Along north Galway Bay

Although we've driven so many roads in this area - nearly all of north and west and south Co. Mayo, it seems - as well as much of northwest Co. Galway  - we've never really explored the area south of the Clifden to Galway road.  We have popped down to Ballyconneely to play golf at the Connemara Golf Links and into Ballynahinch Castle to view a grand old home still operating as a very high-end hotel, but we've never explored the area on the north side of Galway Bay.

On the Westport to Clifden road today

Srahatloe

I felt a particular interest in visiting the area this year having recently been reading Tim Robinson's book Connemara, A Little Celtic Kingdom.  Robinson had just died and I became intrigued with his work after reading a tribute from Fintan O'Toole, a renowned columnist who writes for The Irish Times.  As follows:

The word “geography” means in its origins “the writing of lands”. Ireland was blessed to have had, for almost 50 years, the loving attention of one of the greatest writers of lands.

Tim Robinson, who has died a fortnight after he lost his beloved wife, Máiréad (the M evoked in so many of his works) was a Yorkshire man who came to know, as they have never been known before or since, three Irish landscapes: the Burren, the Aran Islands and Connemara.

Generations of tourists have been guided and enthralled by his marvellous maps of these radiant places. But it is his astonishing books, the two-volume Stones of Aran and the Connemara trilogy, that will stand as timeless monuments to a genius who combined the linguistic brilliance of a poet with the precision of the mathematician he once was.

In fact, though, Robinson called what he did, not “geography” but “geophany, the showing forth of the earth”. His concern was the planet – our luck was that he chose to concentrate his great powers of observation and expression on some small rainy western Irish corners of it.

His subject, as he wrote in his last book, Experiments on Reality, was nothing less than “our aesthetic, corporeal and affective relationships with the Earth”. That is, surely, the most urgent subject of our times, and Robinson was no escapist eccentric. On the contrary, in teaching us how to pay attention to the places we inhabit, his work, for all its depth of erudition and contemplative serenity, has a profound moral urgency.

After his studies in Cambridge and some years as a visual artist in Istanbul, Vienna and London, Robinson came to live on the Aran Islands in 1972. He conceived, as he put it, “a totally unreasonable project of mapping all the land I could see from my home – as if I were so far lost that only a comprehensive universal map would find my place.”

That gloriously unreasonable project produced the two-volume Stones of Aran and the three Connemara books that collectively constitute one of the great literary achievements of our time on these islands.

Perhaps only an English outsider could have given this project such care. “Among the historical roots of Ireland’s carelessness of place,” he wrote, “is the retreat of its language and the accompanying anglicization of its placenames, which have been defaced, rendered dumb and sometimes reduced to the ridiculous. To undo a little of this damage has been for me, an Englishman, a work of reparation.”

What made Robinson so special, and so irreplaceable, was his ability to see what he was looking at with many eyes simultaneously, to take in at once science (geology and botany), art (the fall of land and light on the perceiving eye) and narrative (the history and folklore of the people who inhabit it).

Robinson was in many ways a late flourish of the great English Romantic tradition, an heir to William Wordsworth and Samuel Coleridge. He was “drunk on flowers, on the nectar of their names” and he practiced “the priestcraft of water”. But he was no mystic. He practiced a quiet revolt against the dualism of mind and body: his legs and his ears were every bit as important as his eyes and his mind. He walked the land, he was present in its contours and its weathers, he stopped to talk and to listen.

His personality – gentle, generous, inquisitive, quietly humorous – was important too.

He paid attention to the people who lived in and worked the land as much as to the landscape itself. “A rush of talk like the whirl of starlings coming to roost” – a lot of it talk in Irish – lies beneath his writings, in the stories he gathered, the old (and sometimes not so old) place-names he recorded.

Robinson believed in bringing to bear every kind of knowledge and delighted in the way every place became richer and more complex the more you looked at it and the more you listened to its people. “Every tale,” as he writes at end of the Connemara trilogy, “entails the tale of its own making, generalities breed exceptions as soon as they are stated, and all the footnotes call for footnoting to the end of the world.”

No one has disentangled the tales the stones of Ireland have to tell so deftly and retold them so beautifully. We are blessed that because of his maps and books, the end of Tim Robinson is not the end of the world he came to know so minutely. It will live forever in the gifts he left us.

Roundstone, Carna, Glinsk, Rossmuck - Tim Robinson's Connemara

On our ride to explore this area, we were greeted, unfortunately, with a moody, brooding day - heavy fog, occasional rain, low cloud cover - the kind of weather that obviates long views and stunning vistas.  I never really mind this weather too much - unless, of course, golf has been planned - because it just seems to fit the landscape.  But I was looking forward to high views of the bay and a dramatic distant panorama of the brutal and majestic Twelve Bens of Connemara - the muscular granite mountains that populate the south quadrant of the Irish province of Connacht (or Connaught). 

However, the atmospherics of the day may have better met Tim Robinson's representation of the area - a much more circumscribed and closer look at the land before you. Robinson's book describes the land hill by hill, every stream and lake, every bridge, stone wall and tumbled cottage - and each with its ancient Irish name. An Scailp Mhór - "the big cleft",  Garraí Pholl an Chiste - "the treasure-hole garden",  An Corcal - "the quaking bog", Loch Pholl an Mhaide Giúse - "the lake of the hole of the bog wood."  The weather forced us to keep a close perspective and to note the roughness of the terrain and the constant presence of bogland and of granite - in pebble, stone, and massive boulder.  How very hard it must've been to clear the land and eke out an existence on this cruel and unyielding landscape.

Connacht in green

If you know any Irish history, you'd be familiar with the phrase "To Hell or Connacht."  This phrase expresses the punishing sentiment of the English overlords as they kicked the Irish out of the "Pale" - out literally to "beyond the Pale" - out of the fertile and fecund and developed area around Dublin.  Read this description of the Pale from Conde Nast Traveler - and recall the picture heading the article.  Contrast it with the pictures that I took today.

Connacht is one of the four provinces of Ireland and is comprised of the mid-western counties of Sligo, Leitrim, Mayo, Galway, and Roscommon - a harsh and untamed landscape, battered by the north Atlantic rain and gale winds.  You know how we're relieved in Florida when a hurricane turns out to sea?  Many of these storms turn directly on a fast route to the west coast of Ireland.  They weaken somewhat, and mostly lose their rotation, but they slam into Connacht with an impressive fierceness.

In most areas of Connacht, there wasn't enough farmable land to support a family.  The Irish who were banished to this area had to "build" their own soil by gathering vast amounts of seaweed to mix in with the spongy bog vegetation in order to try to support life-sustaining crops.

For further background on To Hell or Connacht, I share an excerpt from An Phoblacht - a publication which memorializes and celebrates the efforts of the Irish Republicans who rose to defeat the English imperialist forces:

 ''Under penalty of death, no Irish man, woman, or child, is

to let himself, herself, itself be found east of the River Shannon.''

- A 1654 order from the parliament of England.

Three and a half centuries ago, Celtic Ireland was scattered to the winds by an indomitable enemy. The Brehon laws by which the people lived were abolished. Anti-Catholic laws were introduced. The Celtic chiefs were killed or exiled. The Celtic poets were banished. Peoples' land was taken away from them unless they took the Oath of Abjuration - which was an act of apostasy. The people fled, mostly to Connaught. It was simply "hell" east of the Shannon.

Despite colonial oppression, successive generations of Irish toiled and sweated on the rocky bogland and the barren soil of Connaught. For many it wasn't much of a life and particularly during the Famine years, when hundreds of thousands died in the West and others emigrated, it seemed that hell was Connaught itself.

People, however, prevailed, rebuilt their homelands and established communities which survived on mutual aid, sharing and cooperation.

People were not well off, many lived in unhealthy accommodation. Emigration was the generational safety valve. Yet people got by.  They had no choice.

On the way to Roundstone

The road toward Cashel

Granite, rough grass, and a hardy inhabitant

Swampy bogland, suitable only for sheep

Of course, we stopped for lunch.  A delightful veg soup and hearty and humble brown bread.  And a cappuccino that would make a Seattle barista proud.  A nice day out.

Through the Inagh Valley for the ride home.  Nestled between the Twelve Bens
and the Maumturk mountains, and filled with the immense Lough Inagh, it can
be just a breathtaking drive.  And a fisherman's dream.