Setting Foot on the Shores of Connemara (8 page)

In many parts of Ireland the most typical monuments of the pagan Iron Age and Early Christian periods, the so-called ‘
ringforts
’, are very numerous; but in Connemara they are strangely rare. The three dry-stone cashels and two earth-banked raths of north Connemara, the two earthen promontory forts on peninsulas of the west coast and the fragmentary stone ones in Inishbofin, probably represent Iron-Age militarism. The twenty or more
crannógs
or lake-dwellings that have been identified with some
certainty
in the western and southern lowlands of Connemara may be the local equivalent of small ringforts, the circular stockyards around the isolated huts of Iron Age or Early Christian farmers. Perhaps the growth of bog, overwhelming the hillside pastures, forced the evolution of a lake-culture, or of unenclosed shoreline settlements now marked only by great shell-middens. Certainly Connemara was far from deserted at this period, which
pollen-records
from various sites show to have been a time of increase in cereal crops and their weeds.

However, it seems that the pattern of a populated coastal fringe and an empty interior, which largely obtains today, was established by the early Middle Ages. Connemara’s radiating peninsulas and its islets broadcast in the ocean must have answered to the
misanthropy
of the sixth century, when every hermit wanted a desert to himself. Some of the many religious sites on the rim of Connemara are named from figures who seem at home in pure legend, like the fisherman’s saint, Macdara, also known as Síothnach, a name that perhaps associates him with squalls of wind, as do several folktales told of his powers. Other foundations
are attributed to personages who appear convincingly in history, such as St Colman, who retired to Inishbofin after losing the
argument
between the Irish and the Roman Church over the true date of Easter at the Synod of Whitby in
AD
665 (thus initiating the sequence of Celtic causes in retreat to Connemara, which
continues
to the present day, and of which he should be the patron saint).

The roofless late mediaeval chapel and ancient graveyard, still in use, that mark the location of St Colman’s monastery, are
idyllically
sited in a valley-mouth on the sheltered side of Inishbofin, between a reed-fringed lake and a sandy beach. St Macdara’s islet, on the other hand, is of elemental simplicity, a low dome of bare granite on which a tiny stone-roofed oratory, the structure of which imitates that of primitive cruck-built wooden chapels, sits as sedately as a winkle on a rock. For the celebrations of the saint’s day, 16 July, the fishing-boats of the nearest harbours of south Connemara bring hundreds of people to his island, but for the rest of the year its wind-polished silence and mica-glinting emptiness are perfect luxury to the ascetic soul. But the sea-sanctuary best suited to more turbulent spirits is that of High Island, two miles out into the Atlantic from the west coast of Connemara. It is only accessible on calm days when a boat can edge into a narrow cove at a point where its tall cliffs are climbable, and an Early Christian cross-slab rises from the wind-strimmed sward above. The remains of a little chapel and the monks’ corbelled stone huts cluster within a slight cashel wall at the farther, western end of the island, as if to get full penitential advantage of storm-driven spray. The foundation is attributed to St Feichín, also associated with Cong and Omey Island, who is said to have died in
AD
664. In recent years the island has belonged to Richard Murphy, who wrote some of his best poems out of his occasional days of retreat there.

Not long after the era of the saints, the Conmaicne Mara appear out of the shadows of prehistory as the secular rulers of the region. The Conmaicne were a people who claimed descent from Conmac, a son of the legendary Fergus Macraoi and Queen Maeve; the branch of them who lived west of the Corrib were known as the Conmaicne Mara, the Conmaicne of the sea, to
distinguish
them from their cousins further east. The Ó Cadhlas were their leaders; the Annals of Inishfallen mention a Murtagh Ó
Cadhla, chief of the Conmaicne Mara, among those who fell
fighting
the Norsemen at Clontarf in 1014. Later they were reduced to historical footnotes by the coming of the O’Flahertys, but their name (anglicized as Keeley) still occurs in Connemara.

The O’Flahertys, a powerful clan who had given several kings to the province of Connacht in the seventh century, held the rich limestone plains east of Lough Corrib until the thirteenth century, when the de Burgos, the first of the Normans to move so far west, gradually forced them to retire to Connemara. With the
O’Flahertys
came dependent clans whose names occur in local history: the O’Hallorans, the O’Lees, the Duanes. The Joyces, a
Welsh-Norman
family, settled in what became known as the Joyce Country, around the Maam Valley, under the O’Flahertys’
protection
. By the sixteenth century the O’Flahertys were building
tower-houses
on the Norman model, from which, if the oral traditions be true, they tyrannized over humbler folk. The main stronghold of the eastern branch of the O’Flahertys was at Aughnanure near Oughterard. The western branch had castles spread out around the coastline, at Ard (near Carna), Bunowen, Doon (near Streamstown) and Renvyle, and inland at Ballynahinch on a former crannóg. Small communities of Carmelites and Dominicans were established by the O’Flahertys near this last-mentioned centre of power, from which, under the Elizabethan dispensation, the old Conmaicne Mara was renamed as the barony of Ballynahinch. Mere vestiges of the Ard, Bunowen and Doon castles survive, while the lake-tower at Ballynahinch has been much altered by subsequent owners to serve variously as a prison, a brew-house and a picnic-bower. Thus the best-preserved of the Connemara tower-houses is now Renvyle, which has been neatly cross-sectioned by collapse, revealing its simple structure of three square, vaulted rooms one above the other, linked by spiral stairs in a corner.

The O’Flaherty chiefs ruled Connemara according to the ancient Brehon Law until Elizabeth’s wily soldier-statesmen, who rarely ventured into the region, divided and seduced them. In 1585 they accepted the agreement known as the Composition of Connacht, abrogating their Gaelic rights and enregistering
themselves
in the feudal hierarchy. Thenceforth they were hereditary landlords rather than the elective custodians of clan territory, and the chief the Crown wished to see as head of all could call himself
Sir Murrough O’Flaherty. Nevertheless to the notables of the growing merchant-city of Galway the O’Flahertys were still the atavistic lords of a hinterland rank with rebellion, smuggling and piracy. It took the fierce political and religious cross-currents induced in Ireland by England’s Civil War to bring Galway’s
citizens
and the O’Flahertys together even momentarily; that was in 1642 when Galway opted for the Catholic Confederation, then campaigning in the name of the King, and called in the O’Flahertys’ hordes of ‘wild Irish’ to help besiege the nearby English fort, which was manned by supporters of Parliament. But King Charles lost the war and his head, and Cromwell came to purge Ireland of its rebelliousness. By July of 1651 one of his
generals
was encamped before the city of Galway and his ships were in the bay. Iarchonnacht, and especially Inishbofin, then became crucial to the Confederation’s hopes of reinforcement from the continent. A small force of mercenaries sent by the Duke of
Lorraine
landed in Inishbofin in October with arms for Galway, but the city had to surrender, together with the Aran Islands, by April 1652. Towards the end of that year the Aran Islands were
recaptured
by a force of six or seven hundred men from Iarchonnacht and Inishbofin, but the Cromwellians moved several men-of-war and 1900 foot-soldiers, first against Aran and then against
Inishbofin
, which ended its forlorn resistance in February 1653.

A few years later the Commonwealth Council ordered the building of a fort in Inishbofin, and started to use the island as a prison-camp for Catholic priests, as an alternative to transporting them to the West Indies. The priests languished there (
half-starved
, on an allowance of twopence a day, according to a contemporary source) until well after the restoration of Charles II in 1660. After about 1680 the fort was abandoned. It was re-
garrisoned
by the Jacobites in the War of the Two Kings ten years later, but since then its history has been merely one of stealthy dilapidation. The cut limestone surrounds of its arches and windows have all been burnt for lime, but its curtain walls and the diamond-shaped bastions at each of its four corners still stand, in picturesque raggedness. Visitors sailing into Inishbofin pass under its dark gaze at the narrow harbour mouth, where it sprawls upon a low cliff with a menacing, crablike presence.

In the years following the victory of Cromwell’s army the old
clan system was finally broken up, and it is said that Connemara was almost depopulated by famine, plague and massacre. One of the O’Flaherty chiefs who had joined the Galway citizens in 1642, Colonel Edmond, of Renvyle, was wanted for murders committed in the course of a plundering expedition he and his men had undertaken as a relief from the tedium of besieging the English fort. A band of troopers was dispatched to Renvyle to find him and was eventually led by the clamouring of ravens to a small cave in a dark wood, whence they dragged the colonel and his wife:

Colonel Edmond was hanged and the other O’Flahertys
expropriated
as ‘forfeiting traitors’ for their part in the rebellion. Soon Connemara was being carved up for distribution among
Protestants
to whom the Cromwellians had obligations and Catholics who had been dispossessed of estates elsewhere and transplanted westwards.

The main Protestant beneficiaries of England’s reformation of Connemara were a Sir Thomas Merridith, one of Cromwell’s
commissioners
, who acquired townlands here and there, including Ballynahinch, and soon cashed them in, and Trinity College, Dublin, who remained as landlords of much of the Inagh and Maam Valley areas until the end of the last century. Catholic transplanters included the Earl of Westmeath, who was given the Renvyle area but later regained his former lands and sold Renvyle to a branch of the Blakes of Galway, and the Geoghegans of Westmeath, who stayed on as landlords of Ballindoon parish until ruined by the Famine. Several of the eminent Catholic merchant families known as ‘The Tribes of Galway’ were granted tracts of wilderness in place of their Galway estates; the D’Arcys found themselves with the peninsulas of Omey parish and the glens of Kylemore, while the Blakes, Frenches and Lynches shared the granite of south Connemara with the Martins, who also acquired the Cleggan. Most of these grantees managed to avoid actually having to come to Connemara, and some regained parts of their old estates after the restoration of Charles II. The Martins, in the
person of ‘Nimble Dick’ the lawyer, actually put together the largest estate in the kingdom and held on to it through the Williamite period despite their Catholicism, virtually succeeding the O’Flahertys as masters of Connemara.

Nimble Dick’s great-grandson Richard (known as Hairtrigger Dick from his many duels) from time to time found it convenient to retire from cosmopolitan prodigality into the fastnesses of Connemara, where no bailiff dared pursue him. His father had made a modest house out of an inn he owned on the bridle-path by the lake at Ballynahinch, and from the 1790s this became the court of a mysterious kingdom, reports of which irritated the authorities and entranced the romantic. Its endlessly devious southern coastline by nature took the part of the innumerable local smugglers against the revenue cutter, and the Martins were known to entertain with the finest of wines and brandies. Its craggy glens sheltered bands of outlaws who had fled there from the
yeomanry’s
vengeance upon Mayo after the French-led rebellion of 1798; among those with a price on their heads was the notorious Father Myles Prendergast, whose secret ministrations to his Catholic flock were winked at by the Martins for years, although they themselves like most landowning families were now Protestant. Richard’s tenantry would march into Galway to vote for him in its famously turbulent elections; their number was greatly augmented by the refugees from anti-Catholic pogroms in Antrim he welcomed onto his estates in 1796. After the Act of Union in 1801 he was Galway’s representative at Westminster, where he won another nickname, Humanity Dick, for his bill against cruelty to animals; at home, tenants who beat their donkeys could find themselves imprisoned in the old tower-house on the lake-isle of Ballynahinch. It is said that when his friend the Prince Regent boasted of the avenue at Windsor, Martin retorted that his own avenue was fifty miles long, being the road from Galway.

But his 200,000 acres were too poverty-stricken to fuel Humanity Dick’s spacious capacity for life, and by the time he died, hiding in Boulogne from his creditors, the estate was heavily in debt. His son Thomas, known as the King of Connemara, resided more continuously at what was now called Ballynahinch Castle, and tried to salvage the family fortunes through a copper mine on High Island, marble quarries in the southern foothills of
the Twelve Bens, and kelp-burning on the seaweed-rich shoreline. Contemporary accounts portray him as a benevolent and beloved despot, but local oral history retains less fond memories of him. Maria Edgeworth was one of the visitors drawn to Connemara by the Martin legend, and in 1833 she met at Ballynahinch his daughter Mary, ‘one of the most extraordinary persons I ever saw’. This elegant and self-possessed young lady, who reminded Edgeworth of a Leonardo portrait, was prodigiously well read in half a dozen languages ancient and modern: ‘Do think of a girl of seventeen, in the wilds of Connemara, intimately acquainted with the beauties of Aeschylus and Euripides, and having them as part of her daily thoughts.’ Indeed Miss Martin seems to have been all the imagination could require, as the Miranda of these poetic and yet slightly comic realms. She had studied engineering (at the age of thirteen or fourteen!) with the great Alexander Nimmo, then engaged in laying out the roads of Connemara, while from a former Napoleonic officer in exile at Ballynahinch she had acquired a knowledge of fortification, a passionate Bonapartism, and a barracks-room turn to her French. While showing the Edgeworth party the marble quarries, she was attended by a
spontaneous
aggregation of rustics which she referred to as her ‘tail’; when the visitors commented on her ability to communicate with these people, she calmly replied, ‘
Je
sais
mon
métier
de
reine
.’ A rather sugary version of this engaging heroine figures in Charles Lever’s novel
The
Martins
of
Cro
’
Martin
; a more bitter memory of her was handed down by the local people whom, it is claimed, she forbade to use the ancient burial ground near the Castle because their noisy lamentations disturbed her. The pathetic fate of the Princess of Connemara will be mentioned below.