Setting Foot on the Shores of Connemara (7 page)

On another crossing of the same hills, I was groping my way down in torrential rain to Mám Chatha from the south when I came across an ancient stone-walled enclosure about a hundred yards across, which was not marked on the Ordnance Survey maps nor mentioned in the almost exhaustive one-man survey of the Burren ‘forts’ conducted by the Clare archaeologist T.J. Westropp in the 1900s. It consisted of a very dilapidated and irregular
semicircular
arc of wall springing from the face of a steep scarp
crossing
the slope just above the saddlepoint of the pass. Whether its purpose had been military, watching over the pass, or peaceable, for the coralling of cattle at a half-way stage of their seasonal migrations, I could not tell. It is only one (but a very large and unusual one) among hundreds of walled enclosures, some of them magnificently situated and visible from afar, others so degraded and enmeshed with more recent fences that it takes a trained eye to distinguish them from the fields around them.

The majority of the three or four hundred ringforts in the Burren are roughly circular and often about twenty yards across, with simply built drystone walls a few feet thick, and they served as cattle yards around small huts, the individual farms of Iron Age and Early Christian times. But a number of them are more
imposing
, with walls up to five or six yards thick, rising in two or three terrace-like steps inside; a few of them still retain their lintelled doorways. Some are surrounded by one or two outer ramparts, while Baile Cinn Mhargaidh near Kilfenora has an abattis of set,
slanting stones around it like the two cliff-forts of Aran. Despite such forbidding externals these great cashels may not have been built with warfare in mind; their outworks may have reflected communal prestige; their interior terraces, it has been suggested, are better adapted to viewing ceremonials within than repelling the foe without. Perhaps such monuments served various purposes, sacred and profane – but since the Celts who built them could not confide their intentions to writing, less is known about the cashels of the Burren than about the pyramids of Egypt. Cathair Mhaol, the ‘low-topped (
i.e.
dilapidated) fort’, at the foot of the slope just west of Mám Chatha, is typical of these almost anonymous ruins. Like so many others it is deeply obscured by thickets; to fight one’s way through them, groping to and fro until one can stretch out a hand to the mighty masonry, is to experience the past in all its difficulty of access and indubitable reality: here was the pride of some well set-up community, and it lies overthrown among thorns.

But it is not just individual monuments, the scores of cashels and hundreds of lesser ringforts, that lie waiting attention in the Burren; there are webs of ancient field-walls, large tracts of the agrarian landscape from which such monuments drew their
sustenance
, a stone document of the life of that Late Iron Age and Early Christian period, still legible despite all the layers of
overwriting
. And interwoven with that message there are earlier ones, from the Bronze Age and the Neolithic, smudged and torn but not indecipherable. Not one of the Burren’s sixty or so wedge tombs has been investigated, but the famous ‘dolmen’ at Poulnabrone, a portal tomb with a huge and rakishly poised capstone, which has had the misfortune to be adopted as a touristic mascot of the region and featured in a thousand vapid come-ons, has been
excavated
and turns out be five hundred or a thousand years older than had been thought, dating from the Middle rather than the Late Neolithic. Modern’ archaeological techniques could well
overturn
all current assumptions about the course of settlement in the Burren, but the prospect of anything more than a cursory survey of the monuments of this, one of the world’s richest and most complex prehistoric landscapes, are fading for lack of funds.

However, since the Burren has scarcely been picked over by
the professionals the amateur has every chance of making
worthwhile
discoveries, or at least of bringing to the notice of academia what has long been known to the locals. Coming down from Mám Chatha once, I stopped to poke around two grassy mounds, each by a spring. Unable to make anything of their outward appearance I kicked a bit of turf off one and pulled out a small stone; it
crumbled
in my hand, and had evidently been in a fire. A farmer I met farther down the slope told me that these mounds were
fulachta
fia,
the cooking-places traditionally attributed to Fionn Mac Cumhaill’s warrior band. On looking up the subject later on I learned that such mounds of burned stone are common field-
monuments
in many parts of Ireland, that they are usually
horseshoe-or
kidney-shaped (as these are), with traces of a wooden trough in the indentation of the perimeter; the water in the trough was brought to the boil for the cooking of meat by dropping heated stones into it, and periodically the debris of shattered stone would have to be dredged out and flung aside, so building up the
characteristic
heap around the site. When I mentioned these particular cooking-sites to an archaeologist I was told that, no, the Burren was not
fulacht
country; although a few had been discovered recently near Kilnaboy where the Burren merges into the lakelands south of it, in general they were features of wet lowlands east of the Shannon, and not to be expected on limestone hills. However, having learned to recognize them I noted several more in the north of the Burren, and a geologist who was working along the
spring-lines
for his own purposes began to record them almost
throughout
, wherever water surfaces. The only Burren
fulacht
to have been studied properly is close to a turlough south of Carran; it was found to date from the later Bronze Age, about three thousand years ago.

All this interwoven Burren lifeworld of ruined cultures and exuberant nature is uniquely beautiful and interesting, but not very profitable for the landowner, who naturally is tempted by the availability of EEC grants to have his hillsides sprayed with
fertilizers
by helicopter, the result being a more mundane but
productive
farmland, at least in the short run. The financial, legal and moral persuasions necessary to preserve the Burren from such ‘improvement’ have not yet been discovered. In too many places, I
observe, the land-clearing bulldozer is busy, steered by ignorance and fuelled by greed.

Finally I come down to Lough Rask itself, a lake that is
responsive
to the tides although it is a quarter of a mile inland, and which occasionally shows itself to be a turlough by disappearing into its own muds. Herons nest in the tall trees around it, and bee orchids flower on its banks. It is a beautiful place, but its legend is horrific. In 1317, when two chieftains of the O’Briens were vying for supremacy in what is now County Clare, one of them, Donough, passed the lake with his army on their way to the fateful battle of Corcomroe. They saw a loathsome hag washing a heap of severed limbs and heads in the lake (the description of her in the mediaeval account of this campaign,
The
Triumphs
of
Turlough,
is one of the foulest passages of literature I have come across); she told Donough that her name was Brónach Boirne, the sorrowful one of Burren, that the limbs were those of his army if he pressed on to this battle, and that his own head was in the middle of the heap. They tried to seize her, but she flew up and hovered above, spewing curses on them. But Donough told his men that she was the demon-lover of his rival Dermot and was seeking to discourage them; so they marched on (through Mám Chatha, the placename suggests), accompanied by wolves and ravens, and by nightfall most of them were dead and laid out in the abbey of Corcomroe. The battle was not without consequence, for having consolidated his power Dermot went on to defeat de Clare, the Norman lord of Bunratty Castle, in the following year, and it was another two hundred years before the region ceased to be under Gaelic rule.

Passes are impressed upon the physical landscape by great forces of nature – in this case the glaciers of the Ice Ages. Subsequently, history follows these ways of least resistance and scores them into the cultural landscape of lore and placename. In one’s own mental map of a region it is the weight of significance they are made to bear that incises the passes so deeply. Mám Chatha stands in my mind for two complementary rites of passage: the indefinitely repeated seasonal transit of cattle between upland and lowland, and the crossing of a threshold between prophecy and the reality of death upon a particular day in history. Tracking the past and present of this landscape through Mam Chatha, I
meet ‘the sorrowful one of Burren’, and it is under her shadow that I think of its future. For Brónach Boirne is not just a
banshee
, the time-serving otherworldly retainer of a local dynasty; she is the reapparition of the Celtic divinity of the territory, a
nightmare
to the usurper, a vision of beauty and fruitfulness to the one who cherishes it. Should she make herself visible to our
exploitative
generation it might well be as the evil prophetess of doom. Indeed our heads could be in the middle of the heap – for if we cannot save such a place as the Burren from spoliation, there is nowhere safe on the surface of the earth.

Connemara – the name drifts across the mind like cloud shadows on a mountainside, or expands and fades like circles on a lake after a trout has risen. Fittingly, there is no official boundary to the land under the spell of this name. It is also true that real
landscapes
, unlike painted ones, contain their frames, so that each is potentially world-embracing. But such a name as this cannot be left to dissipate its powers of evocation like a scent unstoppered; the topographer, rather, should delight in its sparing, subtle and elusive application.

On the one hand, a modern and commercializing tendency is to call everything west of Galway, Connemara. But the territory so defined is best called, in modern Irish, Iarchonnacht, for it is that described, with the bitter exactitude of regret, by Roderic O’Flaherty’s
West
or
H-Iar
Connaught,
written in 1684, not long after his clan had been dispossessed by the Cromwellians. His book traces its bounds from Lough Corrib to Slyne Head to Killary Harbour (and embraces the Aran Islands ‘as in a sea-
parenthesis
’, to borrow his pleasing phrase). On this classic definition, Iarchonnacht includes Connemara, but exceeds it eastwards.

On the other hand, the territory of the O’Flahertys’ early mediaeval predecessors the Conmaicne Mara (which is the
historical
kernel of Connemara, both place and name) is too restrictive, for it lay west of the Mám Tuirc watershed and the Inbhear Mór, the ‘big rivermouth’ near Ros Muc, and so did not contain the full essence of Connemara, a prime ingredient of which is given by the Irish-speaking granite-and-waterlands further east and south. This last area, though, is culturally continuous with Cois Fharraige further east again, and aspires to unity of social action with it under the name of Conamara Theas or South Connemara.
Ó 
Bhearna
go
Carna,
from Bearna to Carna, is the phrase favoured by Gaeilgeoirí to delimit this linguistic homeland – but most Bearna people would direct you back westwards if you enquired for Connemara there, being close enough to Galway city to share its sense of Connemara as wilderness and westernness itself.

The problem, then, is exemplary, and insoluble. Place flows into place, or holds rigidly distinct from it, according to one’s mode of thought. My mode, to declare it at the outset, is that of the discriminating earth-worshipper. For me, Connemara is the land that looks upon the Twelve Bens, that close-knit,
mandala-like
mountain range, as its stubborn and reclusive heart.

Connemara has had a degree of independent existence for about 460 million years, according to recent theories. Before that time the landmasses and ocean basins, carried on the slowly drifting plates that constitute the earth’s surface, lay in configurations quite different from today’s. The Atlantic did not yet exist, and an ocean the geologists call Japetus separated two continents, one comprising what was to become North America and the
north-west
fringe of Europe, and the other, the rest of Europe. The future Ireland was as yet in two pieces, half of it on the north side of the Japetus ocean basin, and the other half on the south. What one might call proto-Connemara lay on the coast of the northern half, 200 miles or more west of what is now Donegal. Its rocks had largely been laid down as sediments of various sorts 200 to 100 million years earlier in the Dalradian (Late Cambrian) period, during the birth of Japetus; subsequently a three-mile-thick layer of the basic rock, gabbro, coming up molten from deep in the earth’s mantle, had been forced between its strata. As the two continents now moved towards each other, squeezing Japetus out of geography, the rim of the northern one was crumpled into long ridges, the eroded remains of which are today’s ‘Caledonide’ mountains, that is, those of Norway, Scotland, the north of Ireland, Newfoundland and Appalachia. In this upheaval
proto-Connemara’s
rocks were repeatedly folded, faulted and thrust to and fro, until it became completely detached and was driven
eastwards
by the oblique collision of the two landmasses. As the two halves of Ireland were finally rammed together, proto-Connemara was slid southwards over volcanic rocks of the southern shore of Japetus. and welded into its present position.

By then Connemara’s rocks had been kneaded and baked to various degrees. A thick sandstone layer, pinched inside a complex fold running east-west across the region, was recrystallised into a quartzite of great hardness; clayey materials that ended up on the outside of the fold were metamorphosed into less resistant schists, while strata of ancient limestone were transformed into marble. Erosive aeons later, the quartzite stands high, giving us the silvery, glittering peaks of the Twelve Bens and the Mám Tuirc
mountains
; the softer schists have been worn down to form the lowlands south of the mountains, the narrower transverse valleys north of them, and the broad corridor of the Inagh valley separating the two massifs. Connemara’s famous green marble crops out here and there along the southern flank of the mountain ranges. The
dark-toned
hills of Cashel and Errisbeg to the south, Dúchruach and Currywongaun to the north, are forged out of the contorted layer of gabbro. In the final stages of the collision, 400 million years ago, several great domes of molten granite were intruded from below; when exposed by erosion of the rocks above them, they proved vulnerable to weathering, and now form the knobbly
sea-invaded
plain of south Connemara, and low-lying islands such as Omey on the west coast. In one small area known to geologists as the Delaney Dome, north-west of Errisbeg, all the original
substance
of Connemara has been worn away so that the underlying floor appears as through a hole in a carpet, and one can stand on rock that formed the land south of Japetus.

A few great fault-lines roughly delineate the Connemara of this essay. An east-west trending fault lies off-shore to the south,
blanketed
by the carboniferous limestone from which the Aran Islands and the Burren have been carved. To the north the mountains of Connemara are separated from those of Mayo by the dramatic fiord of Killary Harbour, excavated by glaciers in the recent Ice Ages out of a zone of sedimentary rocks weakened by another fault. The Maam Valley, to the north-east, has been similarly enlarged by fault-guided erosion. Finally a less obvious feature, the Shannawona fault, running from near Scríb southwards across the granite regions, may explain the striking difference between Cois Fharraige to the east, with its uplands descending in orderly slopes to a straight sea-coast, and the fantastic filigree of peninsulas and inlets west of Ros a’ Mhíl: the latter region has been downthrown
by over a mile relative to the former, and the more fractured upper levels of the granite brought within the erosive influence of the sea, in which they now lie half-drowned.

During the last Ice Age the snow, piling up on the shadowed lee-side of the mountain peaks, congealed into glaciers; inching downhill, plucking stone out of the slopes behind them and so excavating corries, these glaciers contributed themselves and their load of rock to a sea of ice grinding outwards over the lowlands and stripping them of their covering soils. When the ice finally melted back, from 15,000 to 10,000 years ago, a raw landscape was revealed of polished rock strewn with countless smooth-worn stones of all sizes. The south is particularly burdened with huge boulders, some of which are individually named landmarks today, one of the largest being forty feet high. In certain areas just south of the mountains, and further west, the glacial debris was moulded by the ice flow into the streamlined mounds called drumlins; these now stand out on the brown levels of the bogs as isolated,
grass-green
hills, or on the western shores as islets and promontories with cliffs of boulder-studded clay.

In due course a tundra growth of least willow, soon followed by dwarf birch and crowberry heath, crept forth across this
wasteland
, to be followed as times mellowed by woods of birch and hazel, and then great forests of oak and pine. It seems to have been human agencies – fire and the stone axe – that put an end to these woodlands, around 2500-2200
BC
, perhaps in conjunction with a deterioration in the climate. Heathers, sedges, bog asphodel and sphagnum moss flourished, forming a blanket bog that spread and deepened, creeping down from the exposed hillsides, seeping out from waterlogged hollows, drowning the forest, pickling its roots and fallen trunks in bogwater. Now, when the accumulated layers of peat are cut away for fuel, ghostly grey armies of tree stumps come to light.

For how many tides have Connemara folk gathered shellfish on the strand? It may be that some of the scattered heaps of
whelk-,limpet
-and oystershells, laid bare wherever dunes are eroding, date like similar shell-middens in the Dingle peninsula from the Middle Stone Age, 6500 years or more ago. These first stranders would also have gathered nuts and berries in the forest margins, and stalked the network of rivers and lakes after wildfowl and fish.
(Their stone implements have been found at Oughterard recently, but not so far in Connemara proper.) It may have been another 500 years before settled farming began. In one place that ‘Neolithic Revolution’ has been dated with astonishing precision, thanks to the fact that Connemara’s mildly acidic lake sediments and peat bogs preserve any pollen incorporated in them and so keep a diary of changes in the flora of the vicinity. A core was taken out of the bed of a little lake in Sheeauns near Cleggan in 1987, and the organic residues at various levels in it dated by the radiocarbon method. By analysis of its pollen content, the following sequence of events was reconstructed. Unbroken forest of oak and hazel
surrounded
the lake until about 4100
BC
, when small clearings were made in which wheat was sown and weeds such as plantains sprang up. A hundred years later this forest lost its few elms; in fact the elm was in decline all over Europe at that time, perhaps because of a fungal epidemic like today’s Dutch Elm Disease, spread by growing human traffic. At a level in the core
corresponding
to shortly after this elm-decline of 4000
BC
, tree-pollens are largely replaced by those of grasses and meadow flowers; the forest had been almost totally removed and tillage superceded by cattle-ranching. Finally, in about 3800
BC
, the lake was deserted, and forest returned. Whether agriculture continued elsewhere nearby, having merely shifted its location, is unknown, pending further research, but it seems that the shores of Lough Sheeauns lay in wilderness until the end of the Bronze Age, almost two thousand years later.

These pioneer farmers thought much about death. Successive (or perhaps contemporaneous) groups of them disagreed on the matter and set their differences down (illegibly, alas, to us) in the various styles of communal tombs, built of weighty rock-slabs, that are their lasting memorials. About thirty of these megalithic tombs are known from Connemara; twenty-one of these have been
identified
only in the last few years, along with a spate of other
discoveries
that have totally undone the received idea that the region is archaeologically a virtual desert. These lapidary but opaque
statements
in their ruin still cause dissension. I have seen seminars of archaeologists arguing fiercely among such heaps of tumbled stones, like would-be heirs over a garbled will. An established school of thought has evolved a fourfold classification of these
monuments into passage tombs, court tombs, portal tombs and wedge tombs. The first type, best known from the stupendous round tumuli of the Boyne Valley, does not occur in Connemara. In the others, the roofed chamber or chambers in which the burials and grave-goods were placed constitute a roughly
rectangular
gallery, covered by an elongated cairn which is usually now much reduced. Court tombs have an open, crescentic forecourt defined by upright stones at one end of this cairn, presumably for ritual purposes. In the closely-related portal tombs, the chamber is roofed by an often gigantic capstone, poised on two tall jamb-like pillar stones in front and a smaller stone behind. Wedge tombs are so called because their lintel-roofed galleries are lower and
narrower
at the rear than at the front, which usually faces west. Each of the four types has its own distribution pattern, its cultural affinities and presumed origins in the wider megalithic scene of western Europe, and its allotted hour in a hypothetical account of the evolution of the Irish Neolithic. A residue of the
incomprehensibly
dilapidated or unaccountably odd is relegated to a non-
category
of ‘unclassified megalithic tombs’. But here in Connemara, the rebellious younger archaeologists point out, court, portal and wedge tombs crop up apparently ecumenically, while over a third of the total, including some impressive and moderately well-
preserved
examples, are numbered among the despised and neglected unclassifiables. So these discoveries are further backing for those crying ‘Down with the fourfold theory! Let us have a new Neolithic, of which the cornerstones will be those rejected by our elders.’ It is likely that this emergent theory will assign a much earlier date to the wedge tombs than their present niche at the very end of the Neolithic, and will emphasize regional and independent developments in tomb-style.

Nearly all these tombs lie close to the long sea-inlets of Omey and Ballynakill parishes; this north-western area, with its
comparatively
widespread marble outcrops and glacial deposits, was then as it is now the most fertile and prosperous quarter of Connemara. And the distribution of monuments presumed to date from the Bronze Age – mainly standing-stones, single, in pairs or in
alignments
of up to six – is very similar. The impressive alignment on the crest of a drumlin near Renvyle has long been known, and
sufficient
finds have been made recently to establish north-west
Connemara as comparable with south-west Munster and
mid-Ulster
, the principal foci of the distribution of such monuments. Elsewhere in Connemara the most striking example is an
alignment
of six small boulders on the ridge of a moraine in Gleann Eidhneach, which I came across in 1986. Several of these new sites have been revealed by turf-cuttings; and to see the pair of
milk-white
quartz boulders newly exposed in the black trench of a turf bank on a hilltop in Crocknaraw, north of Clifden, and to realize that at least half-a-dozen other standing-stones and several other megaliths are or were visible from that point, is to be given a glimpse of a cultural landscape the meaning of which has been lost beneath the bogs.