Setting Foot on the Shores of Connemara

by Tim Robinson

  Can certainty be reached? There is a myth of ultimate authority for the placenames of Ireland, recorded in a Middle Irish work of the twelfth century, Agallamh na Seanórach or The Colloquy of the Ancients. This tells of how St Patrick meets a band of tall men with huge wolfhounds, who it says were not people of one time or one epoch with the clergy; in fact they were the last of the Fianna, the followers of the Celtic hero Fionn Mac Cumhaill, in their immense old age. They wander all round Ireland with the saint, telling him the name of each place and the story behind the name. At the end of each story St Patrick calls for his scribe and says, ‘“By thee be it written down all that Caoilte has uttered,” and written down it was.’ This represents the handing-over of the land and its meanings by paganism to the new religion, a profound symbolic linking of the historical and modern to its timeless legendary hinterland, enacted in terms of placelore. St Patrick, bishop, is the guarantor of the truth of the interpretations inscribed under his watchful eye. Note the patriarchal significance of the saint’s episcopal staff here, as the ultimate symbol from which all others derive their stability of meaning. But the saint’s staff or bachal, the shepherd’s crook, is itself a question-mark. There is a tempting resonance in the idea that all interpretations are open to question, that certainty is endlessly deferred. One hears of the ‘death of the author’, the impossibility of grounding literary readings in the intentions of the writer – and no author is as deeply under the sod as the originators of placenames. But, to be sensible, in the majority of cases one can arrive by historical and linguistic inquiry, by guesswork and emendation, by hook or by St Patrick’s crook, at what we might as well call truth.

  At the same time, misinterpretation is part of the life of a placename. I heard recently of a Connemara farmer who was expounding the local placenames to a visitor; after a series of fascinating elucidations he summed up by saying grandly that the farmer without Irish is a stranger on his own land. Unfortunately, on examination, most of his derivations were duds, linguistic impossibilities. Nevertheless they were genuine meanings, one- or two- or three-word poems the man had grown out of his own land. We are all prone to error, we are all strangers on our own land. As language changes course like a river over the centuries, sometimes a placename gets left behind, beached, far from the flood of meaning. Then another meander of the river reaches it, interpreting it perhaps in some new way, revivifying it. The sound may have to be bent to allow this to happen. Eventually the original meaning may be for ever irrecoverable, or it may only be accessible to the learned. Locally, or at a personal level, it is still a name, a pointer, a misdirection perhaps, to the place. How many times could it happen, that the sound and the sense do this dance around each other? Corruption of the name, it is called; but corruption is fertility.

  In Ireland O’Donovan himself, the greatest Irish scholar of his age, presided over the systematic corruption of Irish placenames. He was working for the Ordnance Survey (the section of the Army charged with mapping the land, under British rule, in the 1830s) and after the surveyors on the ground had noted down the placenames from the locals as best they could, it was O’Donovan who checked the earlier textual and cartographical sources, and, having decided on the correct Irish form of each name, wrote down not the Irish but the anglicized form that was to appear on the map; it was the great betrayal, for as he himself noted, many of these names become very indistinct when transcribed in English phonetic values. Of course O’Donovan personally was not the originator of government policy in the matter; this process of anglicization had been going on since Strongbow, was not challenged until the rise of the Gaelic League a century ago, and still proceeds today. But emblematically we may take the Ordnance Survey’s reduction of the placenames to meaningless syllables of English as the second great trauma of the sense of place in Ireland. Brian Friel’s Translations is the mythical expression of this second fall. The first, St Patrick’s appropriation of the ancient Celtic lore, was traumatic in that the words, the names, recorded by St Patrick’s scribe – that is, by the whole historical process I am taking him to symbolize – do not have the meaning they had for the followers of Fionn Mac Cumhaill. The landscape of the Celts was inhabited by the wonders and terrors of nature. When one of the Fianna in The Colloquy of the Ancients tells St Patrick that if the leaves of the wood had been gold, the generous Fionn would have given them all away, he is talking about the magnanimity of autumn. The gods and giants and magical animals that inhabit and give their names to the mountains, forests, marshes and springs are not distinct from the moods and potencies of those places themselves. But in St Patrick’s redaction, the version transmitted to us by the missioners of monotheism, the wisdom of these many gods is reduced to fables, to amusing tales, to placenames. Then comes O’Donovan, a few minutes later, as it were, and further reduces the placenames to sounds emptied even of their residual meaningfulness, to whispering husks.

  Is all this just two steps in the advance of reason? An example: Glasgeivnagh Hill in the Burren. The anglicized map-name tells us nothing, not even how we are to pronounce it. Behind it lies the Irish Glas Ghaibhneach, meaning the grey cow. The legends of this fabulous cow concern its inexhaustible productiveness. No vessel could be found that it could not fill with milk, until someone determined to outwit its good nature tried milking it into a sieve. When it failed to fill the sieve the cow died of mortification. The waterfalls that drop from the grey-green limestone hill of Glasgeivnagh into the lush little valley called Teeska are Seacht Srotha na Taosca, the seven streams of the overflowing. The hill itself with these silvery outpourings is the cow and its unfailing milk, and not just that but an image of the nurturing Earth itself, in its vulnerability to abuse and insult. Placenames then are the last faded ghosts and echoes of powers and words of power we have let lapse almost into oblivion. With such consequences as this, that just across the valley from the hill of the sacred cow, at Mullaghmore, the authorities want to build a visitors’ centre for the coachloads of tourists, right in the middle of an exquisite and unspoiled landscape. That would be the real milking of the Burren.

  But even anglicization is not enough to flatten the life out of a name entirely. Yeats’s ‘lake isle of Innisfree’ is I suppose Inis Fraoigh, island of heather; but the attraction of his little poem has a hidden source in that syllable ‘free’. One doesn’t dream-visit his isle for its heather but for its freedom from the cares of the city. That selective amplification of the name’s previously unnoted resonance is the imperious act of a major poet. But in the Irish names, and particularly in the west where the language still lives or at least has not long withdrawn, and the names are still pronounced properly even if not comprehended, we are surrounded by poetic acts as by the flowers of the field. I always record local opinions of the meanings and origins of placenames, even though some professionals would regard this as naive credulity. In the east of Connemara there is a townland called Doirín na gCos Fuar, the small wood of the cold feet. Why, I do not know; a cos can be a small measure of land, and in south Connemara ‘na cosa fuara’ is a term for very poor people; but maybe neither usage is relevant here. Fortunately the locals have the complete explanation. It seems that once a shepherd went into this wood in search of lost sheep, and he was attacked and eaten by a bull; all that was ever found of him was his two boots, with the feet still in them. A macabre invention, indelibly connected with an otherwise unremarkable place. Though in fact the name has other associations for me. I remember first visiting Doirín na gCos Fuar when I was mapping Connemara. An uninhabited wasteland of cut-away bog, dark ranks of conifers in the distance, the autumn afternoon dimming and rain in the air; it looked intolerably dreary, and I had to steel myself to leave my bike by the roadside and set off to tramp across it. At the very first step off the road my foot sank into liquid mud, and as I felt it oozing down inside my Wellingtons I thought, ‘Doirín na gCos Fuar!’

  Thus we, personally, cumulatively, communally, create and recreate landscapes – a landscape bein
g not just the terrain but also the human perspectives on it, the land plus its overburden of meanings. A placename is a few words piled up to mark a spot, draw attention to it, differentiate it from the unmarked; a few stones that fall down after some generations, perhaps for someone to pile them up again, into a different shape. There is a difference between a mere location and a real place, between a placename and a map reference; there may even be conflict between them. Iorras Beag in Connemara, the hill in whose evening shadow I live, clarifies this issue for me. This is the westernmost of Connemara’s hills; beyond it is only a low-lying stony peninsula, and rocks and breakers and the Atlantic horizon. The top of the hill is an inchoate terrain of criss-crossed fault-valleys and fretful pinnacles. At twilight in particular this is a disorientating, spooky place; wherever you stand, there is another peak looking over your shoulder. One of these almost-summits is relatively distinctive, though: An Goibín Géar, the sharp little gob or snout; it sticks out at one side of the hill and once you have had it pointed out and named by a local inhabitant, it is a landmark on the skyline above the village. It is not marked on the Ordnance Survey maps, so I made a point of climbing up to it and standing on it to take some compass bearings of landmarks in the surrounding lowland in order to pinpoint it for my own map. But my compass seemed to have been turned inside out; I could not make head or tail of the bearings I was getting. Later I mentioned this to a geologist and he explained that such a peak attracts lightning, and here the rocks must have been magnetized by a lightning strike. This added to the interest of An Goibín Géar for me. The act of naming, or of learning its name, strikes a place like lightning, magnetizing it, attracting observations and the accumulation of placelore. But in this instance the point of enlightenment had become a place of bewilderment. Among the dancing peaks of Iorras Beag, An Goibín Géar resisted my attempt to locate it. Perhaps others long before me had felt this shape-shifting quality of those summits, for another of them is called Tower an Phúca. I think the English word ‘tower’ is used here and in other hilltop names, rather than the Irish túr. The púca is of course a sort of fairy; it is the goatish practical joker of the Celtic spirit world, that sneaks up behind you, suddenly shoves its head between your legs, carries you off on a wild caper around the countryside, and dumps you, dizzy, in some distant glen, as in the south Connemara song, Marcíocht an Phúca, the ride of the púca.

  Now a few years ago the Ordnance Survey made an attempt to quell this riot of place, by building a little concrete pillar on one of these anarchic summits of Iorras Beag, with a socket on its top in which a radar-like instrument could be firmly and indubitably fixed for measuring the distance to identical pillars on neighbouring hills and offshore islands. This highly accurate triangulation was a first step towards the production of a new range of maps, which are being derived by photogrammetry, i.e. by computer analysis of stereoscopic pairs of aerial photographs. I pile on the technological agony only to heighten the contrast I want to draw, the contradiction between true place, with all its dimensions of subjectivity, of memory and the forgotten, and ‘location’ as established in terms of latitude and longitude or of a six-figure map reference or some other objective, uniform schema. High-tech cartography is a wonderful procedure, and we all draw directly or indirectly on a fund of objective geographical information, which has to be underpinned by an exact topographical data base. It was necessary that that summit be located with such accuracy; and it has been located to within an inch – to within an inch of its life, in fact. One climbs a mountain, drawn instinctively by the magnetism of the highest point, as to a summit of personal awareness, awareness of oneself as a point in relation to as much of space as can be grasped within a maximal horizon. Thus a mountain top is one of the most sensitive spots on earth, of our feelings for the earth in all their depth, elevation and comprehensiveness. A concrete stub demeans it, in a way that the traditional hilltop cairn does not, that stone memory-bank of all the people who have clambered up to that height. So the Ordnance Survey should find some technical fix to minimize the intrusion of the regime of location on that of place. A compromise could of course be found. We all need the topographic fix, and the occasional fix of immensity – of something that perhaps transcends my theme of the nameable and the knowable.

  Does that sound like the complaint of some hypersensitive aesthete or intolerant environmentalist? I hope not, for my aim is deeper. Enquiring out placenames, mapping, has become for me not a way of making a living or making a career, but of making a life; a mode of dwelling in a place. In composing each of the placename instances I have given you into a brief epiphany, a showing forth of the nature of a place, I am suggesting that what is hidden from us is not something rare and occult, or even augustly sacred, but, too often, the Earth we stand on. I present to you a new word: ‘geophany’. A theophany is the showing forth, the manifestation, of God, or of a god; geophany therefore must be the showing forth of the Earth. In the west of Ireland there is a language and a placelore uniquely fitted to the geophany of that land, with its skies full of migrating alphabets, waves that conspire to lift the currach ashore, its mountains like teeming udders, its foot-chilling bogs, the donkey’s bray of its history, its ancient words piled on hilltops. My work is possible thanks to what I have grasped of the geophanic language of Ireland. My work thanks that language.

  11

  Four Threads

  The folk of Aill na Caillí used to say that the heron shrieks on moonlit nights because it is frightened by its reflection in the water. This fact, which I heard from the last man to leave this now deserted coastal hamlet in the south west of Connemara, would seem to lead one immediately and deeply into the lives of his vanished neighbours and their forebears. Nevertheless the generalities of historical geography are needed for its full appreciation. Fishing and mollusc-collecting in Cuan na mBéirtrí Buí, the bay of the yellow oyster-bank, sailing to Roundstone and farther shores of Galway Bay with turf cut from their commonage, feeding the patchwork of tiny pastures and potato plots around their cottages with seaweed shorn off the rocks, the villagers were as dependent as the heron on the complexities of creek and reef, sandbar and mudbank, neep-tide and spring-tide. I am told that when an unusually high tide would wash into the cottage nearest the landing stage, the woman of the house would just pick up the glowing sods of the turf fire and put them in the iron pot hanging on the hook above the hearth until the waters turned and trickled out under the door again. People lived as intimately as fleas in the skirts of the sea, and died there too, unknown to the outside world. Theirs was a harsh and hungry world; the labour necessary to keep life going, to satisfy the landlord’s agent, demanded every daylight hour. Strength was a virtue. A certain round boulder lying on the shore by the landing stage challenged the young men to lift it, prompted boasts about their fathers or grandfathers who had lifted it. The fear of physical failure, of eviction, emigration or the workhouse, must have hung in the night-hours like a cry of despair.

  The great resource of these people, their principal comfort, was an intellectual one: talk, the telling of stories, endless commentary on places and people they knew or had heard of. A close-woven web covering the bare landscape, this rehearsal of lore, a warm and comforting cloak of familiarity the land pulled around itself against the cold night. In Aill na Caillí (the name means the cliff of the hag, where perhaps the ‘hag’ is the green cormorant, not the wise or wicked old woman), the cottage by the landing stage was the resort of the local talkers and listeners; no doubt when the tide came into the house conversation was hardly interrupted for a second by the unusually wet visitor. The people especially prized by these gatherings would have been of two sorts; first, those who made things happen, who generated histories, good or bad, by their energy, courage or rashness, their wit or luck; and then those who could transmit the store of words, the passing boatmen who often spent the night there unlading cargos of rumour, the pedlars who walked the roads and whose anecdotes were the best of the goods they ca
rried, the old men and women who had traveled through time, who remembered genealogies and derivations.

  ‘Express a life that never found expression’; Yeats’s command to Synge, on dispatching him to the west, was absurdly Anglocentric, as Synge must soon have realized; for the life of the common people was not waiting for the English-speaking littérateur to express it; it was and long had been expressing itself voluminously, through words and music. But this oral culture was obscured for the outsider not just by the difficulties of the Irish language in its various dialects, but by its dependence upon a background of local lore, the assumed familiarity of its audience with placenames and personalities, microgeographies, microhistories. What I am trying to recapture is how the people of Connemara felt their countryside, how they read it. It was like a book in fineness of detail, closeness of print; every corner of it conveyed a message, held a memory. Also it was like a board-game or a card-game – you knew every place and person by repute in all their relationships; if you did not, you took steps to complete your hand, your set of pieces. An old woman I have heard of would walk a dozen miles to get a verse of a song she didn’t know. I am hooked on this game too – after seven years of research, I still go to absurd lengths to fill in some little corner of my jigsaw puzzle of Connemara.

  I will illustrate this density of reference through stories and verses about four names much talked-of in nineteenth-century Connemara: those of a smuggler, a rebel priest, a land-agent family, a wandering rhymer. But time itself is shrivelled and feeble-witted nowadays, and we have not the patience to sit by the smoky turf fire with the rain dripping through the thatch, while a language we no longer understand mutters and hawks and spits in the ashes, and stops to redden its clay pipe. Therefore I translate, and abbreviate, and document, and contextualize.