mellowing on the branch.

I learned later that this was one of the two dates upon which the Burren year hinges, for it is the uplands that provide ‘
winter-age
’ to graze the cattle on, while in summer they are kept near the houses in the lowlands, where they are more easily watered and their calves tended. It was a pattern I was familiar with from the Aran Islands, though there the seasonal movement between the crags and the little patches of improved land around the houses is of smaller compass. Perhaps it was the Celts, whose unit of wealth was the heifer and whose stonework is everywhere in the Burren, who initiated this alternation between upland and lowland
pastures
, or rather the particular form of the custom that marks this region. For what I saw that day was the exact opposite of the ancient practice once general in western Ireland.

The two seasons of the Celtic year were articulated by the movement of cattle and their attendants between winter quarters in permanent lowland settlements and the mountain pastures
habitable
only in summer. In Connemara, for example, the O’Flaherty chieftains and their retinue took up residence in temporary dwellings every May, and this custom of ‘booleying’ (from
buaile
, a milking-pasture) persisted among the peasantry until late in the last century, it being the womenfolk who spent the milking and buttermaking season in little huts of stones and sods on the
hillsides
while the men attended to the tillage, fishing and
kelp-burning
below. But the Burren is different. A spell of hot weather that would make the Connemara hills delightful will reduce the Burren’s uplands of thirsty limestone to waterless deserts;
conversely
in winter when Connemara’s hillsides are streaming
quagmires
, the Burren’s are relatively dry underfoot, and the Burren farmer can take advantage of the residual Gulf Stream mildness that plays around his land, and leave his cattle out of doors.

Of course the visitor who drives into the region past its
northern
hillsides, which from a distance look like the flanks of giant salmon closely armoured with silvery-grey scales, or from the south along roads that cross square miles of the bare rock-sheets so aptly called ‘pavement’, must wonder how any human or animal could survive on what such a terrain has to offer, winter or summer. But as it happens the harder, purer limestones that take on such a hostile polish occur mainly on the lower and
intermediate
levels, and so make a disproportionate contribution to one’s first impressions, while the upper strata are of a dolomitic
limestone
, richer in magnesia, and break down into a light soil
supporting
a nutritious vegetation. Also, even the barest-looking areas have pockets of lush grazing here and there around the springs and seepages at the feet of the scarps that run across the hillsides.

This pass that, crossed with a time-hallowed day, gave me a hint of the specificity of the Burren, is called Mám Chatha, the pass of battle, for history has penetrated it, as I shall tell. A walk that winds through it will supply themes enough for this brief
evocation
of a region that exceeds it in all dimensions. I begin at Turlough, the village south-east of it, and end at Lough Rask, to the north-west.

A
turlach
is a hollow in which a lake comes and goes, not fed by streams but filling and emptying from below through openings in its bed as the general level of groundwater held in the fissured rock fluctuates in sympathy with the rainfall. Since the
phenomenon
is almost unknown outside the limestone region of western Ireland, the Irish term has been adopted generally, anglicized as ‘turlough’ on the natural but mistaken assumption that the second syllable has something to do with
loch
, a lake. The village is named from a fine example of a turlough, and there is another just
north-west
of it; between them they exhibit most of the strange features of this unusual landform.

Since different plants can tolerate different degrees and
frequencies
of immersion, the flora of a turlough is arranged in zones that follow the contours of the hollow. Where a turlough is
surrounded
by hazel scrub the diminutive forest will stop short around its rim as neatly as if trimmed by a landscape gardener, and its inner face will be embellished with flowers of hawthorn, rowan and guelder rose. Slightly lower comes a contour line of a
blackish moss with the musical name of
Cinclidotus
fontaniloides
, which is diagnostic of periodic flooding. The grassy bowl within is usually well grazed and rich in flowering herbs; the common sorts of violet are replaced at the lower levels by the pallid
Viola
persici
folia
,
a rarity in Ireland, where it is almost restricted to this
specialized
station in life. In the centre, pondweeds grow in the muddy dregs around the natural drainholes.

Sometimes in summer one finds that the empty bowl of a
turlough
is sheeted in what looks like whitish blotting-paper laid over the vegetation; I remember being baffled by the phenomenon when I came across it for the first time in the Aran Islands. It is made up of the matted and bleached remains of microscopic algae, which have multiplied countlessly in sun-warmed water and then been left high and dry when the turlough emptied. Algal paper, as it is called, can appear with mysterious suddenness; in Germany, where it has been recorded only about a dozen times, it is called meteor paper, as people imagined it had fallen from the sky.

A bare limestone landscape without surface streams, in which the drainage is subterranean, is termed a karst, from the name of such a region in Yugoslavia. The Burren is a karst that has been worked over by glaciation; the bowls of these turloughs are
depressions
that have been gouged out by the glaciers, or are formed in deposits of glacial drift. Other karstic and glacio-karstic features of the Burren can be seen on the hillsides around Mám Chatha, such as, to the east of the pass, a row of steep conical pits which were once swallow-holes of some long-vanished stream, and a ravine formed by the collapse of a cavern excavated by water flowing underground. These impressive works of water date from a time when the shale strata that still overlie the limestone farther south were much more extensive than they are today, for erosion is slowly stripping them away. A stream running off the impervious shale will be acid with bog-water, and on reaching the limestone will soon (
i.e.
over many hundreds of years) dissolve itself out a swallow-hole by eating away at the fissures and enlarging them; the rest of its journey to the sea will be underground, with perhaps some reappearances in turloughs and springs. As the area covered by shale contracts, the stream will abandon its first swallow-hole and punch through another one closer to the
retreating
boundary of the shale; one can see the process at work today around the margins of Slieve Elva (and it is because of their
creative
implication with the limestone topography that one must include such shale areas in the region to be thought of as the Burren). This is the location of the famous potholes and caves of the Burren, which the wet-suited experts can follow for, in one case, over eight miles. Their latest discovery has been of a section of dry cave near Doolin, which can only be entered through an opening on the sea-bed and a quarter of a mile of submarine passage; the river that formed this system must have been flowing when sea-level was much lower than it is now, perhaps at the end of the last Ice Age. For the family party on a Sunday outing there is Aillwee Cave south of Ballyvaughan, farther west along the ridge from Mám Chatha; here one can stroll through over quarter of a mile of tortuous caverns, sprigged with tastefully illuminated
stalactites
.

Just east of the summit of the pass are the scars of old
opencast
mining of fluorspar, the glossy purple crystals of which can still be turned up in the spoil. Fluorspar is formed out of calcite (the pure white and crystalline form of calcium carbonate) by the action of hot fluorine gas, and the fact that at one time there were such fumes rising through the fissures here is part of the evidence for the existence of granite deep down under the limestone. In fact it seems that the Burren is underlain by an extension of the granite that is exposed on the north side of Galway Bay. Perhaps it was because of this solid basement that the limestone strata were so little disrupted by the Hercynian uplift, some 270 million years ago, that left them as a plateau with just a slight southwards
inclination
. Only at the two ends of the upland area is there substantial folding or faulting; the giant steps with which the last hillside of Árainn descends into the sea are slightly warped and cleft by little rift valleys, while the terraced sides of Mullach Mór, a hill in the south-east of the Burren, are so curved as to make it look like a layer-cake that has sunk in the cooking.

But it is on the nature of what is immediately underfoot, the broken stone of such hillsides as these around Mám Chatha, that the Burren’s paradoxical fame for barrenness and floral luxuriance is grounded. The limestone offers plants some very specialized
habitats, of which two form a strikingly complementary pair. Down in the grykes, as the enlarged fissures are called, all is shadowy, still and dank; ferns such as the hart’s-tongue and
maidenhair
thrive in this atmosphere from a Victorian bottle-garden. But the horizontal surfaces (the clints) between the grykes are dry and brilliantly sunlit, exposed to strong winds and searchingly grazed by cattle, goats and rabbits. Wherever a thimbleful of humus has accumulated some plant will root, of a sort adapted to these spartan conditions rather than to, say, the hurly-burly of a buttercup-meadow. Thus, close to the maidenhair fern, which is a plant of the mild, Atlantic side of southern Europe, one finds here species associated with severe sub-arctic or alpine climates, such as those two stars of the late May Burren show, the vivid blue spring gentian and the delicate, ivory-silk-petalled mountain avens. A profusion of the usual lime-loving plants, notably thyme, various saxifrages, eyebrights and orchids, occur on all but the barest
surfaces
; even the most uncomfortable-looking rubble puts forth woodsage and the lovely burnet rose. Right next to these one finds plants such as heathers that prefer more acidic conditions
colonizing
deeper, better-drained pockets of soil from which the high rainfall has leached out the lime. Sheltered slopes of neglected land carry dense hazel scrub, and it is worth fighting one’s way through its outworks of bramble to see the miniature forest glades, dim, green, bewitched by moss and lichen, where wood-anemones flower virginally in the spring and the rarer broad-leaved
helleborine
more sophisticatedly in high summer. It is easy – but
sometimes
rewarding – to get bewildered and go wrong by 360 degrees, in such viewless thickets. When I was exploring around the
turloughs
described above, in the course of making my map of the Burren, I got lost in the hazel, and decided to work my way up slope to climb out of it. After an hour or so of disentangling
myself
from endlessly intricate snares, I emerged high on the hillside south of Mám Chatha at a point that would no doubt very seldom see a human being. There, something stirred in a bush ahead; I froze, and after a few minutes a badger came out to root and snuffle about in the rough grass. It took no notice of me as I stepped lightly after it, stopping when it did and waiting for it to move on, as if I were walking a wheezy lapdog in a park. When I
went round ahead, it came within a yard of my toecaps before backing off with a throaty hiss of surprise, but then carried on
foraging
as before. Eventually I had to tear myself away from the occasion – and just a hundred yards farther up the hill found a grove of tall flowers that I did not immediately recognize; they were in bud, and I unrolled one enough to glimpse yellow within:
Meconopsis,
the Welsh poppy, never recorded in the so zealously botanized Burren before, and miles from any possibility of being a garden escapee. That was one of my best crossings of those hills; I flew down to Lough Rask as if winged with delight, and later I commemorated both encounters on my map, with a just detectably four-footed emblem of the animal, and the Latin name of the plant, secreted among my penwork clints and grykes.