My Time in Space (10 page)

But that was holiday. The next year I came back in March to begin mapping in earnest. My method was simple enough: I
carried
the dozen or so sheets of the Ordnance Survey map that cover the region at six inches to the mile (topographically very
accurate, though out of date, having been last revised in 1913–18), and I walked or cycled everywhere marking in new houses, paths, archaeological sites and holy wells, noting placenames and
whatever
local lore I could pick up. I had done some research
beforehand
, reading through a detailed and captivatingly discursive series of papers the Clare antiquarian Thomas Westropp published in the 1890s and 1900s, in which he set out to describe some of the principal ancient monuments, and was drawn into, as I was to be drawn into, a crazy attempt at full coverage. Westropp describes 310 Celtic or Early Christian ringforts and cashels in this region of some 150 square miles; I located them all on the maps and gave them numbers, and over a period of a few months visited each one to see if it was still extant, and found a lot more in the process. Similarly for the 66
Late Stone Age tombs, which had been
published
in i960 in the
Survey
of
the
Megalithic
Tombs
of
Ireland.
My motive in trying to re-find all these things for myself was not just a concern for scholarly accuracy, it was a way of driving myself into every corner of the terrain – and it brought me sometimes to Eden, and sometimes abandoned me in thorns.

As population and land-use has fallen away over the century and a half since the Famine, hazel scrub, fraught with brambles, has eaten little fields by the hundreds. This secondary woodland appears quite timeless, a denial that culture had ever opened up these areas to the sun. Many of the trees are suspended in death, their rotten branches held in place by a thick glove of moss until one reaches to them for support in a difficult place, and they drop off soundlessly. A delicate haze of Herb Robert’s thin reddish stems and mauve stars floats over the blanket of moss that covers the litter of boulders underfoot and the low mounds of collapsed field walls. With much puzzling and casting about I could often
match the vagaries of these mounds snaking through the shadows with the crackle-glaze of field boundaries on my old Ordnance Survey maps, and use them to orient myself. (In an essay on the Burren I wrote at that time, I inadvertently stated that ‘it is easy – but sometimes rewarding – to get bewildered and go wrong by 360 in these viewless thickets’. But an error of 360 brings one back on course, if one only knew it.) I spent many days badgering through these dim coverts looking for stone cashels which to judge by Westropp’s descriptions had stood in open country a century ago, and which I found literally with my hands and were full to the brim with scrub; I climbed their tumbled but still mighty walls and paraded precariously around them at treetop level. The hazel reaches its most intractable in some of the closed depressions of central Burren, where depths of limestone tunnelled like
wormwood
by long-vanished rivers have eroded and collapsed and been carted away by the Ice Ages. Exploration of one of these evidently left me too tired to write up my diary each night:

In this countryside clogged with the wreckage of its past,
superstition
presented itself with great immediacy. The stories I was
told in so many cottages and fields had not yet sunk back into folklore; they were still news. This man, as a child, had taken all the coins out of a holy well reputed to cure warts, and the next day his hands were covered in warts. That family had built onto the west gable of their house, where the fairy paths are supposed to run, and had had no luck since. Even vision seemed warped by the force-fields of belief. A farmer showed me three low mounds (Bronze-Age barrows, in fact) on his land; ‘They make a line!’ he insisted, even though we were standing on one of them, another was straight ahead and the third off to the left. Similarly for three ruined castles a mile or two apart, north of the village of Noughaval; they ‘made a line’ which seemed to be of some unspecific significance for people of that neighbourhood, whereas on my map they made a rather irregular triangle. The
slua
sídh
, the ‘folk of the mounds’, that is, of the ancient tumuli and ringforts regarded as fairy dwellings, are believed to travel in little
whirl-winds
, on the passing of which one should bow and take off one’s hat, according to Westropp. As it happened my own encounter with them took place within distant sight of two of those dark ragged towers, out on the treeless levels of the townland of
Crag-naruan
. I say ‘out’ because it feels like a long, step-by-step
journey
from the world of roads and houses to reach this unfrequented and hazardous locality, the limestone being riven with fissures
several
feet deep, wide enough to break a leg in and hidden beneath a continuous carpet of moss. It was a hot afternoon, absolutely still except for an almost subliminal bourdon of insect life. I was
picking
my way across this expanse of mantraps, taking bearings of the castles just visible on the horizon since there were no other
features
higher than small hawthorn bushes and the decayed walls of abandoned fields to locate myself by, when I heard a car
approaching. But surely I was a mile from any road? Within a few moments the sound had become that of swiftly flowing water – even more improbable in that desert of karst. Then suddenly the air around me was convulsed, it tugged at my cap and snatched at my map – and the invisible commotion was gone within a minute, rushing away into the distance, leaving all as before.

Sometimes I myself played the role of mischievous sprite. Creeping around in the hazel scrub one day, I found a number of stems recently cut for walking-sticks, and left them propped together in a little pyramid to puzzle whoever would come to
collect
them. Was I trying to immerse myself in this countryside to the point of vanishing? Some passages in my diary would almost suggest this; for instance my first visit to Oughtdarra in the
south-west
of the Burren. This is a valley of extremely complex
topography
ringed about with the ragged promontories and terraces of inland cliffs, every corner of which seemed to figure in scraps of folklore I’d read in Westropp. His succinct description of the place – ‘One of the most complete labyrinths of valleys, cliffs, and
enclosures
, even in the tangled glens of the Corcomroes, lies behind the little ruined oratory of Oughtdarra’ – and the observation of a
person
from that locality I’d met on my travels, that spring usually comes a week or two early to Oughtdarra, combined to instil an enchanting prevision of it into my overheating mind: