by Tim Robinson
However, McCalla was not content just to be Mackay’s ‘useful person in the country’. He soon went to Dublin and worked under the botanist David Moore for the Ordnance Survey, but after a few months he was dismissed for giving away specimens of finds to Babington and William Thompson. That seems harsh punishment for a minor indiscretion; perhaps the naive young Connemara man had strayed into the field of some professional infighting.
After that he worked supplying specimens to Dr Scouler of the Royal Dublin Society, and then at Scouler’s suggestion he wrote to Hooker at Kew proposing himself as leader of a botanical expedition to New Zealand. Hooker was impressed enough to agree to pay him at the going rate of £2 per hundred species, even though his testimonials were mixed. Moore wrote that McCalla was an indefatigable collector etc., but ‘he wants industry, taste, and a due sense of honorable and faithful motives. So much so that I fear he will lose many of his specimens after they were collected and statements by him will require to be received with the very greatest care.’ Scouler was prepared to finance the expedition, or at least to put up the £20 fare to New Zealand, and another £20 for 30 reams of paper. However, McCalla never quite got around to setting off. Scouler was annoyed to find that he had started collecting algae for sale and had caught a cold in the process. He felt that McCalla was perfectly honest – and unlike his father never touched the drink – but ‘he is far too simple and from his ignorance of business habits apt to be imposed upon.’ Scouler still hoped that ‘this wild man I have caught in Cunnemara’ would soon be on his way – but a couple of months later McCalla was again under doctor’s orders at Malahide, having got soaking wet gathering algae. Eventually Scouler wrote to Hooker that he had given up on McCalla, whose ‘incorrigible habits of procrastination and his cowardise … have worn out my patience. He made it a point to do nothing today which could be deferred until tomorrow and to do nothing for himself while there was a chance of someone else doing for him.’ McCalla candidly agreed with this assessment, acknowledged that Scoulter was justified in withdrawing his patronage, thanked him, promised to repay the money he had received, and came home to Roundstone. His big adventure was over.
After that he worked on his algae, on which he was an expert, and in 1845 published the first of two volumes on the topic, which won him a silver medal. In the following year another of the rare heathers was discovered, probably on Na Creaga Beaga, the small crags, the next hummock to the west of Na Creaga Móra, the big crags, where E. mackaiana grew. A visiting botanist found the plant, but it was McCalla who identified it as the Dorset Heath. These were the Great Famine years; Connemara was being depopulated. Yet there were still visitors, and McCalla made a bit of a living selling them prepared specimens of the locality’s famous flora, until, in 1849, he was carried off by the cholera epidemic that followed the Famine. He was aged thirty-five. His tomb is in the Presbyterian churchyard, up the lane to the north of the Protestant church. The chapel, the Kirk, itself was knocked down some decades ago, and McCalla’s tomb is the most notable of the few that are still traceable. But it is in danger of falling down; and it would be fitting if the botanical community made a move to restore it.
An odd fact about E. mackaiana is that it was discovered in Spain just months after its discovery in Ireland. That’s an impressive victory for the theory of Morphic Resonance – you remember that some years ago this theory was propounded to explain such observations as that once a new chemical substance has been crystallized for the first time, it suddenly becomes easy for laboratories all over the world to do the same; similarly once something abstract has been thought out in one place, the same idea will strike elsewhere. This all comes about through the propagation of morphic fields, fields of pure form, through space. If you prefer something less exotic than Morphic Resonance, it would be interesting to enquire out the personal networks, interlinking with the Roundstone one I am talking about, centering perhaps on Hooker, which by spreading general ideas about classification and specific floristic expectations, brought the discriminating gaze of botany to bear on the same rare plant at the two ends of its range at the one time.
I skip back to the discovery of Erica ciliaris, the Dorset Heath. (I am basing myself here on an article by the late Professor Webb.) Everything combined to make this discovery harder and harder to credit. First, in 1839 a Mr Nash of Cork had sent out specimens of three rare heaths he said had been found in his own county. When Babington unexpectedly visited Cork and wanted to see these marvels, Mr Nash’s excuses were varied: the site for Erica ciliaris he said had been ploughed up; that for Daboecia cantabrica, St Dabeoc’s heath, had been burnt over; that for Erica mackaiana had been destroyed by baryta mining. Then J.F. Bergin found the unfamiliar heather in Roundstone bog that McCalla identified as E. ciliaris, and later McCalla showed it to another botanist, J.H. Balfour of Edinburgh, who very briefly announced its existence in an article in The Phytologist in 1853. But thereafter for a long time, although several eminent botanists came to search for it, none saw the plant, and doubts arose. So Balfour came back to try to confirm the record, and got very confused as to which bridge he had found it near, along the road across the bog north of Errisbeg. Eventually he came to the conclusion that he had identified the correct bridge, but the stream there had now been banked and the site destroyed. Subsequent writers were of the opinion that Bergin had been ‘the victim of an imposition’ (was McCalla the suspect?) and that Balfour’s specimens had been mislabelled in the Edinburgh herbarium. Erica ciliaris was thenceforth filed among ‘unverified records and missing plants’.
When David Webb was working on the distribution of E. mackaiana in Roundstone Bog, he kept an eye open for other things too, and became convinced that the ciliaris record was incorrect. Then in 1965 he accompanied a student, Michael Lambert, to a place where the latter had noted some ‘very large E. mackaiana’ – and it turned out to be E. ciliaris. (The version I heard was that Webb and his students were standing in the bog, and Webb said he didn’t suppose there was much chance of finding ciliaris among all these thousands of acres of heather, and one of the students said, ‘What about this?’ – pointing at their feet – and there it was, immediately identifiable, of course, by its being just the same as all the rest.) Now, there are only about five tussocks of it, covering an area the size of a tabletop. It is more or less where Bergin claimed to have seen it, but the site only matches Balfour’s description if one assumes he was completely muddled when he mentioned a bridge nearby. Is it the same colony, that has been stumbled on three times in a century and a half? It was nearly wiped out by a fire shortly after Webb’s rediscovery of it; it is also very vulnerable to disturbance and even to the interest of professionals, who all want just a little sprig of it. A local naturalist has told me that to ensure its survival he has taken bits and planted them on various islands: I think he is lying, but future finds of it might be suspect, and so might the present known station. Did McCalla have access to specimens of ciliaris? Might he have been tempted to use them to renew his flagging career? A libellous suggestion about Roundstone’s native son! Roundstone Bog has been repeatedly traversed by experts engaged in mapping the distribution of E. mackaiana, and no other ciliaris sites have ever come to light. The one known station is close to the road, which looks suspicious. On the other hand if it were not close to the road it would most likely never have been seen.
Botanists will not reveal this location to the casually curious. I had to persuade a botanist – we’ll call her Erica – to show me the site, which she would only do on condition I was blindfolded. So off we went in her all-terrain vehicle for hour after hour, driving round and round, me bouncing around in the back with the Kalashnikovs and machetes; I don’t know where we went, but three times I smelled Guinness and fish and chips. Then we walked round and round in the bog for hours. Eventually she said ‘This is it!’ I was very moved. I can’t describe the plant, since the blindfold was not removed; but, to trip over, it feels subtly the same as any other heather
.
Meanwhile, mapping the exact distribution of E. mackaiana continues to attract a lot of effort; I’m not sure why. Praeger, David Webb, Maura Scannell and David McClintock, Charles Nelson, and several others, have added to the sum of knowledge on the question; now Micheline Sheehy-Skeffington has just shown me the latest distribution map of it in Roundstone Bog, from Errisbeg to the edge of Clifden, compiled by her student Liereke van Doorslaer. The original site was on the bog road about halfway from Roundstone to Clifden, and the known range has gradually been extended both north and south of the bog road. This has led to it becoming the best known and most controversial plant in the history of Connemara since, say, the potato. Partly because of these rare heathers, the area of lowland blanket bog south of the bog road has long been designated an Area of Scientific Interest. Then in 1987 the ASI was extended to take in an area of bog – the same bog – north of the bog road. This was done by the scientists of the Office of Public Works’ Wildlife Service. However, the OPW bureaucrats then left the redrawn maps sitting in their out-trays until January 1989, and did not even inform the County Council. They excused themselves later on by saying that they were short of staff and the index to the maps wasn’t ready. Unfortunately in that period some businessmen of Clifden decided the town needed an airport, and that the ideal site was on the corner of the bog nearest to Clifden. Three months after they had applied for planning permission and when their scheme seemed to be well airborne and had gathered enthusiastic local support, it was discovered that the airport site was within the new bounds of the ASI. Of course ASIS as such had no legal standing, but the Council tended to adopt them into the County Plan, and European funding was being sought, so in practice the ASI designation grounded the scheme. A mighty row broke out; single-handedly the OPW by its inefficiency had created an anti-environmentalist backlash in Connemara. For us local environmental activists it was a difficult time; we cursed the OPW but had to fight their battle for them to preserve the bog from this intrusion. After a judicial review, which the Clifden businessmen quite deservedly won, the whole ASI system nationwide has been declared unconstitutional, and is now being replaced by a new sort of designation.
The airport company had, of course, had to commission an Environmental Impact Report. The bit of bog in question was examined by botanists and zoologists and other sorts of ’ists from REMU in Cork, and lo and behold REMU’s conclusion was that in general this was an uninteresting corner of the bog, whose loss would not be of significance. The REMU botanist did not notice any E. mackaiana on the site, although the nearest known station at that time was only a few hundred yards away – but the Connemara National Park personnel looked over the site as well, and found acres of E. mackaiana, together with its hybrid with E. tetralix. The Environmental Impact Report therefore ended up with this embarrassed mention of the plant: ‘This heather, including its hybrid E. stuartit and St Dabeoc’s Heath, were identified by OPW personnel and validated by REMU personnel.’ Perhaps it was REMU who were the more in need of validation. Of course, then, E. mackaiana became a pawn in the arguments for and against the airport – not an easy argument to conduct on our side, for the airport lobby quickly grasped the essential scientific fact about the stuff, that it’s indistinguishable from ordinary heather. It certainly didn’t obviously count as interesting ‘wildlife’. As one woman said to me, ‘If the Wildlife Service is so keen on the place why don’t they buy it and put some wildlife on it?’ Wildlife is zebras and elephants, not heather. Another airport supporter used to perform at the public meetings they held in all the villages; he would wave two bits of heather to prove that Erica mackaiana grew all over the mountain behind his own house miles away at Letterfrack. This ridiculous plant it seemed was standing in the way of progress. A poem was written about it in the local paper; I’ll give you a few lines from it:
BOTANICAL PRISONER
Now the voice of Bureaucracy thunders yonder,
I have set a boundary to the nation,
I don’t cherish my children equally.
The prognostic perception of Parnell and Pearse perishes,
Homo sapiens has a captive audience
A prisoner of Erica mackaiana.
The airport scheme did not get planning permission, and I can tell you E. mackaiana wasn’t Connemara’s favourite plant; it became the symbol of obscurantist and incomprehensible intellectuals and especially of ‘self-appointed experts’ with funny foreign names like Matthias van Schouten, who were denying Connemara its place in the twentieth century and wanted it to be depopulated by emigration and overgrown with heather. I think, though, E. mackaiana will never again bloom as it did that summer. The highpoint was its appearance at the annual Clifden fancy-dress ball: the prize for the best costume went to someone dressed as Erica mackaiana.
That concludes this Roundstone set-dance of human beings and heathers. In the last figure, a human takes the appearance of a heather which already bears a human’s name.
13
Through Prehistoric Eyes
A raven materially outweighs a peregrine falcon – but in the scales of honour, the invisible scales of air poised above a precipice, the falcon is predominant.
I witnessed this one spring a few years ago, in the Twelve Bens, the mountains at the core of Connemara. I was accompanying a friend who was researching the breeding birds of high stony and boggy places, in an exploration of a magnificent valley called Gleninagh which runs up into the heart of the mountain range from the east. The cliff, hung like a great curtain between two peaks of its south-western perimeter, boasts the longest rock climb in Ireland: Carrot Ridge, so named from an episode in which more carrot than stick had to be used to get a certain climber up it. No combination of carrot and stick would induce me to try, but I have walked along the top of it, the col called Mám na bhFonsaí, or the pass of the rims. On this occasion, as we approached the foot of the cliff, a pair of ravens flew out from a crevice high up on its left-hand side, and my bird-man remarked that since the ravens had not built their nest in the prime site, the very centre of the cliff, we could expect to find peregrine falcons nesting there. And sure enough a peregrine falcon soon appeared over the top of the cliff – a much slighter bird, a fluttering dot against the bright sky, insignificant until you noticed how fast it was crossing your visual field – and it dived at the ravens once or twice in a perfunctory way, not seeking to damage them but just to remind them of their place.
In the good old days that the Prehistoric Society* exists to commemorate, there would have been a pair of golden eagles on the cliff as well; but the principle of precedence would have been the same; these things were settled long before human eyes were turned up to them.
It had already been a rich day’s walk. Coming up the track past the valley’s only farmhouse, we had seen the menfolk of the Bodkin family planting their potatoes. Bodkin is an ancient name in County Galway; the family came in with the Normans. However, I don’t believe they have been in Gleninagh for more than a few generations, although to see them building spade-ridges, that ran at forty-five degrees up the hillside and seemed to be composed of nothing but stones, one had an impression of a way of life of chthonic immutability. Farther on, we sat down to drink our coffee, on the sunnier flank of the valley. As we rested, my eyes went straying, grazing with the sheep and spring lambs, across the floor of the valley; and were brought up short by a row of little bumps on the profile of a low ridge a few hundred yards away. Something regular, it seemed, something organized, contrasting with the sprawling topography of the bog; evidently worth investigating. We splashed across wet places and climbed the bank, which proved to be a glacial moraine crossing the valley; the stream meandering down the valley has had to cut a sharp little ravine through it, about fifty feet deep. And there on the crest of the ridge was a line of six boulders; roundish, sack-shaped, glacial boulders of quartzite. There was no doubt about which way the line pointed; the largest – it was only waist-high – being at one end, and distinguished f
rom the rest by the streaks of white quartz in it. I knew enough to recognize this as a Bronze Age site – there is another very fine alignment in north-west Connemara, and a smaller one in the Joyce Country to the east – and I was excited by the discovery, because nothing of the Bronze Age had at that time been found in central Connemara. So I busied myself pacing it out and taking its compass-bearing, playing the amateur archaeologist instead of using my eyes. The orientation was about south-south-west, and did not appear to me to be of much importance, because the line was pointing vaguely at the high wall of mountains. In any case I was prejudiced against the idea of the astronomical significance of such structures, which I felt was often merely the projection of the archaeologist’s suppressed superstitions onto the sensible folk of the prehistoric past.