Setting Foot on the Shores of Connemara

by Tim Robinson

  Apart from the trawlers there are a number of small half-deckers working out of Cill Rónáin, drift-net fishing for salmon in June and July, and lobster-potting until the weather breaks up in autumn. I often watched them throwing out the pots as I walked along the shore. One day I saw one of these boats coming into the bay at Cill Mhuirbhigh at an unusual pace, towing something big and heavy. By the time I had hurried round the bay the crew had hauled some sort of a monster out of the water and were hacking it open. It was a basking shark that had become entangled in their nets and which they told me they had ‘drowned’ by towing it behind the boat. This fish, a harmless plankton-eater that can grow up to thirty-five feet long, used to be harpooned by the islanders for the oil of its liver; Robert Flaherty had reconstructed the hunt for his film Man of Aran. There is still a basking shark fishery off Achill Island, and the oil, which has some engineering uses, fetches a high price, while the fins, we hear, go to Chinese restaurants. Recently a Norwegian trawler had been seen poaching for basking sharks around Aran, and our fishermen had decided to take a closer look at one. They spilled out the liver, which would have filled a couple of suitcases, and stuck their fingers in its eye-sockets and twiddled its huge eyeballs; then they tumbled the corpse back into the water before I had a chance to take a bit of fin home for our dinner. This incident led to a brief revival of the fishery in the following year, but fortunately the catch was not even sufficient to cover the cost of the diesel expended in scouring the seas for the elusive prey, and the project was abandoned.

  As well as its fishing fleet the village of Cill Rónáin turned out to have more points of interest than I had expected, though I recorded them with mixed feelings as they were mainly relics of the bad old days – barracks, courtroom, coastguard station, pound – all now adapted to better purposes. The contrast between this weighty apparatus of extortion and the resources of the community to which it was applied reminded me of the accounts of armed constabulary being landed on the islands to carry out the eviction of an old woman or the sequestration of a cow, within the memory of some still living. Nowadays two gardaí, seldom in uniform, work from a small room in the huge empty coastguard station, the courtroom is a café and the barracks a pub.

  By the end of the summer I had covered Árainn and was ready to leave for Inis Meáin. The Gal way steamer calls at the two smaller islands two or three times a week on its way to or from Cill Rónáin. It cannot dock at either island but drifts offshore while goods and passengers are ferried ashore in the famous Aran currachs – keelless canoes of lath and tarred canvas, nimble as a seal among waves and rocks but alarmingly fragile-looking to the tourist who has to jump into one as it lurches up and down outside the steel door in the steamer’s hold. On this occasion I was the only stranger going ashore, and the boatmen extorted a pound from me, saying that it was so rough I wouldn’t have got ashore at all but for the fine crew I had.

  The landing-place in Inis Meáin is exposed, and the island is more frequently cut off in winter than is Árainn. It is the least visited and least changed of the islands, and here the harshness of Aran triumphs over its milder aspects. It is unbelievably stony; I think of Inis Meáin as the Delos of the Rain God. The north-facing terraces, which in the big island are largely cultivated, here extend below the line of villages in successive rims of bare rock several hundred yards wide, and the ‘back of the island’ behind the ridge-line is made oppressive by countless field-walls too high to see over. In many of the fields superfluous stone has been built into big rectangular stacks, to clear the sparse grass. All around the south and south-west coast, storms have moved massive blocks of stone, many of them the size of cars or cottages, up the shelving shore, and assembled them into a huge dyke; one can walk outside this ‘storm beach’ on utterly barren sheets of rock swept bare of loose stone, which towards the very exposed south-western headland are two or three hundred yards wide. Out on the rim of this lugubrious grey-green desert, a glittering plume of foam leaps up again and again as waves rush into a cavern below. There are cliffs along the west-facing coast, increasing in height as one goes northwards; here the storm beach is actually on the clifftop, and only fades out where the cliffs are over a hundred feet high and the waves cannot scale them. At this point there is a ruinous structure of rough stone blocks, perhaps once a lookout’s hut, called Synge’s Chair. Here the writer J.M. Synge used to sit and watch the seabirds circling and screaming below; I often came to rest in the same spot, envying him his stormy creative height.

  Synge’s coming to this desolation, just before the end of the last century, to find the stories and the language of the plays he was to write in later years, symbolizes the return of Ireland to its origins, for this stony island nourished one of the roots of nationhood. The Irish language, suppressed, starved and despised, nearly died in the last century; its revival was a necessary step in the fight for independence, and Inis Meáin was one of the places to which the cultural nationalists turned in search of the language through which the nation could rediscover its identity. At that period so many scholars and writers lodged in the one cottage that put up visitors that it became known as Ollscoil na Gaeilge, the University of Irish. One young man who stayed there was Pádraic Pearse, who was to proclaim the Republic in the rising of Easter 1916. How, then, does modern Ireland repay its debt to such places? In the pub, weather-darkened faces are illuminated by the flicker of TV; images of speed and sexuality are received in non-committal silence. On the slip in the driving rain four children huddled together in a plastic sheet watch as the currachs are run out into the waves, taking off the last of the summer visitors. Is Inis Meáin to die? Soon these children will follow, to jobs in Galway, Birmingham, Boston – anywhere but Inis Meáin.

  Having seen those last visitors off into the mists, I found myself weather-bound for a few days, and sat in the kitchen deciphering the blotches in my notebook while the woman of the house huddled in her shawl, knitted and took snuff. Sometimes a neighbouring lad would come in and sit by the range in silence, bending sideways to let his spittle drool onto the hot plate and sizzle into a little pancake. Gathering that I was a ‘scholar’, another man called in to put his problem to me, perhaps just to pass the time. The lobster season was ended and it was time to tow his wooden tank full of lobsters now moored by the slip across to the Clare coast. There one dealer was offering £1 a pound for full-sized lobsters only, and another was offering 80p a pound for all lobsters above and below the legal limit. Which was the better deal? ‘Well, how many small ones have you?’ – ‘Maybe a couple of dozen.’ – ‘And how many big ones?’– ‘By Jesus, I haven’t a clue!’ So I had to fall back from mathematical to moral argument, and as the weather didn’t clear enough for lobster-delivery during my stay I never heard the outcome. My reputation as a scholar must have survived, however, for when an unprecedented event occurred one Sunday I was urged to record it, because ‘That day should be in History!’ Every Sunday the curate from Inis Oírr is brought across by currach to celebrate mass in Inis Meáin, and the honour of this sometimes dangerous task devolves upon each of the Inis Oírr households in turn. Recently a new household had come into existence, a lay community of young Catholic enthusiasts, men and women, collectively known as ‘The Danes’ because their leader was Danish; they sang psalms at all canonical hours of day and night, fished from a catamaran, built their own currachs to a modernized design, and in everything they did were a source of endless speculation to the islanders. Then they claimed their right to bring the curate across, and the curate, who was new to the islands, accepted the offer. The men of Inis Meáin who went down to the slip as usual that day to greet him were amazed and amused to find that his crew included two girls. He himself was unaware of the sensation caused by this jolting of ancient observances and prohibitions. As the procession to the chapel passed the cottage I was staying in, a lad broke off from it to run in with the news: ‘There were women in the curate’s boat!’ – and I was told that it would be worth my while wri
ting it down, which I now do. And as an historian should, I note the date of this event: 15 September 1974.

  There is quite a lot of social interchange between the two small islands, and my hosts’ cottage, at the top of the road leading down to the slip, was well placed for observing it; the lady of the house spent much time scanning the seaways through binoculars. One misty evening – my last in Inis Meáin – we were all at the door anxiously watching the return of a currach with some lads who were banned from the Inis Meáin pub because of ‘blackguardism’ and had gone to do their drinking in Inis Oírr. Their progress was slow and irregular, but they made land at last, and came up the hill past our cottage all clinging to the cab of a tractor. Shortly afterwards they sent a child down to us to borrow a butcher’s knife, which the man of the house handed over with evident reluctance. When next we looked out into the gathering murk, they were down on one of the great creigs below the village, with a cow and a shotgun. One of them took uncertain aim at the cow’s forehead, there was a bang, the beast fell, kicking and slithering on the wet rock, and toppled off the conveniently flat place they had chosen for their butchering into a deep gully. They leaped down to finish her off with a hammer, waving at us to come and help; we shrank back into the doorway. For an hour or more they were hacking and tugging at the carcase, and later that evening on our way to the pub we passed them standing in the drizzle by the roadside, with a heap of raw meat that steamed in the cold air, drinking mugs of Guinness out of a white plastic bucket; I recognized them as the brave crew that had brought me safe to shore. The next day, as I was saying goodbye to my host, we saw a raven circling above the creig, and he observed sagely, ‘Nothing happens unknown to the raven!’

  I crossed to Inis Oírr by the trawler that takes over the inter-island connection when the steamer is withdrawn for servicing at the end of the season. As at Inis Meáin, the currachs come out to ferry travellers ashore; on this occasion there were few passengers – an Icelandic geologist, an elderly man from the Folklore Commission, and myself – and only one currach was launched, which had to go to and fro several times. The landing is on a wide shelving beach, giving the island a welcoming aspect; as the currach nosed into the sand two men grasped me by the elbows and flew me ashore. When I think of boat-days on Inis Meáin’s dismal shore I remember a dog on the rocks howling at the breakers crashing in out of the fog; Inis Oírr’s boat-day, however, I see as a sort of garden-party, a talkative gathering on a brilliant expanse of smooth sand watching the trawler or the steamer beating to and fro offshore, and the currachs bounding in over a festive sea. White houses scattered in a wide arc around the foreshore, and behind them a bright craggy hill bearing a picturesque ruined castle – a gleam of sunshine on all this transports one for a moment to the Mediterranean. But beyond the skyline begins the same grey criss-cross of walls and scraggy fields, slowly declining to a storm-battered shore. A monument to the power of the sea, there is the sixty-or seventy-yard-long hulk of the Plassy, a freighter that struck a notorious rock off the east coast of the island a few years ago and eventually drifted ashore. Successive storms have lifted her higher and higher and now she stands bolt-upright on the storm beach several yards above normal high tides, and appears to be sailing across dry land. Her hull is broken open and one can step into the hold; her cargo for this motionless voyage is huge boulders.

  Behind the livelier aspects of Inis Oírr as compared with Inis Meáin – the better-stocked shops and less spartan lodgings, the animation brought by children from mainland schools who spend a summer month here learning Irish – there is the same sad wasting-away of a community losing its lifeblood through emigration of the young. The girls go first; it is easier for them to get jobs in hotels and shops. Not long before my visit the socially conscious young curate had written an appeal to the authorities to do something about this desperate situation, instancing the fact that there was just one girl of marriageable age left, to twenty-six young men. I fell into conversation with an island girl soon after my arrival, and asked ‘Are you she?’ No, she was not; she was just home for a holiday from her job in Galway, and anyway, she said, ‘I couldn’t marry any of those lads; they’re all my first cousins!’ An exaggeration no doubt, but one that points up the problems facing a dwindling community. This year the curate has to report that there are no marriageable girls at all in Inis Oírr.

  The islanders tend to mistrust the offices of the outside world, on the whole with good cause, and as this was my first visit to Inis Oírr I felt it more than ever necessary to explain to everyone what I was up to. Maybe I imagined an initial reserve, but in any case it dissolved as news of my activities got round, and my explorations were interspersed with hundreds of conversational encounters, from the barrel-shaped old salt directing four men stretching canvas over the framework of a currach in his boatyard on the foreshore, to the lighthouse keepers in their isolated quarters at the back of the island, from Seán an Siopa (Seán of the shop), the unofficial king of the island, sitting massively by his fireside and rolling forth grand diplomatic utterances with his eyes shut, to the blue-robed zealots, the ‘Danes’ (Mary’s Followers of the Cross, they call themselves), who questioned me closely about the times of mass in the big island.

  Then it was time for me to leave the islands to their motionless voyage and stony cargoes, and go to London, where I would have space to piece together my sketches, notes and sodden OS sheets. A motorboat was to take me across to the Clare coast, but as Joe the boatman lingered in the pub watching a football match on television, and the sky darkened, I became more and more doubtful about this first step of the journey. I had seen the little fibreglass boat battering about in the waves against the quayside for some days with a fender sagging loose and the canopy hanging on by one bolt. A couple of tourists in the pub were also in two minds as to whether to leave or not, but Joe persuaded them to stay, saying that he would be back for them in the morning. Eventually we set off down to the quay, and as we looked out into rain and prancing waves Joe surprised me by saying, ‘That’s the last they’ll see of me!’ It seemed that the weather was breaking up and that if we had waited for them to make up their minds it would have been too late to cross before dark. The only other passenger was a pretty little American girl besotted with the rugged Joe. It was to be a wildly exciting crossing. Once we had left the shelter of the island nothing was visible in the mist but huge waves chasing up from behind us. I watched how Joe negotiated our way through the seas: holding to his course through the smaller waves, keeping a lookout over his shoulder for swells breaking at the top, and when one of the regular successions of three big seas came, steering away from the first, letting the second lift us stern first – they were much bigger than the boat – and pivoting on its top to head down the other side and face into the third. The only time he faltered was when the girl started to caress his knee; a mass of water exploded into the boat, and he pushed her aside with an oath. After an hour or so the Cliffs of Moher loomed up out of the gloom, and soon we were running into the little cove of Doolin through a narrow gap between a rocky peninsula and an islet smothered in breakers. We spent that evening listening to the famous local folk-musicians in the pub, and when we came out a gale was howling. Two rather drunk youngsters drove us down through lashing rain to see how the boat was faring; it was swooping to and fro agitatedly, and a violent sea was threatening to break over the quay and swamp it. Outside the feeble circle of light from my torch I could see nothing but huge white-topped swells rushing past. Joe put on a lifejacket, clambered down and sprawled on the nose of the lurching boat hanging tyres over its bows. With the lads larking about among mooring-ropes in the darkness, I was really frightened that my adventure would end in tragedy, but I pulled them back from the edge, and with much shouting and hauling and tying and untying of ropes we got the boat turned around and moored bows outwards, and nobody was drowned. I slept that night in a caravan that seemed about to take off from the foreshore, and woke to sunshine and the roar of toppl
ing breakers. Then I hitched a lift to Shannon, and flew to the cloistral calm of London.

  My task now was to make good my analogy of the ‘well-formed concept’ and to objectify it as a map. Because I knew little about normal cartographical procedures, the problems of conveying information intelligibly were not to be solved by ready-to-hand techniques; rather they appeared as opportunities for expressing my feelings about the islands. In choosing line-weights and typefaces I had in mind not so much legibility as the Aran landscape, the beauty of which lies in its crystalline delicacy of detail always on the point of dissolution into vast luminous spaces. The commercially available mechanical tints seemed inadequate symbols for beautifully shelving beaches and the ever-changing interpenetrations of rock and water, and I preferred to let my pen run on for hours in minute lyrical effusions of dots and twirls. All around the coast, a fiction, the high-water mark, posed a similar problem; rather than indicate it by a line I relived with my pen the hourly give-and-take of land and sea. Drawing the cliffs was a strange experience; as I reconstructed them from my sketches I found myself becoming dizzy over these half-inch abysses; no doubt it would have been easier to search out aerial photographs, but my instinct was to keep as close as possible to my experience of them. I had tended to think of my approach as consisting in the closest possible identification with the object, but that, I now came to believe, is not quite the case. While I was exploring the islands my dreams expressed the process in sexual metaphor; my distinctness from the object was preserved, but at a limit beyond which lay a threat of self-loss. Now in the act of drawing my aim was to achieve the same intimacy of physical contact with the emergent image as I had reached with the reality. – But all this is to formalize in retrospect a practice that was tentative and instinctual, and indeed to fill up with ideals the blanks on the resultant map.