Two centuries ago more than 800 people lived and farmed in Gleninagh; today fewer than forty people live in this area. Over the years on visits to try to get to know it and read its history, I have taken time to potter and ponder and have come to realise the sense of loss and abandonment which is found here. There is sadness to strolling around the fields and in imagining how it once had been. Even the cows have a mournful bellow.
To get a feel for the atmosphere of Gleninagh, a wander around it will open your eyes to the human history and the flora to be found in one small patch of land. Gleninagh, Gleann Eidhneach, translates as ‘Glen of the Ivy’ and the last Irish speakers in County Clare lived here. The townland (one of 2,176 in Clare and spelled on some maps and in books as Glaninagh) is divided into two territorial divisions north and south, and is equidistant between Ballyvaughan and Black Head. There is no coastal hamlet or village, but it is made up of scattered cottages and houses along the roadside and down lanes. Gleninagh North sits hard by the sea on a rock-strewn shore. Incorporated within this area of a few square kilometres are a deserted village, an abandoned tower house, a derelict medieval parish church, and the remains of the site of Gleninagh Lodge along with other unidentified skeletal ruins including forts. Historical sites litter the ground. Apart from the holy well, a close inspection reveals an ancient cooking place and a lime kiln within a few metres of each other.
It can be approached by two ways: either walking down a gently sloping lane used by the pilgrims, or by boat from the sea, but tourist coaches do not stop here and few boats moor at the quay where the Earl of Ormonde sailed into exile in 1639. Parking nearby is difficult, so the area is neglected by visitors and remains one of the Burren’s secrets. You will not find it in any modern guidebooks but in 1831 it was mentioned in Samuel Lewis’ topography of Ireland. In the 1840s Thomas L. Cooke of Parsonstown, who wrote a series ‘Autumnal Rambles about New Quay’ for the Galway Vindicator, visited the well. He described its walls of solid masonry and the interior as ‘having human skulls, and round flat stones resembling cakes of home-made bread’. It is also mentioned in Murray’s Handbook for Ireland (1906). The author John Cooke writes that at Gleninagh holy well a human skull was once used as a vessel for drinking but the practice was stopped by the parish priest.
Locals know its history and toponymy. Meet a farmer here and he will tell you that he comes from the townland of Gleninagh, in the parish of Ballyvaughan, in the diocese of Kilfenora, in the barony of the Burren, in the county of Clare, in the province of Munster, in the country of Ireland. Pride in place and in place names is etched deeply in the veins as firmly as the ferns rooted into Gleninagh’s grykes.
There is much to see and admire. An axis of field-covered rocks and grass, a small wood, and the seashore thread through this ancient landscape. The ground is studded with a diverse flora. The range of flowers within a space the size of a football pitch includes scores of orchids, ferns and geraniums. On one spring visit I came across heath spotted-orchids and twayblade. Interwoven in this psychedelic mixed patch were the fluffy spikes of lady’s bedstraw, Irish eyebright, wild thyme, kidney vetch, white clover and common milkwort, which, according to my guidebook, is known as ‘the four sisters’ because its flowers can be blue, pink, white or mauve. Buttercups, yellow-rattle, primroses, cowslips, yellow wort, and clusters of false oxlip all speckle the grass. Some plants are so inconspicuously coloured, many people never see them yet they have jewel-like quality. Look closely and you will identify speedwell, the slender St John’s wort, and you may stumble upon the tiny but exquisite bee orchid whose blooms are startlingly lifelike imitations of bumble bees.
Hunkering along the woodland’s edge, the grass is thick with sanicle, valerian, herb Robert and the vanilla-scented squinancy wort. The grykes house a striking selection of ferns: rusty-back, hart’s-tongue and maidenhair spleenwort grow in sizeable clumps while wild madder and saxifrage colonise the clints and rocks. Along the seafront you will find bladder campion and thrift. These fields represent a bewildering array of resident species where every square inch of ground vibrates with a teeming mass of plant-life. It is the Burren showing off and few are aware of it.
Standing guard over all this botanical richness is the tall L-shaped tower of Gleninagh Castle, a waterside fort beside the well. It was built as a stronghold by the Ó Lochlainn family in the late sixteenth century. They disposed of it in the mid-1600s, but later regained ownership and were the last inhabitants when it was abandoned in 1840. The main block rises to five storeys, with stone-arched roofs over the first and third storeys. Rounded corner turrets are well preserved. The tower overlooks a stony beach and, with its high narrow windows, was an important coastal vantage-point from which to survey Galway Bay.
On one occasion, as part of a tour on a harsh winter’s morning at seven o’clock, a key was produced and, ducking cobwebs, I made my way up a cramped mouldy spiral stairway. Liscannor slabs decorate the floor and the height lends a new perspective to gaze around Gleninagh through windowless frames and defensive slits. The early morning light could have been dirty concrete but out to sea, undeterred by the coldness, a great northern diver was enjoying itself in the steely grey water. Riding the waves unconcernedly with its head underwater, it bobbed up to allow me to catch a glimpse through binoculars of its thick neck, dagger-like beak and sleek body. My grandstand view was obscured by morning mist. But farther round the coast I could just make out the fat punctuation mark of the Martello tower at the tip of the Flaggy Shore. The castle is one of the Burren’s most evocative look-out points and it is not hard to understand why the builders chose this site lording over the stones, sea and bay.
The Burren boasts numerous ruins among its notable architectural glories but few can compare with the well-appointed condition of Gleninagh Castle, which is still in a surprisingly sound state given its 400-year-old pedigree. Birds have haunted this building and the seashore for centuries. The sense of abandonment is again apparent as in the 1990s it was home to red-beaked choughs. They have since vanished and been replaced by the clatter of rock doves (west of Ireland progenitors of wild pigeons) now frequenting the dank corners.
Through a field thick with thistles and clover, I make my way over to the cracked limestone shoreline passing the remains of an outdoor cooking area (fulacht fiadh). There is evidence of the remains of a lime kiln where the whitewash was prepared to paint the tower house. Thousands of smooth stones along the shorefront have taken themselves down for a swim where the sea comes in unwhitened by foam. In the bright Gleninagh light, they glisten with a distinctly luminous quality.
Back up towards the main road, the ancient Gleninagh churchyard lies roofless and largely unnoticed behind a stone wall. Long strands of ivy cling to one wall while brightly purpled buddleia rises up along another. Spiders’ webs are woven around wall rue growing profusely over the stones. T. J. Westropp visited it during his travels around Clare describing it as ‘a rude plain building with a pointed south door, lintelled south window and round-headed east window’.
It presents a sad unkempt appearance today although a watering can and waste bin augur well for a tidy up. Moss covers knee-high nameless stumps of headstones or ones where inscriptions have been worn away with the years. I had been told that bodies of washed up sailors were buried here alongside graves that may include famine victims but none are marked. The twentieth-century gravestone names include Donohue, McCarthy, Burns, Irwin, Fitzpatrick, O’Donoghue, and come from Gleninagh, Ballyconry and Ballyvaughan.
A short walk across the road is the deserted village of Creig, not far from the pinnacle well. The crumbling stone remains are overgrown with a mini-forest of nettles, weeds and vegetation along with a tangle of twenty worn tractor and car tyres. I trample them down and walk over to inspect the cavities where the fireplaces once stood. Other signs reflect the surviving evidence of human habitation that is all part of the awe-inspiring character of this place.
Look up towards the terraced Glenina
gh Mountain brooding over the area and you will make out the faint trace of a mass path running through a gap in the hills leading up to the southern limit of the area of our exploration: Gleninagh South. From the wayside cairn near the roadside, I take a stony path diverting to the top of Gleninagh Mountain (Cnoc Achadh na Glinne) which, as Irish mountains go, is not high. At 318m in stature, it qualifies as the Burren’s joint highest point along with the neighbouring hill of Dobhach Bhrainin a short limestone hop away. Sit quietly for a while on the summit beside the Ordnance Survey triangulation pillar; soon you will appreciate the absence of noise and will be afforded a wide panorama of sea and landscape embracing Galway Bay, the islands, and the far shore of Connemara.
The mass path runs for over 3km, leading steadily uphill and downhill, eventually merging with the Burren Way, a signposted route favoured by hillwalkers. All around, and on the periphery of Gleninagh South, the past snatches at you: another deserted village here, a penal chapel there, and at Caheranardurrish the ruins of a mass house and shebeen at the point of entry into the haunting Caher Valley.
There is another human tragedy here; a heart-breaking story of how, in the middle part of the twentieth century, many people fled this area after an outbreak of tuberculosis swept through it. TB was rampant in many parts of Ireland and Gleninagh suffered acutely, resulting in mass emigration from this once populous area.
Since I first stumbled on Gleninagh on a coastal walk, it is a place I have constantly been pulled back to, poking around an area preserved in a mix of aspic and cow dung. It has a quiet reserve with a piquancy and element of mystery. It conceals itself, hiding its sad history, shy about flaunting its enigmatic past (apart from a signboard at the castle, no written information about the area is on display). The stranger must dig deep to explore and uncover the bristling layers.
Apart from an occasional farmer checking on his livestock and the annual well-worshippers, I rarely meet other people here. Few who come to the Burren have seen or smelt it, soaked themselves in its past or tested its present-day religious and musical pulse. The absence of visitors gives it the idyllic feel of west of Ireland solitude. This is a place where the light stretches long on clear summer evenings, lingering over the hills, fields and sea, where the moonlight mingles with the pink sunset. Stand on Gleninagh’s stones facing the sea, look across the bay to Connemara and you may experience a dream-like quality to the light. As you do, think of the intricate interplay of the dead and the living cultures imbued within this townland. I like to reflect on the generations that have preceded me and the ghostly echoes of the past surrounding me.
On each visit I have gleaned new fragments containing individual snippets of information to try to build a partial jigsaw of the concatenation of historical events and the shifting rhythms of life of this sliver of land. It is remarkable how one small pocket covering some rough fields can pulsate with so many eras. If you wish to feel the quivers of the multiple layers, long vistas and powerful continuity of history, as well as sampling the array of exotic flora, all you need do is spend some time at Gleninagh where the past is continuously at your elbow. Look around these memory-filled fields and you will feel the power of an older world linked to the present in a unique history-sodden combination of people, plants and piety in an atmosphere drenched in melancholy, and occasionally, music.
Gleninagh holy well © Trevor Ferris
9
Travels of the Wandering Rocks
Patient observation and constant brooding above the rocks, lying upon them for years as the ice did, is the way to arrive at the truths which are graven so lavishly upon them.
John Muir, ‘John of the Mountains’
‘What in tarnation,’ the man from Kentucky asks, ‘is an erratic?’ He had been listening to a brief description of how these huge grey boulders came to be placed on the limestone pavement. His fellow Americans are in awe of the history all around them.
No one has ever counted how many of these boulders, known as glacial erratics, are scattered throughout the Burren. It would be a colossal task because thousands of them were carried here by glaciers and deposited as if by magic. Today these peculiar features of the landscape – both limestone and granite – sit peaceably at rest from their travels, rock solid, or in some places, perched precariously on disproportionately small pedestals of bedrock that have been protected from erosion. From a distance some look as though they could be toppled with a nonchalant shove, or easily rolled down a hillside and pushed into the sea. In truth it would take an army of strong Burren men and women to shift these enormous boulders whose weights vary but tip the scales at an average of ten tons. Too tough to break up into small stones, they have been left standing and are now integrated as part of the outdoor décor. They have stood here for 15,000 years and despite some weathering have retained their shape. Now they stand alone, immovable, monolithic, and at first sight, unremarkable and commonplace. But despite their mute appearance, they are a special topographical feature and come with a story all their own.
The word erratic is from the Latin errare meaning ‘to wander’. Over the course of my visits I have often spent time on a wandering, rock-hopping quest to see how many I could locate. First there was bird-spotting, then train-spotting … but erratic-spotting? From the roadside, erratics can be hard to pick out, camouflaged into the limestone and blending into the interminable succession of grey drystone walls and bare pavement. But when you get close it is a different story. A walk across the large flat slabs of pavement uncovers scores of these historic natural rock monuments. One of the best areas for this search is Black Head. Many of the Carboniferous limestone erratics abandoned here were picked up by glaciers from across Galway Bay. As the ice-floe advanced southwards across the bay, it ripped up great lumps of rock, rolled them round in the glacier and, when it melted, dumped them unceremoniously on the Burren. Other erratics come from Galway granite on the far side of the bay while the old Dalradian rocks of Connemara were also transported southwards.
In a morning’s walk at Black Head I count more than seventy-five. They are spread in a seemingly haphazard, incongruous jumble, but in places there is an order to their curvilinear symmetry. Beside a low stone wall threading its way down from Murroughkilly, a line of erratics known as a boulder-streak is visible. They are often found aligned as the glaciers moved in a long train stringing them out in a continuous curving line. A large, potato-shaped erratic provides the ideal rock-steady resting place for a lunch break and the chance to appreciate the juxtaposition of hills and sea. It also affords one of the best places for a sense of the infinite. Beside a wall, a hare stands alert, listens to the wind, gives an abrupt turn of the head and jinks off, zigzagging its way across the pavement.
I have come to know the Black Head erratics – not so much on first-name terms – but more as reference points from which I depart and return with confidence on each visit. Having acquired their strange forms and locations in my mind I have brought photographers and groups here, pointing out the boulder-streak, explaining how it helped me to work out how the erratics came to be here, informing my pathway of understanding. Silhouetted against the darkening sky, they look unnerving to some but for me they define the spirit of this place and in particular a specific spot at Murrough where the dark green needle-shaped leaves of a sprawling juniper bush sprout, often with small yellow cones, from a gryke.
Erratics are chemical rocks that contain fossils called colonial coral. They have lots of corals growing together. Some have veins, others have dolomite and chert, which is similar to flint and is a silica. It was much sought after by early settlers in Ireland. In the early nineteenth century, geologists were mystified by the boulders they found throughout Europe and which were different in composition from their surroundings. It was thought they were carried to their destinations by currents of water and mud associated with Noah’s flood.
So much for their provenance – what do these stone giants look like today? Geologists describe erratics as a
‘flat-iron’ shape. They have a humped back and a flat bottom with a pointed end and a steep end which is how they got the name. Apart from the flat-iron description, many have a characteristic potato shape, but they are not uniform in appearance and vary greatly in size. In some places they have a striking individuality and an anthropomorphic sense about them. Intriguingly, as I discover on an exploration of their sculptural expressions, it is as if they have been chiselled in a certain way and each has an identity peculiar to itself. Some have comical lichened faces, a few wear frowns; some look sad or baleful, others have a smiling countenance, happy with their geological lot perched on their pedestal of contentment. One or two of these leviathans resemble the shape of a shark or whale; another, standing next door to a more traditionally erect one, looks for all the world like a giant slumbering tortoise. Two others could be mistaken for a camel and a monkey. This phenomenon – known as pareidolia – is a delusion based on sense perception of seeing a human face or another form in an inanimate object. Some look unbalanced, out of kilter with a warped appearance and an anguished face. Another has a carved face similar-looking to the flat and steep forehead physiognomy of an Easter Island statue staring out to sea. With its nose, mouth, bold jaw and Negroid head, it stands in silent testimony – a stony-faced sentry – looking out to the Aran Islands moored far out in the Atlantic. Buffeted by storms, rain and sea showers, the lashing gales are of no consequence to these boulders. They have seen them off, weathered the storm and stuck fast to their base. Like polished diamonds, some gleam in the sunlight with a smooth curvature, others have an ungainly shape sculpted by the elements.
Burren Country Page 12