Setting Foot on the Shores of Connemara (29 page)

In fact I am tempted to boast that, in the whole prehistory and history of the valley, there have been two creative events; the first, the setting-up of the alignment, the second, the rediscovery of its significance. However, I must note a slight discrepancy, to see if it amounts to a loose link in my argument. The midwinter sun
actually
misses the very lowest point of the col; it passes just a degree or two above it and vanishes behind the mountain slope on its west. Part of that discrepancy represents a small change in the
orientation
of the earth’s spin over the last 4000 years, due to the gravitational influence of the other planets; for just as a child’s top nods and wobbles, so the earth’s axis bows all around itself in a cycle lasting 26,000 years, and the depth of the bow varies slightly, in another cycle lasting 40,000 years. The angle between the plane of the equator and the plane of the earth’s orbit round the sun – the obliquity of the ecliptic – has decreased by about half a degree since the Bronze Age, so that the midwinter sun now rides a little higher in the sky than it used to. Thus the whole vast system has got slightly out of focus since the alignment was built. But
realizing
that fact is like readjusting the focus, toning up the valley once again, bringing it into sync, not just with the order of the seasons but with the earth’s orientation in the cosmos.

As to the preservation of such a landscape: evidently the first necessity is to keep the sightlines clear, the rays of connection uninterrupted. Obstacles can spring up with amazing rapidity if one is not vigilant. In this country we are particularly afflicted by sitka spruce and interpretative centres. Not that I’m against all such centres – the Céide Fields pyramid seems to me to effect in itself a focusing, valid in that stupendous landscape of sprawling bogs and streeling clouds. But as for the accursed Mullach Mór, it would have been not so much an interpretative centre as an
interruptive
centre. Interpretation calls for a knowledge of the
language
, and since the language of the Burren includes such terms as strangeness, and silence, and mystery, obviously foreign to the mentality of those who wanted to site the centre out in the area to be interpreted rather than in one of the nearby villages, all it could have offered would have been an impertinent interruption. The Mullach Mór scandal makes one wonder if the idea of an
interpretative
centre is of devilish origin. It is the devil of commercialism and commodification who takes one up into a high place, and shows one a landscape, and says, ‘All this can be yours,
cognitively
, if you will only fall down and worship me.’ Anyway, such a modest site as this I have described in Gleninagh – I know I have interpreted it as the very fulcrum of the universe, but it is indeed a modest site – needs no interpretation. It is in the best sense an interpretative centre itself, it is the stance from which the relationships of the terrain can be sensed even before they are theorized, as the Bronze Age well understood.

So, its conservators, apart from simply ensuring the physical integrity of the stones and their uninterrupted dialogue with the skyline, have to look to the general metabolism of the landscape. It might seem that, as yet, there are few problems in the wild recesses of Connemara; due process of Nature seems to be the rule. The raven and the falcon re-establish their primordial
pecking
order each spring; the lambs bleat, the stream meanders, the Bodkins build their stony potato ridges. But – to pick up one clue to a hidden distemper – this year in the stream, which is one of the headwaters of the Ballynahinch River, famous since mediaeval days, there were no salmon spawning. On this fishery, according to Roderic O’Flaherty, writing in 1684, ‘… experience was made how the salmon hath still recourse from the sea to its first
off-spring
;
for here, eighteen salmon were marked, with a fin cut off each of them, at their going to the sea, and seaventeen of them were taken next season, in the same place, coming back’. And now, for the first time in many thousands of years, the salmon no longer has recourse to its own origin. One of the reasons for this is European Union policy. The farmers of ‘disadvantaged areas’ such as Connemara cannot compete with New Zealand in the cheap raising of lamb; so they are helped out with grants, headage
payments
of so much per ewe. There is little market for the end-product, neither the meat nor the wool, at present, but it is still profitable to collect the grants. The result is overgrazing. (I am not pointing the finger at the Bodkins; I know nothing of their
stocking
levels. This is a general observation about Connemara and other rain-soaked western mountain regions.) Thousands of sheep – more than have ever been seen there before – are eating the heather down to the ground, and incidentally are suffering and dying in the winter and spring; then the rainstorms are breaking up the shallow exposed peat layer, and the streams are sweeping it away, and the delicate pebble beds the salmon need to lay their eggs in are burdened with mud and rubble. There is an outcry, mainly from the commercial point of view, about the decline of the salmon and sea-trout fisheries (the sea-trout suffer from a
veritable
Gordian knot of environmental problems). People enjoy killing salmon, and Connemara’s gillies and hoteliers live by holding their coats and praising them mightily when they succeed, and the rest of us let them stand rounds when flushed from their triumphs. This is, to say the least, interruptive of that silver ring, the life cycle of the salmon, that we glimpse in pools and waterfalls when its recurrent destiny interlinks it, too often fatally, with our own world. Even in Bronze Age eyes, I am sure, the king of fish was more than a source of food and cruel fun. But when the grants system is amended, as it will be, if only in the interests of the economy, will the farmers turn to the sitka spruce? I dread to see the forestry plough’s go into the valley of Gleninagh. Several other superb valleys of the Twelve Bens and the Maumturk Mountains have great rectangular sticking-plasters of forestry on their cheeks. Without going farther into the maze of ecological interactions, I think I have made the point that to preserve a
prehistoric
sacred landscape it is necessary to preserve what we still
have, of the nature that gave it its meaning. Otherwise, what we pass on is a poignancy of regret, a reproach.

One might think that, to a conservationist, time, both past and future, is the problem, for if, in considering the preservation of ancient sites, we are humbled by how old they are, we might well also be abashed by how young they are, these objects and relationships between objects, that we are supposed to hand on in
wholeness
to future centuries, to millenia, perhaps to timespans of
geological
magnitude. But in so doing, we are hardly just playing the pedagogue, informing and improving the mind of futurity. That we entertain this stupendous project of conservation must mean that we still preserve, in ourselves, an openness to present space as well, a reverence before the play of forces a site such as this in Gleninagh celebrates.

In this talk, the ceremonies of raven and falcon, the setting sun and the shadow of the mountain, the salmon seeking out its origins, the glacier disgorging its burden of rock, the changing obliquity of the ecliptic, have been both metaphors for and instances of the processes of nature, the genderless mutual
engendering
of time and space. And in presenting them in terms of retinal images, of optical geometry, I have been insinuating the idea that the eye itself has its religion, its sense of relationship to the whole, anterior to, underlying, and outlasting all other cults. I fear that these six boulders in Gleninagh, like six precarious stepping stones, are leading me too far out into the Ineffability of the Absolute, but instead of underpinning all I have said with a
reference
to innate, pre-cultural, Chomskyesque universal spatial
grammars
, I will suggest that spacetime is the irreducibly general
religious
object we share with the Bronze Age and with all future inheritors of the prehistoric eye. And with that, before I fall and drown, I will be silent.

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 justify 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.