‘In Bell Harbour they’ve built holiday homes that are like rabbit hutches and are terrible. Domestic architecture in the Republic of Ireland is disgraceful. They have built houses three and four storeys high in the middle of rural Ireland and there is no excuse for it. It was just sheer ostentation. Some people had too much money and didn’t know what to do with it so they showed off.’
Despite her dislike for these developments, the Burren still holds a magical appeal. Its seasons have provided her with a tremendous variety of descriptive copy but she finds it hard to single one out.
‘I don’t have a favourite season. Then sometimes I rethink this and when the spring arrives this is my favourite. But when it’s over, the summer comes and I call it the blue and purple season and I love it too. With the arrival of autumn we get the spareness of it all and it is beautiful. Winter shows the Burren in its bare rock with the bare branches of the trees and I especially love the sea in all its wildness.
‘The quality of the light is special. That is one of the things that made it easy to write about because the landscape is changing all the time. I have a friend from Cornwall who came to paint here but the landscape changed so rapidly that she couldn’t paint it because of the shadows and light passing so quickly. Although she did some pencil sketches, she couldn’t capture it in a painting on canvas as it was too hard to do that. Some painters who come here adopt a more abstract, surreal feel for it. When it rains here it disappears quickly because of the porous landscape whereas in other areas this isn’t the case. The biggest appeal is the beauty of the place and the naturalness of its people whose families have lived here for generations.’
Curiously, for someone living in the midst of a vast array of unique Arctic-alpine plants, when pushed to select her favourite, Sarah is a galanthophile and therefore chooses a modest flower – the humble common snowdrop or as Alfred, Lord Tennyson referred to it: ‘the solitary firstling’.
‘I love them all, of course,’ she says, with a cheery sweep of her arms. ‘The gentians, mountain avens, and the early purple orchids but when I see a single snowdrop early in the year rising from the stony ground then I realise the rest are on the way. There aren’t that many snowdrops here but for me they are full of hope for what lies ahead.’
Sarah’s writing has been published in A Burren Journal (2000), which is illustrated with delicate watercolours by Gordon D’Arcy and Anne Korff. In 2005 she wrote Memory Emancipated, a memoir of growing up in New Ross in the 1930s and early 1940s. She has also compiled and edited Burren Villages: Tales of History and Imagination, an anthology of essays about different aspects of the Burren published in 2010.
Although Sarah’s swansong diary was penned on 9 December 2010, she has no intention of giving up observing, thinking and writing about the landscape on her doorstep. ‘The Country Diaries opened up all the Burren for me from Mullaghmore to the coast and right across to the Gort lowlands. When I began writing them I was delighted with the welcome and encouragement I received from my first editors Chris McLean and Jeannette Page. They gave me freedom to write in the way I wanted to. Of course there is a certain sadness about ending something that gives great pleasure, but ends, as well as beginnings, have to be faced. And after all, I still have my beloved Burren and its splendid people.’
Like Wordsworth’s daffodils, Sarah is ‘jocund company’, and a sprightly walk with her across the limestone reawakens a sense of wonder and exhilaration. For twenty-three years, as the only Irish correspondent, she occupied a unique place in the rich tradition of the eccentricities of country diarists. Her stealthy observations and finely honed affectionate vignettes of Burren life that decorated the columns of the Guardian opened up the area for many people who would otherwise not have known of it. An engrossing chronicle of the area, they collectively represent a unique snapshot of local history and lore. Written in a personable style, Sarah’s diaries spoke – and still speak enduringly through her anthology – to somebody, somewhere in the world, and her personality shines through. Her peeps into local life, the vagaries of the weather, idiosyncratic snippets of local gossip, and the natural curiosities coupled with her evocative word painting gave pleasure to a wide and avid readership.
For her final diary she went for a walk through the Corker Pass between Abbey Hill and Turlough Hill witnessing ‘the most perfect rainbow’ interrupted by a flash of lightning. In response she spoke aloud to herself, ‘This, our Burren, is beautiful beyond compare.’
Sarah Poyntz, retired Burren Guardian country
diarist at her home at Ballyconry © Trevor Ferris
11
The Music of the Sea
Hug the shore, let others keep to the deep.
Virgil, Aeneid
New Quay Aperitif
Day One: Thursday evening 27 May 2006
Six pints of stout are slowly settling on the bar counter beside two collection boxes, one for the South African Missions, the other on behalf of Clarecare for the elderly and families in need, ‘Making Clare a better place’. A sign on the wall reads: ‘Please – No Smoking, No Dancing, No Swearing. This is a Respectable House.’ The shelves hold a cream mug with five Hamlet cigars and miniature bottles of Campari and Powers. You can buy toothpicks, cigarette lighters and watercolour postcards of the bar. In the next room Crunchie, Mars and Kit Kat bars are available to wash down with your stout. The de rigueur bar-room wall accessories include a large framed sketch of the Poulnabrone dolmen stone, a touring map of the area, and a Seamus Heaney poem, mounted and framed, celebrating the Flaggy Shore.
Looking like an after-thought to the northern part of the Burren, the Flaggy Shore on the Finavarra peninsula is a thin prong of land leading to a tower commanding the entrance to Ballyvaughan Bay. It also leads to one of Clare’s finest pubs, Linnane’s at New Quay. Consider the facts: you can enjoy your prawn open sandwich sitting outside on the back porch and, as you watch the oystercatchers at the pier, a low dappling sun settles over Galway Bay. Alternatively you can sit inside by the turf fire cradling a pint in a convivial atmosphere. I have come here to start the first leg of a walk along the whole of the Burren coastline down to Doolin, hugging the shore, keeping an eye out for birds and flowers, keeping the sea on my right hand side throughout the walk, and keeping music at the forefront of my mind.
The Irish traditional tunes are served up in a corner of Linnane’s by an easy-going father-and-daughter combination on concertinas. A heady cocktail of reels, jigs, waltzes and hornpipes is pouring from the doughty duo. With exceptionally deft cross-key fingering, the tunes vary from reels to slow airs that strum the heart strings. The father opens each number with a solo introduction and after a few bars nods a smiling glance to his daughter who, with effortless ease and grace, intuitively picks up the melody. They stretch and squeeze their instruments unobtrusively, largely unnoticed, and unappreciated. Opposite them, a tall angular fiddler on a three-legged stool lies sleeping, slumped across the table. His hand supports his head. He nods forward occasionally, pulling himself back with a myoclonic jerk. An unfinished half-pint of stout languishes in his glass. Stickers on his black case on the floor say ‘Up Clare’ and ‘Custy’s Music Shop, Ennis’. Small groups of T-shirted, potbellied and ruddy-faced farmers with rascally charm stand around the bar in an easy camaraderie. Some laugh at him and prod his back; he doesn’t move a muscle. By one o’clock the turf fire has died, the music has died and the non-fiddler of New Quay looks as if he has died too. Draped around the shoulders of two men he is limply carted off and tossed into the back of a transit van, missing a glorious full moon that has risen, large and round, over the Flaggy Shore.
Day Two: Friday 28 May
I have based myself at Mount Vernon, a Georgian seaside villa and the summer home of Augusta Lady Gregory, a pivotal figure in the Irish cultural renaissance. This historic house was built in an unusual vernacular style and the owners, Mark Helmore and Ally Raftery, boast they do not have worldly interferences such as telephones, television o
r tea-making facilities in the bedrooms. Original features of the house from Lady Gregory’s time include three fireplaces designed and built by the painter Augustus John who, along with W. B. Yeats and George Bernard Shaw, was a regular visitor. The cypress trees in the garden are said to have been the gift of George Washington.
From my bow-fronted bedroom window, I peer out through vermilion frames to a depressing grey day and a sea with small wavelets drained of its colours. The forecast promises wind and rain. A yellow-anoraked couple walks down the coast road with a brown and white collie running furiously ahead of them, pink tongue lolling from the side of his mouth. The dog pauses to survey the wind-capped waters of Aughinish Bay and watch swallows bustling about energetically. A mist restricts visibility out to sea.
Fanned by the Atlantic wind, I set off early on a rising spring tide along the northern coast of the Flaggy Shore. Swathed in mist, the lower tiers of terracing on the Burren hills look cold and uninviting. Masses of knee-high, bright yellow sea radish lines the roadside as I drop down over a wall and across stones to the seashore. A cormorant passes low across the surface of the water with an early-morning sense of urgency as though late for an important date. The recent heavy rain and the seaweed add to the slipperiness of the rocks. I join a ready-made limestone pavement path with shallow pools of water running parallel with the rocks. A car passes with headlights on, and the breeze-ruffled Lough Murri is birdless, duckless and swanless. A tan coastal varnish, with clinging bladder wrack, covers the wave-scoured rocks and boulders.
Once I cross a short portion of sandy and stony beach, the distinctive shape of the Martello tower at Finavarra Point comes into view. A hare bounds over a stone wall, leapfrogs across my path, and disappears at breakneck speed into a ploughed field. The tower is a well-preserved solid circular structure built during the Napoleonic Wars of 1812–1816. A sign says: ‘The property including the Martello Tower and Appurtenances was bequeathed to the state for the benefit of the Nation by Mrs Maureen Emerson who died on the 4th day of November 1999.’
The sign does not mention the benefit to the rooks enjoying its higher reaches. A robin comes to rest beside me on the stones. I consult the map and realise that in just over an hour I have covered the merest fraction – an infinitesimal amount – and head swiftly for Scanlan’s Island along the Flaggy Shore’s southern side. I disturb a family of whimbrels that rises quickly. Just before I reach the breakwater, I come across a brightly painted house standing on its own overlooking a lagoon. I had read about an English artist who had painted strips of colour along the walls of Pond House. A blue and white yacht Lauren is tied up and the Cherokee speedboat sits on concrete blocks raised off the ground. The peace is broken by the darting and harsh twittering of a flock of sand martins that has established a colony here.
A shower blows quickly in and over the lagoon. To avoid a detour around the head of the inlet, I wade carefully across the water channel. It is more suited to wellingtons than walking boots and I struggle across rocks heavily coated with bladder and spiral wrack, arriving on the other side with well-washed boots, socks, and mucky trousers. Two Large White butterflies cruise past as I make my way through fields and clamber over fences before re-emerging on the road at Finavarra. A 3-metre-high memorial to a poet overlooks the bay at Parkmore where orange lichen-covered steps provide a resting place. The pillar stone is in memory of Donncha Mor Ó Daliagh, venerable poet of the thirteenth century. Daisies and buttercups pepper the ground around it. In a field behind me, set on a height, lies the shell of Finavarra House surrounded by silent cows. Part of it is covered with ivy. The whole area was at one time part of the Finavarra estate.
Mist still encloses the higher reaches of the hills but a warming lunchtime sun is emerging to burn it off as I munch my sandwiches. Gulls whirl around in choreographic disorder when I rejoin the coastline. My route turns south and I leave behind the Flaggy Shore where I have made reasonable progress. I recall the parting motto from Mark at Mount Vernon: ‘No room for flagging on the Flaggy Shore’. A mix of rock and grassy coastline takes me the next kilometre or so into Bell Harbour. The stones and pebbles are shot through with a variety of colours. I think about how walking empties my mind of thoughts, allowing me to concentrate on the present – the here and now – not what happened last week or what might happen next month. Most of us are rarely alone, but walking on your own is the best way to appreciate scenery because it allows you to tune your senses into the land and seascape.
When I reach Bell Harbour, the clouds have dissolved to give way to columns of sunlight. I pay €3 for a mug of tea and a bar of chocolate in Daly’s Corcomroe pub. With a brightly quizzical eye, the barman raises his bushy eyebrows several times at my journey. ‘Faith,’ he says ‘it’ll be another damn good three hours along the coast to reach Ballyvock-han.’
The tentacles of development are tightening their grip on Bell Harbour near the small car park and quay. Following roadside hedges wallpapered with red valerian, I make my way down to the shorefront beyond an Ó Lochlainn Tower by a track beside Bell Harbour House where two dogs strain on leads. The sun-spangled afternoon is turning into an oasis of flat calm with a stillness settling over the sea.
I return to my thoughts of being alone when I realise that I have company. More than twenty seals with pups are chilling out en famille on the rocks. One or two stand to attention in the water, others frolic around. Although I tread softly, trying not to disturb their dreamy sunny siesta, and conceal myself behind a high wall, some speedily take to the water, peering up at me, bottling with their heads and necks clear of the water. Half-a-dozen others bask gracefully on the seaweed-freckled rocks, sizing me up and staring with inquisitive coal-black eyes at this stranger on their shore. Leaning quietly on top of the wall, I watch them at length. They are at one with the rocks, merging perfectly. Through binoculars, they look overweight and cumbersome, lying with their heads lifted and hind flippers curving into the air. Their colours fascinate me; some are spotty, others are brown, and their wet and shiny coats have blotches. Suddenly, an unseen noise, and in an instant they dive underwater, re-emerging seconds later to come up for air. One snorts harshly, and another sounds as if it is blowing its snout. Some slither back into the water and swim farther out, while others haul themselves back up on to the rocks. Two scratch their fore flippers idly and shuffle around. I have never before seen so many gathered in one spot with their long whiskers so visible.
Making my way along the pavement, I have a feeling that I am being followed. A couple of my aquatic friends tag along in the water for a short distance before one falls by the wayside. The remaining one coughs twice; I cough back, then we cough together. After twenty paces, I look around – dark, quizzical eyes fixed on me. He nods briskly out of the water, bobs several times, and with a cheeky farewell wink, performs a swift underwater disappearing trick returning to playtime with his chums.
Another hour, another tower. The tower at Muckinish West is a partially collapsed one. From the road it looks in sound shape but approaching it from the seafront I discover that its frontage has collapsed, giving it a forlorn appearance. Trees decorate the second storey, and grass, weeds, and flowers colonise its crumbling walls. A potholed path with grass along the centre leads to a sharp corner where the coast swings around to a beach filled with grey stones and shingle from where I look across to the Flaggy Shore. My route rises to grassy coastal cliffs before the terrain quickly turns into a path along sand dunes spangled with gentians. The crisp, soft sand feels gentle on my boots, a relaxing contrast to the cracked limestone. A woman with two dogs pauses on Bishopsquarter beach. As I pass the Whitethorn restaurant and Burren House, the sea takes on a distinctly choppy appearance.
The final stretch of the day takes me into Ballyvaughan, looking deceptively serene for a Friday night. It is 6.15 p.m. and a listless early evening torpor hangs over the village. It will be at least another three hours before the music-makers in the pubs open their fiddle cases and unwrap
their tin whistles. A couple of herring gulls pace querulously up and down the waterfront wall. Over a bar meal I read in the paper about the rain and the so-called ‘European monsoon’ which has swept across Britain and appears to be heading for Ireland. Fortunately the anticipated heavy rain has not yet reached County Clare.
Greene’s is a plain-looking pub in the main street with gallowglass military figures on panels outside. With a promising air of musical expectation, the bar fills soon after opening time at 9.00 p.m. Most customers stand at the bar and the few tables and chairs are quickly taken. A two-man group entertains Saturday evening drinkers with ‘Will Ye Go Lassie Go’ and ‘The West’s Awake’. The bearded bodhrán player tilts his curly head of hair, snuggling it closely to his instrument. His companion launches into a majestically paced version of ‘Nancy Spain’. The bar quietens. With little facial expression he runs through the verses with emotion and passion, every syllable of each word eked out, his eyes gazing fixedly on the window throughout. The poignancy of the song has an electrifying effect on two women standing in front of me. Their eyes moisten and teardrops run down their faces, adding to the mess of their already smudged lip-gloss. A nanosecond before the applause, a grey-haired bewhiskered woman in a grape-green woollen cardigan who had been sitting at the bar on a high stool, twitching her nose throughout the rendition, having small conversations with herself, signals her loud approval: ‘Gudman Liam.’
A series of reels quickens the tempo. ‘Toss the Feathers’, ‘The Morning Star’ and ‘The Bucks of Oranmore’ activate some spectators. A tall pony-tailed woman with a long pre-Raphaelite neck and wearing tight jeans gets up to inject her own personality into the entertainment. With remarkable feisty footwork, she pounds the floor, kicking her legs higher and ever higher raising the pulse of the packed house. Two girlfriends frame her movements in the small screen of mobile phone cameras capturing the digital perfection of the moment. Hand-in-hand a German couple performs a stiff and uncertain jig across the cream linoleum kitchen floor, giving up halfway through with warm blushes and embarrassed laughter. Drinkers chortle into their pints. Reminiscent of a Muckinish seal, the bewhiskered woman creases her right eye into a cheerful wink, burps like a windy baby, and whispers to me through yellow teeth ‘In here we call that lino dancing.’
Burren Country Page 14