Setting Foot on the Shores of Connemara

by Tim Robinson

  14

  Taking Steps

  Pausing to catch my breath near the top of Derryclare Mountain in Connemara a few years ago, I turned to look across the boggy plain below that stretches southwards and breaks up into islands scattering out into the Atlantic. A few miles away, Cashel Hill, an isolated pyramid not as high as Derryclare, arose out of these lowlands, dark against the light-flooded distances. I noticed that, from where I stood, the top of it was exactly level with the ocean horizon. That meant that a straight line drawn from my eye to the summit of Cashel Hill would go on to graze the curve of the Earth’s surface, like a tangent to a circle. Surely, I thought, I could calculate the radius of the Earth from this observation, given the height of Cashel Hill and the height of the point I was now at, which I could read off a map. So, when I got home that evening I drew a few little diagrams, and resurrected from my schoolday memories one of Euclid’s theorems about circles, and found that, indeed, the calculation would have been quite simple, had I remembered to mark on the map where I was when I made the observation, which, unfortunately, I had not done.

  However, I have no intention of reclimbing the mountain in order to find that spot again, since it is only the theoretical possibility of the calculation that excites me. Further, I now realize, I have no need to refer to maps for the heights and distances needed for the calculation; there is near my house a long level stretch of road with a clear view of both Cashel Hill and Derryclare Mountain; I could walk, say, a thousand paces along this road, and take sightings of the two mountains from either end of that distance, and with a bit of trigonometry arrive at rough estimates of all the data I need. Thus I could calculate the size of the Earth in terms of my own pace, without recourse to maps, astronomy or even the magnetic compass. Of course the result would be highly inaccurate, but that is not the point; obviously if I really need to know how big the Earth is I can look it up in an encyclopaedia. What is of value in the thought-experiment is the relationship it brings into consciousness between my body and the globe of the Earth.

  Perhaps one reason this might seem significant to me is that for over twenty years now I have been living in and exploring with manic attention a rather limited patch of that globe: the Aran Islands off Galway Bay, the Burren on the south shore of the bay, and Connemara to the north of it. And if the countless footsteps I have taken in these three terrains have not in some sense carried me beyond their horizons, if the work I have done there does not have that wider relevance, then I have cast away a large proportion of my life.

  The published outfall of these years comprises three maps, of Aran, the Burren and Connemara, a number of booklets and essays on the history, placenames and folklore of these places, and a fat, two-volume book devoted to just one of the Aran Islands, Árainn itself. Since the second volume of this book, Stones of Aran, has now appeared, and I have no interest in taking the mapmaking techniques evolved as part of my response to specific places and turning them like a torchlight on some other territory, and no idea at present of how to create a work of literature out of my vast accumulation of material on Connemara, this present period is one of retrospection and evaluation for me. And I have to start on that task from where I am at this moment, writing this letter.

  The nearest thing to me is the cat, Nimma, asleep on my lap as she usually is whenever I’m typing. Warm cat and humming Apple Mac are inseparable sensations for me. A small terrier, Squig, is lying by the radiator. At the other end of the room my partner in life and in business – I’ll call her M as I do in my writings – is pecking out a column of VAT figures. This cosy, homely, efficient set-up is called Folding Landscapes; it publishes the maps and some of the shorter prose-works. There are windows along two sides of the room, and the other sides are internal glass screens that reflect the windows, so that Folding Landscapes itself is enfolded in the landscape, or the landscape is folded into it like eggwhite into batter. All around me I see sample rectangles of Connemara; the waters of Roundstone Bay, silvery grey today with a wind-driven crosshatching of darkness, and beyond them dim purple silhouettes of mountains, the Twelve Bens, their heads thrust into banks of cloud. Our workspace is at sea level; I sometimes have to break off to watch an otter eating a fish on the rocks of the foreshore, yesterday there was a red-breasted merganser appearing and disappearing among waves, and once we were able to look down on a little auk, blown in from the ocean, submarining just below the windowsill. When the wind is strong from the east, spray taps on the pane; twice, when a prolonged gale pushing water into the bay has coincided with an equinoctial spring tide, the sea has seeped through the floor, leaving the carpet feeling like sphagnum moss underfoot and spoiling a few books, but doing no lasting harm. On summer evenings, with a full moon rising from the hills across the bay, glimmers of reflected moonlight ripple across our ceilings. On still frosty winter nights the outside looks in at us balefully; the bay seems brim-full of black poison, the reflected moon a stream of livid necromantic symbols swimming towards us and dissolving as they reach our shore. I love living beside these glamorous tides, living on the edge of the habitable habitual.

  In reality we are much more sheltered here in Connemara than we were on Aran, where we spent most of our time between leaving London in 1972 and coming to the mainland in 1984. There the storms broke unimpeded against our cottage, the whole fetch of the Atlantic behind them. As we learned on our very first day – it was mid-November when we arrived – an Aran squall of hailstones cannot be faced; one has to turn one’s back, shrug the shoulders up over the ears, and creep in under a field-wall until it is over. That move from West Hampstead, from a life that had a structure and impetus quite uncoupled from the seasons of the year – I had been pursuing a career in an unprofitable but prestigious avant-garde sector of the visual arts, while M was studying and working in arts administration – to Aran, where weather ruled over practical affairs such as whether or not the steamer arrived from Galway and there might be bacon or sugar in the shops, and tended at first to dictate our personal lives, our moods, our decisions to walk or read or stay in bed, precipitated me – and I can only follow my own story here – into a directionless state in which I was prey to anxieties and obsessions. But it was the place itself that suggested a way out. Aran is extraordinary in so many ways – its limestone polished by glaciation into a mirror of geological theory, its floral rarities flourishing the characteristics by which they might be looked up in Floras of the Aran Islands, its rambling, ramifying paths like invitations to explore, the Irish language teasing with inimitable sounds and cryptic, Celtic allusions – that I was soon lured into trying to understand the island, by its promise that this project could never reach an end. Accumulating impressions in a diary, I became a writer; and then, noting placenames and routes and locations on paper, a cartographer.

  My first crude map of the Aran Islands has led onto better-informed versions, and also to maps of the other two great terrains visible from Aran: the limestone uplands of the Burren with its countless remnants of all prehistoric ages, and Connemara of the riddling coastlines and interior solitudes. But I have not set myself up as a regional rival to the official mapmakers, the Ordnance Survey, and this for two reasons. First, I need the Ordnance Survey’s topographical accuracy as a basis for my own constructions of these landscapes; I do not want to spend my life remeasuring the toothy perimeters of these tiny fractions of geography, and my net is spread to catch other features of the world, including the otherworld itself as it shows itself through folklore and legend in this one. And secondly, the usual conventions of map-symbolism – the precise-looking smoothly sweeping contours, the generalized colour-coding of areas for height or vegetation-cover, the hard-and-fast line of high water mark, to mention but a few, all useful in particular contexts – add up to a spurious claim of universality and objectivity, and I am ready to trade in some of this scientistic legibility for a measure of freedom of expression, room to doubt.

  Perhaps it is only in hindsight that I can justif
y my choices of technique in such terms. Nevertheless it does strike me now that these black-on-white maps, in which shingle banks and beaches and bogs and crags and lake water and mountain heights are all represented through thousands of dots and dashes and twiddles and twirls, are elaborate disclaimers of exhaustiveness. Everywhere are these minute particulars of ink, mimicking the rough, the grainy, the oozy or the dazzling, the sensuous modalities of walking the Earth’s surface; while, equally everywhere, the white, the abyss of the undiscovered, shows through. Also, it occurs to me that there is at least a coherence between this style of drawing and a cluster of images that surface everywhere in my writing, centering on the human pace, the step taken, as in the beginning of this present letter. Though I have probably taken more steps about and on my three western marches than most of their born inhabitants, I have not put down roots in any of them. Roots are tethers, and too prone to suck up the rot of buried histories. I prefer the step – indefinitely repeatable and variable – as a metaphor of one’s relationship to a place. The big book I have spent most of my Irish time on, Stones of Aran, is through-composed in terms of steps; the first volume, called Pilgrimage, being a walk round the coast of the island; the second, Labyrinth, working its way with incredible tortuosities through the interior. Another, shorter work is called Setting Foot on the Shores of Connemara. This controlling imagery is not entirely something I have freely chosen to elaborate, and it could become a knot-garden I have to cut my way out of. Perhaps I do need to quit these worn ways and trodden shores, to test these ideas elsewhere, to travel in search of that impossibility, the view from the horizon.

  I know that the step, which is only one in a linked set of images of lateral extension – the walk, the path, the labyrinth, the spider’s web – is not some poetic flower picked of my own creative fancy by the wayside of my life, because, looking back, I see it implicit in the work I was doing in London. One of these, a project that was never realized in fact, I called a structured arena; it would have been a concrete floor in the form of a frozen wave-pattern, the regular distances from wavetop to wavetop imposing a choreography on one’s walking across it. Now it seems to me like a prevision of the bare limestone crags I loved to walk across in Aran, on which one’s paces pick up a pattern from the regular alternation of deep fissures and smooth surfaces of rock. Another London work, also strangely like my later experience of Aran, consisted of a hundred simple geometric shapes cut out of board, a yard or so across, black on one side and white on the other, which were exhibited on a black floor in a blacked-out gallery; as the public – participants, not spectators – found these shapes and turned them over, so a dimly luminous terrain was formed and reformed underfoot. This was called ‘Moonfield’, because it was inspired by those almost indecipherable black-and-white TV images of the first moon-landing. How long ago it seems, how antiquated and dusty, that ‘great stride for mankind!’ I wrote about it at the time in terms of lunar paradoxes: ‘One flies towards a symbol of inconstancy, ambiguity and madness, to alight on a surface of weatherless scientific candour; after the longest voyage one steps from the space-craft into an indoor environment, that of the hermetically sealed, sound-proofed, sterilized laboratory; the first exploratory step alters what is to be explored more than a million years have done.’

  Then there was a work only a few visitors to my studio saw, for it was done when I was already withdrawing into myself from the London artworld: a yard-long white rod, hanging vertically in the middle of the room, very still, suspended by a multitude of taut coloured threads. This represented for me then a single pace taken towards the centre of the earth. Now it rhymes mysteriously with my experience on Derryclare Mountain.

  Clearly, then, a devotion to footsteps was something I carried with me on that decisive step from city to island. Indeed a related image comes back to me from much earlier days. I must have been eight or nine – old enough anyway to have learned that the Earth spins in space, and seemingly to have picked up Newton’s Law that action and reaction are equal and opposite – when it occurred to me one day that it was the effect of all the people walking on it that made the globe turn. I soon realized, of course, that the net outcome of those multitudinous tiny impulses in all directions would be zero. That was my rational mind forming itself, by closing itself. Now I can open it again to that image of the world’s endless random turnings under the feet of its inhabitants. Since it seems that such thoughts came with me to these western corners, perhaps I do not need to go beyond present horizons to test them further. Perhaps I will not travel. But mentally I am already turning the globe, this way, that way.

  Sources

  ISLANDS AND IMAGES

  This is a lightly reworked version of an essay written for The Geographical Magazine (London, December 1976) to mark the publication of my first map of the Aran Islands. Several themes in it concerning the big island were subsequently enlarged upon in Stones of Aran. I have added some anecdotes from my diary, that lapse of time now authorizes me to publish, about the two smaller islands. Of course many changes for good and ill have taken place since the period I am describing. The original title has been restored (it appeared as ‘Aran Surrounded by Water’, which annoyed me at the time but now seems quite acceptable).

  SETTING FOOT ON THE SHORES OF CONNEMARA

  Written in London in 1981 as a private memorandum, according to my diary, ‘to convey the strangeness of my experience, & the degree to which it seems to happen inside me, as if the people I met were my own creations. But what seems graspable when I lie dreaming back over it sifts away like fine sand between my fingers when I sit down before the cold clattering typewriter.’ I am happy that Antony Farrell later carried it off to inaugurate Lilliput’s list (Lilliput Pamphlets / 1, Mullingar 1984).

  THE VIEW FROM ERRISBEG

  This piece formed the Connemara and Aran chapter of The Book of the Irish Countryside (Town House and The Blackstaff Press, 1987). I have curtailed some historical material dealt with in greater detail in ‘Space, Time and Connemara’.

  CROSSING THE PASS

  The Burren chapter of The Book of the Irish Countryside (1987). I have amended one or two obsolete remarks, rearranged some other material slightly, and thrown in a badger for good measure.

  SPACE, TIME AND CONNEMARA

  Written for my Connemara, Part 1, Introduction and Gazetteer, Part 2, a one-inch map (Folding Landscapes, Roundstone, 1990). It was also published in Eire-Ireland (Vol. XXIV No. 3, St Paul, Minnesota, Fall 1989) with unforgivable sub-editorial blemishings, and, restored, in The Mayo Anthology (ed. Richard Murphy, Castlebar, 1990). The title of this brief and tender evocation of a little patch of territory imitates another, the awesome comprehensiveness of which inflamed my childhood ambitions, though I was and am quite unable to read the work in question: the cosmologist Hermann Weil’s Raum, Zeit, Materie.

  6 INTERIM REPORTS FROM FOLDING LANDSCAPES

  This appeared in The Bulletin of the Society of University Cartographers (Vol. 20, No. 1, Reading, June 1986) and in The American Geographical Society Newsletter (Vol. 9, No. 1, New York, 1989). I have recast one or two passages to avoid overlap with other essays in this volume. As to the trifling formula into which I sought to compress all the pathos and challenge of cartography, I had left it unsupported, as a minor infraction of the bounds of the literary (‘Never apologize, never derive!’); however, I will risk a line of proof here. If S is the scale of the map, then T cannot exceed St, and M is at best m/S. Hence MT *** mt, which is a fixed amount given one’s means of representation. There is a teasing parallel with the Uncertainty Principle here.

  7 A CONNEMARA FRACTAL

  A talk given at the first Conference of the Centre for Landscape Studies in University College, Galway, 1990. A short version was published in Technology Ireland (Vol. 23, No. 3, June 1991), and a fuller one in Decoding the Landscape (ed. Timothy Collins, Galway, 1993). The reminiscence of Besicovitch and the attempt to explain fractional dimensions have been added more recentl
y. In fact this piece seems still to be in evolution; it could become a book on Connemara, or on various other things.

  8 ON THE CULTIVATION OF THE COMPASS ROSE

  Another very private meditation started in about 1979 and taken up again in 1990. It later came in useful as an intervention or interruption in a debate of mind-numbing cautiousness as to the proper definition of cartography that was occupying the professionals; I sent it to The Cartographic Journal with the suggestion that ‘Cartography was the cultivation by graphic means of the compass rose’, and was as surprised as I was delighted that it was accepted (Vol. 29, No. 1, British Cartographic Society, June 1992). It also surfaced in Decantations: A Tribute in Honour of Maurice Craig (Dublin, 1992).

  PLACE/PERSON/BOOK

  The introduction to my edition of J.M. Synge’s The Aran Islands (Penguin Twentieth-Century Classics, London 1992).

  LISTENING TO THE LANDSCAPE

  A talk first delivered at the 1992 Merriman Summer School, ‘Something to Celebrate: The Irish Language’, and published in The Irish Review (No. 14, Belfast, Autumn 1993); the present version was given at Ireland House, New York, in 1994.

  FOUR THREADS

  This piece originated as ‘Secret Connemara’, a talk with slides and cassette recordings of folksongs, my contribution to the 1994 Toronto Conference (strangely entitled ‘The Haunted Ark’) of the Canadian Institute of Irish Studies; in recasting it as an essay I have added a layer of self-questioning.