Setting Foot on the Shores of Connemara

by Tim Robinson

  And so on. The local carpenter is called in, and replaces the burned leg with a huge hourglass-shaped thing four feet long; Seymour protests he isn’t a piano. … The story goes down well when I retail it in Roundstone, and perhaps when all Henry Robinson’s oppressions have been forgotten, his contribution to the grotesqueries of Connemara will be relished still.

  To wrap up my worrying about the Robinsons, I quote a verse of a song about carraigín, an edible seaweed Connemara people used to gather on the shore and sell in Galway market. I have never heard it sung, or met anyone who knows the rest of it, but this much is remembered:

  Dá mbeadh dhá mhaide rámha

  Agus báidín agam fhéin,

  Rachfainn ag baint charraigín

  Is á thriomú leis an gréin.

  Bhéirfinn taoscan dhe go Gaillimh

  Agus taoscan ar an tráen,

  D’íocfainn cíos le Robinson

  Is bheadh brabach agam fhéin.

  If I only had two oars

  and a rowboat of my own,

  I’d go and gather carraigín

  and dry it in the sun.

  I’d send a load of it to Galway and another on the train;

  I’d pay the rent to Robinson

  and keep the profit for my pains.

  So Robinson didn’t extort the last penny, at least in the softer, latter times. For the honour of the name, I’d like to think so.

  ITINERANT RHYMER

  Thinking of the different trajectories out of which I am seeking to reweave the old Connemara – O’Malley‘s exuberant wake, Father Miley’s hare-like startings, the Robinsons’ staid mainroad clip-clop – it seems unlikely that any two of these persons ever met. But the prodigious life-span and roving habit of Colm de Bhailís, craftsman and poet, may well have brought him under the notice of all of them. Hitching a lift to Aran in a turf-boat, he might have seen the Captain’s sloop flying before the revenue cutter; he might have been aware of an anxious stirring in the loft of one of the isolated cottages he worked in; he might have had to step respectfully off the road and doff his cap to seanRobinson or even to Master Henry. Born in 1796, two years before the people of outer Connemara saw the French fleet go by to Killala, as is still remembered, and dying in 1906, when the tenants of the Berridge estate were boldly pressing for the land to be divided between them, he saw the country go down decade by decade into the pit of the Great Famine, and its agonizingly slow recovery.

  Colm de Bhailís lived in the south Connemara island of Garomna – five or six square miles of bog, its rim transformed by the labour of generations into a lacework of plots and pastures. Since poverty has compelled the inhabitants not only to dig away the peat for sale as turf to Galway city and Aran, but to cut and dry the ‘scraw’, the surface layer of living vegetable matter, for their own fuel, the underlying granite is now naked and gleaming, or covered only in a thin straggly web of heather and furze. And, like many eroded landscapes, this is one of severe beauty; sometimes in the long days I spent exploring it I stopped and stared, confounded by its sharp horizons biting at the sky, its lakes reflecting high-piled emptiness. The ragged stone walls of the de Bhailís potato gardens are still pointed out among little hillocks in the far south-western corner of the island. Nowadays Garomna is linked by causeways via two other islands to the mainland, but in those days to walk out of the island it was necessary to wait for the exceptionally low ebbtides that follow the new moon or the full moon, and then to slip and stumble over half a mile or so of seaweed-covered rock and mud. During the Famine many people died while waiting thus to escape from the island, waiting for the moon. I have been shown their graves, little heaps of stone on the stony shoreline.

  Such is the background of the poet whom Patrick Pearce described as ‘a naive, sprightly, good-humouredly satirical personality, a peasant living among peasants, who sings like the lark from very joyousness and tunefulness of soul.’16 And under that good humour the realities of deprivation show, like bones sticking out. ‘Amhrán an Tae’, the song of the tea, is a comic dialogue between wife and husband, she addicted to tea and he to tobacco.17 He says, ‘Musha, you’re always talking about tea, and when you have it no one else sees any of it; be off and get me some tobacco or I’ll give you a touch of the spade-handle!’ She replies, ‘How can I do that but by selling two chickens that laid yesterday? The stuff you got on tick at Christmas isn’t paid for yet, and that’s running short for the children.’

  An Fear Maise, bionn tusa i gconaí ‘cur sios ar an tae, ‘S an lá bhios sé agat, ní fheictear a’at é; Imigh leat ‘s faigh tobac dam ar mhaithe leat féin, Nó roinnfidh mé leat feac na láí!

  An Bhean Cia an tslí atá a’am-sa? Cá bhfaighinn-se duit é, Acht ag ceangal dá chirc a raibh ubh aca aréir? Rud a thóg tú faoi Nollaig, níor íoc tú fós é, ‘S tá an méid so sách gann ag na pàistí.

  After a dozen verses of argument they go to law, and end up as laughing-stocks; ‘But,’ says Colm, ‘I suppose the children died’:

  Ach ceapaim gur cailleadh na páistí.

  A story about Colm is told in the Aran Islands, where he used to do odd jobs (he had a great reputation for building chimneys that drew well). On this occasion he was in Inis Meáin, the middle island, where he had work to do on several houses. It was the custom in those days to do a few hours’ work before breakfast. Colm finished the job on the first house before breakfast time came, and the woman of that house assumed, or pretended to assume, that he would get his breakfast in the next house. But the people there took it that Colm had had his breakfast already. So Colm worked away quietly for a bit, and then he turned to the man he was working for and said, ‘What is the name of this island?’ ‘Why, this is Inis Meain!’ he replied. ‘Ah,’ said Colm,

  ‘Inis Meáin, inis gan ‘rán

  Inis gann, gortach;

  Tabhair leat do chuid ‘ráin

  An lá ‘mbeidh tú a’ dul ann,

  Nó beidh tú an lá sin i do throscadh!’

  [Inis Meain, island of hunger and wanting. / Have bread in your pocket / The day you make your visit, / Or you’ll spend that whole day fasting.]

  The poet’s satire was a fearsome weapon in the Gaelic wordworld, and Inis Meáin has never forgotten Colm’s little verse. Perhaps that is why its penury has not stopped it being the most hospitable of places, as Synge found when he stayed there.

  Tailoring, I am told, was the easiest trade to take up in the old days, for all you needed was siosúr, miosúr ‘s méaracán, scissors, tape-measure and thimble. Tailors were often despised as being unfit for hard physical work. Once when Colm was working in a house in Ros Mue, there was also an itinerant tailor there, a miserable little fellow nicknamed An Bás, death, and Colm was annoyed to find that he had to share a bed with him. The next day the woman of the house promised Colm a quart, no less, of poitín if he would make up a poem about the tailor before bedtime. The result, ‘An Bás’, is one of his best-known productions. He praises the house highly: ‘If I were to pass the whole of spring there, I’d think it but a fortnight – But it’s there they made me up a bed / in which to talk with Death.’

  Dá gcaithfinn ráithe an earraigh ann

  Comharfainn nach mbeinn seachtan ann,

  Acht is ann a coireadh leaba dhom,

  Ag cómhra leis an mBás.

  Talking with death must have been a familiar domestic situation for Colm de Bhailís, who outlived his wife and his son and must have seen most of his neighbours starve. In 1901 Colm went into the workhouse at Oughterard; he was so old that, although his songs were still sung, most hearers would have assumed their author was long dead. But by that time the outside world was beginning to take an interest in the Gaelic oral tradition, and the Gaelic League had been set up to revive the dying language. Patrick Pearse, who often visited Ros Muc and had heard Colm’s songs there, discovered to his surprise that their author was still living. He raised a subscription, the Gaelic League bought a cottage for the ancient poet, and his works were
written down and published for the first time. But Colm’s health soon failed and he had to return to the workhouse hospital, where he died at the age of 110.

  One could say that Colm de Bhailís and his like represent the last step in the decline of the bardic tradition: from the great Munster poets of ‘Hidden Ireland’ one descends to blind Raftery sitting in the drinking houses of Galway, ‘face to the wall, playing tunes to empty pockets,’ in the words of a verse attributed to himself – and then, down with a bump, the step one had forgotten at the foot of the stairs, to the rustic wit of Colm de Bhailís. But this is no doggerel; his jaunty rhythms and rhymes lend themselves to singing, and, more to my point, his themes grow out of the stony Connemara ground itself. I end with a glance at his best-known song, ‘Cúirt an tSrutháin Bhuí’, the court of the yellow stream. A peculiarity of many of these old songs is that, to make any sense of them, one has to know circumstances of their composition not explicit in the song itself; the song is the kernel of a nut, the shell of which is a dense fabric of personal histories and place-names – not always the most digestible of stuff, but without it the kernel loses its savour. The ‘yellow stream’ of this song is a tiny thread of water running out of the bog between two hills in the island of Leitir Móir. Colm was caught in the rain there once, and made himself a little shelter of sticks and clods of grass. Then, to pass the time, he made up a song praising this ‘court’ in wonderfully high-flown terms:

  Is deas an féirín gheobhtha gléasta

  Cúirt an tSrutháin Bhuí,

  Ar talamh déanta ar dheis na gréine

  I bhfoscadh ó ‘chuile ghaoith,

  ‘Bhfuil a ghairdín pléisiúir le n-a taobh

  A dhéanfadh óg de’n aois,

  ‘S go bhfuair na táinte bhí gan sláinte

  Fóirithint ann le mí.

  [How fine an ornamental treasure, / Is the Court of the Yellow Stream, / Built on land blessed by sun / And sheltered from the wind. / So that the pleasure garden by its side / Would make the old feel young, / While hosts of invalids / Found succour there for a month.]

  And so on it goes, heaping up extravagances for verse after verse: Queen Victoria is mad with rage since hearing praise of its roof, sailing ships with favouring winds bring the Queen of Sardinia, all is prepared with golden gates and company fit for a king, and finally Martin Luther himself comes begging for pardon at the Court of the Yellow Stream. The strange thing is that this fantasy is sung to an air of passionate, almost tragic intensity. But one could understand the implicit tragedy to be the disproportion between these people’s material circumstances and their life-capabilities. The poet of south Connemara ended in the workhouse, but he had built a house, a Court in fact, that no agent could raise rent on, and the artistry that goes into singing its merits, even today, is as glorious as the furze that blossoms on his granite island.

  * * *

  In trying to convey something of the old, gossipy, intimacy between this countryside and its inhabitants, I have had to patch the cloak of oral history with evidence from document and photograph, for the inter-generational conversation, which persisted through the Famine and to a degree survived the retraction of Irish into its present narrow quarters, has been broken up by our easy comings and goings and our well-fed indifference. I would like to offer Connemara its lost memories, but fear to denature them; I am troubled by my translation of the homely glow of the turf fire, in which each thing is only the more richly what it is for being half shadows, into the even, comparativist, light of a computer screen with its implicit worldwide connections. However, today’s Connemara breatnes the global gale of information, ana it there is any way home for a contemporary society to a known landscape, it detours all over the earth’s surface. Perhaps, though, we have to eke out the concept of home to cover all that route. If the old Connemara is irrecoverably lost and no equivalent can be constructed, my four left-over threads from it can serve only on that wider loom.

  NOTES

  1 Amhráin Chlainne Gael, collected by Micheál and Tomás Ó Máille (Dublin, 1905; republished, ed. William Mahon, Indreabhán, Connemara, 1991).

  2 The original Irish is quoted in Hidden Connemara, ed. Erin Gibbons (Connemara West Press, 1991).

  3 Richard Hayes, The Last Invasion of Ireland (London, 1939).

  4 ‘Na Buachaillí Bána’, in Ratftearaí: Amhráin agus Danta, ed. Ciarán Ó Coigligh (Dublin, 1987).

  5 Annála Beaga ó Iorrus Aithneach, collected by Seán Mac Giollarnáth (Dublin, 1941); my translation.

  6 Quoted in Hayes, op. cit.

  7 Information from Ruairí Lavelle, Clifden.

  8 Mac Giollarnáth, op. cit.

  9 ‘Aifi Mhac Ghiobúin’, author unknown, in Micheál Mhac Suibhne agus Filidh an tSléibhe, ed. Tomás Ó Máille (Dublin, 1934); my translation.

  10 Thomas Colville Scott, Connemara after the Famine: Journal of a Survey of the Martin Estate, 1853, ed. Tim Robinson (Dublin, 1995).

  11 Colm Ó Gaora, Mise (Dublin, 1943, 1969); my translation.

  12 Galway Vindicator, 12 June 1880.

  13 Kathleen Villiers-Tuthill, Beyond the Twelve Bens (Clifden, 1986).

  14 Galway Vindicator, 5 May and 2 June 1880.

  15 The Rt Hon. Sir Henry Robinson, Bt, KCB, Further Memories of Irish Life (London, 1924).

  16 An Chlaidheamh Sholais, 8 August 1903.

  17 Amhràin Chuilm de Bhailís (Dublin, 1904, republished 1967).

  12

  Botany – a Roundstone View

  The view from Roundstone, or from Errisbeg, the hill overlooking Roundstone Bog – consists mainly of heather, and so I’ll restrict myself to heather today. I will describe a sort of chain dance of plants and humans, interlinked by their roles in the odd history of discovery of the rare species of heather found here. This then is a cultural ecology, with comic interludes.

  For the amateur like myself the identification of these rarities is tricky. Here’s the trick. Hold the specimen in one hand and insert the following key:

  1 Much the same as any other heather Same but bigger 2 Erica erigena

  (Mediterranean Heath)

  2 Spelling mistake in Latin name Daboecia cantabrica

  (St Dabeoc’s Heath)

  Vericaceous 3

  3 Not to hand Just like any old heather E. ciliaris (Dorset Heath)

  E. mackaiana (Mackay’s Heath)

  The reason you don’t have E. ciliaris in your hand is because it’s only found in one spot, which is a state secret, and it’s illegal to pick it. In general these Ericas are best told apart by their extreme similarity to the common sort, E. tetralix.

  I cannot deal with their ecology, their curious Atlantic distribution, the puzzles of whether or not they show up in the pollen record since the Ice Age, or any of the sensible questions that make them endlessly fascinating to botanists. Instead I’ll tell the story in which they figure in conjunction with some human characters. I start with the tall one, E. erigena, which used to be called E. mediterranea, and also E. hibernica. In English it is the Mediterranean Heath, though its affinities are more coastal Atlantic than Mediterranean. However, I can reveal that its real name is French Heath. At least, a shepherd here has shown me a little stream valley on the north east of Errisbeg called French Heath Tamhnóg. A tamhnóg is a small tamhnach, a patch of cultivated or cultivable land in the middle of a bog. This patch may have been cleared as a summer milking pasture, a ‘booley’, in the old days, but now it’s a small forest of Mediterranean Heath, and no doubt some farmer or shepherd heard from a visitor and misremembered its name. Apparently this plant was first collected by the great Welsh Celticist and natural historian Edward Llwyd, who visited Connemara in about 1700. Then it was rediscovered here by J.T. Mackay, the director of the TCD botanical garden, in 1830. Those pioneer botanists didn’t do things by halves; Mackay sent a hundred and fifty samples of it to Sir W.J. Hooker at Kew. When Robert Shuttleworth, a young English medical student acting on Mackay’s behalf, came here in the following yea
r, he collected a cartload of it. However, there was and is plenty; as Shuttleworth writes, ‘I found E. mediterranea covering a very large extent. My young guide told me that on St Patrick’s Day the whole bog was white with it.’ Oddly enough it did have a use, which is still remembered. A botanist called Tomlinson writing in 1910 records that ‘the heath had in many places been ruthlessly uprooted, and was lying about in withered heaps’. He subsequently discovered that this had been done by the small farmers of the surrounding lowland in order to procure suitable bunches for potato ‘Spraying’ purposes, most of those concerned being too poor to purchase spraying machines.

  That ‘young guide’ mentioned by Shuttleworth could have been Roundstone’s native botanist, William McCalla, to whose grave all botanists visiting Roundstone make pilgrimage. My information on him is drawn from papers by Alan Eager and Maura Scannell, and by Charles Nelson. McCalla’s father kept the hotel here; he was a retired veteran of the Peninsular Wars against Napoleon, a Scot, and a great drinker. Roundstone was largely a Scottish foundation. The Scots engineer Alexander Nimmo, who designed the harbour here for the Fisheries Board and planned the road system of Connemara, bought the lease of this area and sublet plots to people who would build houses along the street; he is also said to have brought in Scots fishermen and fishwives. There was soon a Presbyterian community here, and young McCalla, who was born in about 1814, was educated to be a teacher in a Presbyterian school nearby, funded by the Martins, the big landlords of Connemara. The various botanists who stayed at his father’s hotel, and the interest caused by the discovery of E. mediterranea, may have influenced him to study botany. Soon the experts were finding him an invaluable guide and a source of specimens. Then he began making his own discoveries. Collecting litter for his cattle one day he noticed a slightly different heather on a hillock called Na Creaga Móra, in Roundstone Bog a few miles north of the village. When Charles Babington, the Cambridge botanist, visited in 1835 McCalla took him to see E. mediterranea, and the next day showed him the new heather. Babington was very impressed by McCalla; he wrote that ‘this young man, although labouring under very great difficulties, has by his own exertions, and with an almost total want of books, obtained a very complete knowledge of the geology, mineralogy, conchology, and botany, of the neighbourhood of Roundstone’. Babington also sent samples of the heather to Mackay, who forwarded them to Hooker at Kew, saying that McCalla ‘promised to be a useful person in the country.’ Eventually it was named E. mackaiana after Mackay, who one could say was indirectly responsible for its discovery through his encouragement of McCalla.