Setting Foot on the Shores of Connemara (4 page)

I had already heard of old Tomás, the last of his family, who still spent most of his time on the island although he often slept in the houses of various mainland relatives and would probably soon settle down in Ros a’ Mhíl. As I crested the dunes I saw him in the distance on a slight rise, looking about his empty fields, and it was immediately clear that this was how he passed most of his island hours. He was the only moving object in my field of vision, and I in his, though his movements as he watched me approach were merely a scarecrow’s slight turnings and leanings with the wind.

He greeted me courteously when I spoke to him in Irish, and invited me into his house which stood nearby, a little apart from the line of roofless cottages that marked the long axis of the island like the vertebrae of a beached carcass. It was a stone-built cottage of the traditional type, its thatch replaced by roofing-felt, with a loft above each end-room and a central kitchen open to the gaunt roof-space. I sat on the only chair by an empty hearth while he boiled a kettle for tea on a ring set on the nozzle of a gas cylinder. There was nothing in the room except the frayed and bleached wares of the strandline, of which he showed me from a collection of little things on the windowsill a wave-worn cigarette lighter and a small disc of mica. I would be welcome to stay the night, he told me, but when I explained that I had to return ‘by this ebb’ he stood up immediately to show me round the island. As we went out he showed me the trophies he still wins every year for dancing jigs at the local festivals. He moved lightly before me over the low
and broken stone walls of the pallid autumnal fields, in which the twisted rootstocks of wild iris showed everywhere among the scant grass. We looked at the unfenced burial-ground with its graves marked only by little boulders and unnamed except in the oral record which would soon leave the island to fade away with this old man, and of which I jotted down a mere scrap: that the grave in the north-west corner is of a woman, said to have been the first settler here, who was drowned when coming into the island on horseback, three hundred years ago.

We crossed the grassy street of the skeletal village and took a barely discernible path, once called The Scholars’ Road, down to Schoolhouse Beach. Rabbits, flourishing unhunted, had
undermined
the walls of the deserted schoolhouse and it had totally
collapsed
. To the south, the ocean-face, a third of the island was smothering in sand as the rabbits tunnelled the dunes and then ate them bare until the winter gales broke them up and set the sand marching. Tomás showed me where the lads used to play football on green fields when he was young; but the fields had fled since then, revealing low foundations of ancient habitations and the heaps of limpet, mussel and winkle shells left by some shore-folk of the island’s dateless past. On the way back to the house we
lingered
along the strand and examined the offerings of the last high tide. The writing on a plastic bottle we decided was Hungarian. A lavatory-brush puzzled Tomás until I explained its use, which however did not much interest him, and it was for its appearance that he carried it home.

When we reached his house he suddenly dodged inside before me and ran to rap on the bedroom door, shouting, ‘Get up! Get up! Are you all in bed yet?’ – and then turning to me with a
laughing
face flung open the door to show me the room empty save for a blanket or two on the floor. The only adequate response to his joke would have been to promise to stay with him there for the rest of his life, indeed to have settled down, repelled the sands and
repopulated
the island. But the tide of my life was set in another
direction
, and it was already time to walk out of his world.

The second of these little domains with their lunar schedules of opening and closing hours was named after a saint of ancient times
who sailed there from Aran of the Saints itself, and I hoped for miracles from it. It stands in the mouth of a bay near An Caiseal and is reached by the Road of the Islands, a sequence of fords improved into causeways of piled boulders, which links three islets into a mile of tortuous path. Only three people still lived on the saint’s rocky steeps, an old couple too infirm to leave home and a man who preferred to row across to a farther shore of the bay to do his shopping; thus through disuse the Road of the Islands had become – as the woman of the house I was lodging in at the time had told me in her horribly corrupted Irish – ‘cineál rougháilte’, kind of rough. So I had allowed myself plenty of time for it, and came down to the shore to find no sign of it beyond a little jetty of black stones slanting down into the broad and steady outflow from the bay. I sat down to wait for the way to open, which it did, not mechanically like a toll-barrier or park gate, but as a flower does, by change so slow that it lulls, entrances and eludes the attention and thus appears as a number of separate instantaneous and miraculous leaps from stepping-stone to stepping-stone across the flow of daydream. The river-like shifting of water into which the way descended between the shore on which I lay and the islet a hundred yards away was every time I remeasured it with my eye narrower than I had remembered, but its present state seemed so unchanging as to throw doubt on the memory.

Eventually the flood looked as if it might be fordable, so I walked out over the roughly piled and seaweed-covered boulders of the causeway and planted my foot in the current, which pressed against my Wellington boot and rose in a silvery bow-wave that warned me to withdraw, to be patient. And over the next ten minutes stones added themselves onto the length of the causeway, appearing like dark mushrooms growing up through the water. When one or two more had made themselves available in the middle of the dwindling gap I made a few splashy bounds, and the farther part of the causeway took me safely to the shore of the first islet. There was no obvious path across it and I had some tussles with thickets; a few cattle in a marshy hollow looked up but did not finish formulating a reaction to my presence before I was making my way over the ford between their islet and the next. That and the third crossing were no obstacle, but on the
outermost
islet I got into almost impassable complications of sloughs
and thorns and reefs of rock, and the ultimate causeway was a long penance of round boulders wrapped in wet seaweed. I was hot and tired as I climbed the grassy lane that ran straight up from the end of the causeway to the cluster of gables near the top of the saint’s island.

Life has so far withdrawn from these marginal places, leaving few except the old, that I had not expected to find a man entering upon his prime here and still less one who appeared to embody the ideals of those visionary revolutionaries of the turn of the century who dreamed of and fought for a Gaelic nation, alive to its ancient traditions and fiercely independent of the corruptions of modern Europe. This man, another Tomás, thoughtful-looking but open-faced, just returned in his boat from Sunday mass, was sitting in his neat sunny cottage smoking his pipe and
contemplating
the sally-rod baskets he had been making during the week. Before the door was the framework of a currach he was building for the Pattern Day boat-races on another island. We fell into easy conversation, as if it had been my daily habit to drop in on him. I was a little disappointed to hear that the baskets were merely to decorate a pub. However, his contentment with the island life that gave him space for his crafts, and his ready response to my inquiries about old burial grounds, holy wells and such matters were genuine enough. He led me with the leaping strides of one of Synge’s Aran men down the rough flank of the island, while his dog flitted and circled, not so much the man’s shadow as the shadow of his attention as he cast the automatic glance of a farmer about his fields. In a hidden hollow he showed me a little
burial-ground
, long disused and very overgrown, unrecorded on the map, nameless, its graves marked by mere boulders we found with our feet in the long grass, with a pine-tree he had transplanted there flourishing over it and a bit of thornbush in the gap in the wall to keep the cattle out. He thought that most of the graves were of children but that there were some adults buried there too from the
drochshaol
, the ‘bad time’ of the Famine. He asked me, as the Connemara man of Patrick Pearse’s unearthly paradise would not have done, whether I thought the Council would give him a grant for looking after the place, and I told him I imagined they would not, knowing as I do into what extremely small pieces his
executors
have torn Pearse’s will.

While I made my notes – for such a ‘children’s burial ground’ might well be the site of a forgotten Early Christian church, or even some spot of prehistoric sanctity – and puzzled out by means of the field-walls where we were in the spider’s web of lines on my old Ordnance Survey map, we discoursed of other wonders. I asked if there was a holy well on the island, and after some thought he said that there was not, but that there was a well about which there was a doubt as to whether it was holy or not. He offered to show me two strange marks on the rocks on the way to it; one, he said, looked like the print of a heel of a huge shoe, and the other like that of a great bird’s foot. These sounded promising. Curious marks in the rock seem to be less common in granite Connemara than in the two limestone areas I had mapped, Aran and the Burren, in both of which I had trampled miles in
searching
out the imprints of the hoof of a mythical cow, of St Benan’s foot, St Bridget’s knees, St Ísleamán’s hands, St Colmkill’s fingers and even his ribs, as well as the marks left by an entire dinner service down to the pepper and salt whisked away through the air from a king’s banquet by St Colman. In those two wonderful regions where neither the aboriginal rock nor the ancient lore is much obscured by later deposits, it seems that every irregularity underfoot has both a scientific cause and a legendary one, but when I pestered the geologists for more details of the formation of these ‘solution hollows’ it appeared that although they had been classified according to various discordant schemes they had not been fully understood, and that the geological system of
explanation
was hardly less dubious than the hagiographical one.
Nevertheless
such oddities were for me something more than the faintly comic after-images of the wondering mediaeval vision of the world that still persists in such places and that I find so sympathetic, for at such spots two modes of understanding intersect, giving as it were an accurate fix on a point of reality, which therefore could become a reference-point of my own intuitive surveying.

But today I was to be disappointed. The first of the two marks the islander had to show me, the heel-print, in a stone of a
field-wall
near his house, appeared to be natural, but I could add nothing to his description of it and he had no legend to account for it. The second, the bird’s footmark, was in a sheet of bare rock at the highest point of the island, and I could tell him it was the
bench-mark which the old surveyors carved on points the heights of which were given on the map – and that here we were therefore exactly so many feet above sea-level. But for my purposes a
secondhand
trig-point would not do.

The dubiously holy well was in a field largely of bare rock not far away, and as soon as I saw it I knew how the doubt had arisen, and that it would play a part in my own mysterious triangulations even if it would not appear on my finished map. Many of the holy wells of the west of Ireland are not true springs but mere hollows in the rock that hold a little rainwater, sometimes through such long droughty periods that it is easy to share the old folks’ belief that they never run dry. Now only a few days earlier on another island I had seen such a well, dedicated to St Ann, which was a perfectly triangular hole just a few inches across. The granite of this region is cut through by long slanting fissures that run in various directions, and there three such planes, happening to
intersect
just below ground-level, had left a tetrahedral piece of stone isolated between them to be plucked out by the glaciers that scoured the region during the Ice Ages, or dissolved away by trickling rainwater in subsequent millennia. The puddle we were now looking at was another, rather larger triangle, and just as it had immediately appealed to me as being custom-built by Nature for my personal system of co-ordinates, it must always have seemed to the old folk of the island to relate to the St Ann’s well which they would have visited, and therefore to bear some
significance
, which in this case it appears had never become explicit, for there were none of the usual accumulation of little objects – pebbles for counting the ‘rounds’ of prayer, coins, holy medallions, teacup-shards, horseshoe nails – that mark a well at which wishes are efficacious, and the young man had no qualms about letting his dog drink from it. And although I am acquiring a reputation in these countrysides for my devotion to the cult of blessed wells, I did not feel I could pronounce on the genuineness of this one, precious though it would be to me.

By the time the islander had finished naming for me all the inlets and headlands visible from this height, the state of the tide was on my mind. I said goodbye and thanked him, and walked on down to have a quick look at a cluster of roofless cottages on a steep slope above a little bay. The overgrown kitchen gardens and
lanes around them trapped me in brambles and ambushed me with tottering walls, and it took me so long to work my way through them and around the coast to the beginning of the Road of the Islands that I felt I should hurry. Then the three islets flustered me with clifflets and pockets of bog, and in the end I went so far astray on territory disputed between marshland and seabed that I began to imagine that the final causeway to the mainland must already have been submerged, and that I would have to bellow until someone launched a boat to fetch me off. But then the
causeway
came in sight, a broad firm path still well above the waters, with the look of one saying calmly, ‘You could have taken another hour, or half an hour at least,’ or even, reproachfully, ‘By hurrying you risked something more than being stuck on an islet for a few hours. You might have blotted the ironies of your meeting with today’s Connemara man, or even mislaid one of the co-ordinates of your dream.’