The Burren

Friday, 7^th October was the last full day of this trip I would spend in the hundred and fifty or so square kilometres of limestone plateau south of Galway Bay known as the Burren.  I had decided to spend the day, which had dawned exceptionally clear and sunny, exploring nearby.  Hitherto, during the eight days I had spent there, I had but hurried through much of the Burren on my way to places further afield.  I could comfortably have spent every day and more of my stay just strolling around the Burren but preferred, on this my first visit to Ireland, to get something of a  broader-brush idea of the country.  Consequently I had to compromise; to make sacrifices to time.

At least five thousand years of history have been written, much of it tantilisingly enigmatically, in the stones of the Burren.  Deforested for agriculture as early as Neolithic times, the topsoil of the area has long since blown and eroded away.  Nonetheless sparse populations have continued to survive, farm and leave built evidence of their presence in this rather bleak environment.  My first impression of the Burren was one of a wasteland of bare, wind-swept rock, littered with large boulders and latticed with dry-stone walls.  The Burren is far from this.   Glacial action and subsequent rainwater erosion has engraved the limestone surface with deep fissures in which grasses and other plants flourish to provide nutritious fodder for grazing animals. 

P. J. Kavanagh wrote of the Burren as, “ . . . a desert which is not a desert - cattle fatten on its limy grasses, and in spring Arctic flowers jostle with Mediterranean ones, sheltered in the cracks of its limestone slab”, while Cromwell’s surveyor reported to his master, in typically grim Cromwellian language, that it was, “a savage land, yielding neither water enough to drown a man, nor a tree to hang him, nor soil enough to bury”.

Poulnabrone dolmen is the structural remnant of a 2,500 year old burial chamber, one of a great number of dolmens, stone rings and standing stones dotted around the Burren that provide evidence of the area being occupied during Neolithic times.  Many of the Burren’s extensive stretches of dry stone wall are also believed to be of Neolithic origin.  The Burren is also rich in ruins and sites of several early Christian and mediaeval churches, abbeys, monasteries as well as many castles, intact, ruined and restored dating, from the 11^th to 17^th centuries.  

Site of church dedicated to St Columba, 6^th century^. 

Founded, early in 7^th Century, by St Colman Mac Duach, the visible remains of the monastery at Kilmacduagh are largely mediaeval.  The leaning round tower, which dates from the 12^th century, is the highest in Ireland.

  

Excursion to Roundstone

For the first time since last Thursday when I arrived here in County Clare I woke yesterday morning to a blue sky and bright sunshine.  Predictably it did not endure; within half an hour a deluge of exceptionally heavy rain was drumming on the roof of the cottage.  A keener photographer than I would have been outside taking photographs of the incredible patterns of light and shade cast by puddles of sun and heavy rain on the tweedy coloured hills opposite but I settled for the dry comfort of the cottage and my morning ‘kick-start’  -coffee and a chocolate chip-cookie.

Within another half hour the sky had cleared, the sun was shining and cotton-wool clouds were being scudded across the sky before a brisk north-westerly wind.  It would be a good day, I reasoned, for a drive to Roundstone, a fishing village on the Galway Bay coast of Connemara that I had put onto my provisional itinerary for several reasons.  One of which was that a friend who knows Ireland well had told me not to miss going there, ‘its a gem of a place’ she had said.  Another was that I knew Roundstone to be the home of author Tim Robinson whose ‘Stones of Aran’ books may, when I first read them back in the early 90s, have planted an early seed of interest in visiting Ireland in my mind; had his Connemara trilogy, the last book of which has only recently been published, been available at that time I may well have made a point of coming here years ago.  But the greatest incentive I had to drive to Roundstone was the prospect of something fishy for lunch at O’Dowd’s.

The weather continued to see-saw rapidly between periods of low visibility, heavy rain and wintry gloom under dark clouds, to bright sunshine and vistas of sparkling mountain and bog under blue skies festooned with all manner of wind-blown scudding clouds. 

That a society of folk blessed with a facility for noticing, admiring and enjoying the beauty of a natural landscape are capable of doing so much to spoil it seems, to me, to be something of a paradox.   Much  of the north shore of Galway Bay, in particular the first stretch of the road leading west from Galway city, has been all but scenically ruined by the imposition of far too many inappropriate buildings; architecturally tedious, extension and conservatory carbunkled boxes in which folk can sit behind huge windows to enjoy the view, not of the beautiful landscape they perhaps hoped to enjoy, but of dwellings at least as architecturally tedious as their own!  What I thought particularly sad was that a few old thatched cottages have survived in more or less good repair.  These buildings, small, low-density, ‘organic’ cottages, built to take advantage of sheltering hollows rather than ‘the view’, illustrate how buildings can, and not so long ago did, enhance, rather than ruin, a landscape. 

At Balllynahown the road turned inland, away from the bungalow-blanketed rocky shore of Galway Bay and into the earthly paradise of mountain, lake, stream and bog that is  recognizably Connemara.  The road narrowed to a twisting undulating single track across the bog and other traffic all but disappeared.

Near Rosmuc Village I stopped to visit the cottage which writer, poet and Irish patriot Patrick Pearse built as a summer retreat.  Here he entertained several of those involved in the 1916 Easter uprising.  He chose a beautiful spot for his summer getaways.  For me, it is difficult to imagine how an armed revolution, careless of bloodshed,  could possibly be considered in such a beautiful, peaceful place.  But Pearse was, along with all irishmen of his day, an oppressed man and, I imagine, to be oppressed is to be desperate for freedom at any price.

Roundstone was the delight I had been promised.  Above a small harbour sheltering several colourful boats, village shops, hostelries and houses are strung along a low cliff overlooking Inishee island.  Prominent among these buildings is O’Dowd’s bar and restaurant.  O’Dowd’s was far less formal than I had expected it to be.  The ‘Seafood Platter’ I ordered there for my lunch, a medley of several kinds of fish and seafood, including generous samplings of noticeably fresh salmon, crab, prawn and mussels, on a crisp mixed green salad, more than confirmed the establishment’s reputation for excellent food.

The accompanying Guiness was . . . .
Well, Guiness, about which, here in Ireland, there is nothing more that needs to be said!

Connemara

Yesterday, a more or less overcast day, I drove to Connemara.  I have read a good deal about the scenic beauty of Connemara, its mountains, lakes and sea inlets  I have seen many beautiful paintings and excellent photographs depicting its landscapes but the landscapes I witnessed around me yesterday as I pootled along generally empty roads, exceeded in scenic beauty every preconceived idea I had ever held of the place.  Not only did every turn of the road bring forth a stunning new landscape, views were also subject to continual and infinite  changes of light that filtered through varying thicknesses of wind-driven cloud and squally showers of rain. Connemara is a stunningly beautiful place to be; exhilaratingly so.

I could but reflect, however, as I drove through this earthly paradise in the comfort of my well appointed four-wheeled shelter, on how those wretchedly poor souls driven here in the seventeenth century, almost certainly to perish, might have viewed it. Today, Connemara’s raw, natural beauty owes much to its being devoid of signs of the hand of man; some sheep, some evidence of peat cutting but little else.  In the sea estuaries fish-farming is evidently a prospering business but even the fruits of the sea were denied to seventeenth century refugees who were forbidden to go within three miles of the shore.  How those who survived the journey West managed to build shelter and grow food, beggars belief.  Most, of course, did not; they simply disappeared, further advancing the Lord Protector’s exalted place in his God’s heaven.  With God’s like that waiting for me I would prefer to take my chances without one; compared to a paradise with men like the Lord Protector in, albeit secondary, authority an eternity of haunting the bogs, hills and lakes of Connemara may not, it seems to me, be such an awful prospect.  

   

There be nothing there - only sea . . .

"Is this the road for Tawin?"  I asked the fellow as I passed by him.   My "Tay-win" seemed at first not to register with him but he was obviously a smart enough fellow to be able to make allowance for my extraordinary pronunciation.  "Tawn" he said, "is it Tawn you be looking for?  I told him that I probably was and he confirmed that if I carried on in the direction in which I had been travelling I would eventually reach "Tawn".  "But there be nothing there; only sea",  he told me.  "Sea will be fine",  I assured him.   And so it was.  West Tawin - a rather fine single arch stone bridge connects it to mainland East Tawin - is the the island tip of a low peninsular covered with fields divided by stone walls which stretches out into Galway Bay towards the Atlantic.   For a while I paddled around there on the amazingly soft lush turf contentedly lost in the huge land, sea and skyscapes all around and above me.  The hitherto persistent cloud was breaking up and clearing from the north.  I could see that Galway town, across the bay from me, was in bright sunshine; things were boding well for a fine evening.

And so yet again it was when, later, I stopped at Kinvara, a seaside town with a pretty harbour, across the water from which is a fine sixteenth century castle; yet another 'tourist attraction'. Adjacent to the castle is a rather more than adequate tarmacked and white-lined car and coach park.  I understand that tourist revenue is the only source of income with which to maintain venerable buildings and that the vast majority of twenty-first century tourists, myself included, tour in cars or coaches needing to be parked, but huge areas of tarmac, littered with ugly multicolored pressed steel and plastic vehicles do little to enhance the atmosphere and sense of history of a place.  Having achieved its raison d'être the 'attraction' becomes a victim of its attractiveness and enough of its integrity to become, for sensitive folk at least, something rather less than attractive.

For a long while I leaned on a harbour wall, bird watching and essaying to take acceptable photographs of the birds that were pecking about among the rock pools and seaweeds below; various gulls, curlew and plover.  My camera, I am sure, is well up to the task, the man behind the camera has yet much to learn about telephoto photography!

Just as I was about to climb into my car, which I had parked at the end of the harbour, and leave Kinvara a wedge of swans flew low and slow over the water passing within a few yards of my hiding place by the wall - a would-be photographer's version of the angler's 'one that got away' story!

A grey day

Today the cloud base remained at, or close to, ground level throughout the day.  A lot of people were out and about; Sunday excursionists.  Were they not indifferent to the weather, the Irish would, I suppose, never leave their home, or local pub, firesides.  I too had ventured out, with plans to visit nearby Neolithic sites, of which there are many hereabouts, and to drive along the coast to enjoy spectacular views of what are billed as the imposing Cliffs of Moher.  Frustrated by low visibility and a wet atmosphere my plans did not come to much but I did look in at the remarkably intact remains of the 1,000 year old Caherconnell Stone Fort and a recently excavated Neolithic structure adjacent to it.
Perhaps the inclement weather added something to the atmosphere of the strange, seemingly infinite limestone pavement of the Burren but it did little for my enthusiasm to explore it.  The cliffs of Moher are described in the Rough Guide as 'awesome'.  As maybe, but they were invisibly so and cliff top hotels and boarding houses with names promising views of Galway Bay, the Aran Islands and the Atlantic Ocean  today looked out onto  nothing more than a blanket of grey mist.
I may not have had too much enthusiasm for becoming lost in the mist but my sprits have remained high.

Caherconnell

Enigmatic Neolithic structure adjacent to Caherconnel

A day of being

Today has been sunless, still, overcast and wet but I have enjoyed my day immensely.  This morning I spent writing in the cottage.  This afternoon I donned the hat and calf-length raincoat I bought yesterday at Ennis and went out into the mist and rain in search of the remains of an early Christian church I understood to be somewhere across the fields from the cottage.  As seems to be the case with a great deal of the Irish countryside, this area is littered with built evidence of human occupation and use and continuity of ideas since at least neolithic times.  The most recent of these, satisfying a human need of an explanation for being, for some kind of god, is the seamless transition from Pagan to Christian.

Adjacent to the church is a stone shrine believed to be older than the church and to mark the grave of St Cronan

Despite the remoteness of both the cottage and the church the stroll to it is remarkably well way-marked; first along tarmacked country lanes and then through fields divided by stone walls well provided with ancient-looking, lichen-covered stone stiles. The ruins of the small now roofless but well maintained church, dedicated to St Cronan of Roscrea, or Tuamgraney, possibly date from the 12th Century.  A number of interesting romanesque carved heads have been built into the walls of the church. Adjacent to the church is a stone shrine believed to be older than the church and to mark the grave of St Cronan.  As may be but, in common with so many ‘sacred’ places, the paddock containing the church and shrine did, for me, exude a powerful ‘atmosphere’ of peace and well-being.  Today this feeling was somewhat enhanced by my believing, not without some concern, that I could hear there, or  above the song of a Robin and the alarm call of a frightened Wren, almost hear snatches of ethereal sounding music.

I wandered along what passed as a path for a short distance beyond the church and stumbled upon a spring and a wishing well, concreted and obviously, judging by the healthy layer of coins at its bottom, very much in current use. Beside the ‘well’ was an earthen mound topped with a broken standing stone.

Returning to the cottage, I lingered at the roadside to gather rain-washed blackberries and while doing so was relieved to hear, loud now, the source of the ‘ethereal music’ I had imagined I had heard earlier; from a nearby cowshed I could clearly hear far from ethereal sounding pop music being blasted out from a radio within.

Hurrying back to the cottage under a lowering cloud base with rain falling with increasing determination I stopped briefly to photograph one of my hardier neighbours (Top photo).  As I did so a flock of Curlew appeared from out of the mist behind me, wheeled above, piping mournfully, then flew low over a stone field wall to fade back into the rain-mist from whence they had come.  This timeless awareness of the continuity of existence of all things, both animate and apparently inanimate, is something of a reality I think I may have been drawn here to find.

Static - for a while

This morning, for the first time since, almost three weeks ago, I was on the ferry to Venice, I am feeling sufficiently relaxed to essay a blog post. Since my landfall at Venice I have been more or less continually moving. This had not been my intention but, in my case at least, the circumstances of travel have been mind altering.  I had not expected the drive across Italy into France to be as easy as it happened to be.  Arriving in France early in the evening of my first day of travel towards Ireland encouraged me to abandon my original plan, to move gently north and west, in favour of a new plan; to reach my chosen objective, Ireland, as soon as possible.

Shortly after emerging from the Mont Blanc tunnel I turned of the main road and booked into the delightful Aiguille du Midi at Les Bossons near Chamonix.  Delightful in every respect but accordingly expensive, providing further encouragement to hurry on.

On the outskirts of Laon, a mediaeval town I have long wished to explore, I booked into an adequate if utilitarian hotel, equally expensive as the Aiguille du Midi but considerably less delightful.  I would have liked to stay at Laon for a while and may, one day, make a dedicated visit but this time I had resolved, with some regret, to press on.

Only four days after leaving home, at about two o’clock on 16^th September, I drove out of the shuttle train into the bright and sunny Eurotunnel terminal at Folkestone.  Shortly after I was enjoying, in an old haunt of mine, the Rose and Crown at Elham, a delicious pint of Kentish ale.

Since the idea of making Ireland my ultimate destination first entered my head, I had intended to visit en-route my sister in Scotland, a diversion made easy for me by having family and friends living at strategic distances along the way.  An so it was that I broke my journey north at Canterbury, Boston and Glossop.

After spending four pleasant days with my sister I took a two hour catamaran ferry trip from Troon to Larne.

Ireland surprised me. I had expected it to be little different from Scotland, it is not, after all, so far away but it felt very different. Heading for the Giant’s Causeway I drove north along a beautiful coast road that snaked between the sea on my right and a patchwork of small, neat fields on the rolling hills on my left.  Near Bushmills I booked into Islandcorr Farm B&B, which should have been an ideal base from which to write, sketch, paint and dream but, tired and disinterested, I did none of these things. I did however get some much needed exercise. During the morning of what was reported to be the warmest day of the summer I walked north along the lower coast path at the Giant’s causeway to the point at which it has been closed.  In the afternoon I walked the whole of White Park beach, a huge stretch of tide washed sand on a part of which cattle were contentedly loitering; something I had never seen before.

From Antrim I headed, on a dreary and sometimes wet day, west and south through Derry, Donegal and Leitrim to Sligo where I loitered to pay my respects to Yeats.  From Sligo I drove on through Mayo and Galway arriving in the early evening of 29^th September at the Burren, County Clare where I have taken for a while a small, very basic, but adequate cottage.

Needing adequate ‘gear’, a waterproof coat and hat, and a means internet connection here I spent my first full day at Ennis, Clare’s largest town where I found everything I needed.

Ennis, in common with every town I have driven through in the Free State, is a wonderfully colourful collection of small independent shops and bars.

This is not much of a post and is certainly not the kind of post I hope to be making while away on my search for whatever it is for which I am looking but I wanted to have it out of the way; to clear the way perhaps for the kind of introspective posts I had come here to Ireland in part to essay to make.