Listening to the Wind

Tim Robinson

• Publisher: Milkweed Editions
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781571319821
• Topic: Tecnologia e ingegneria
• Subtopic: Ricerca e competenze ingegneristiche e tecnologiche

A mapmaker's vivid journey through the geography, ecology, and history of Ireland's Connemara region. Here is Connemara, experienced at a walker's pace. From cartographer Tim Robinson comes the second title in the Seedbank series, a breathtakingly intimate exploration of one beloved place's geography, ecology, and history. We begin with the earth right in front of his boots, as Robinson unveils swaths of fiontarnach —fall leaf decay. We peer from the edge of the cliff where Robinson's house stands on rickety stilts. We closely examine an overgrown patch of heather, a flush of sphagnum moss. And so, footstep by footstep, moment by moment, Robinson takes readers deep into this storied Irish landscape, from the "quibbling, contentious terrain" of Bogland to the shorelines of Inis Ní to the towering peaks of Twelve Pins. Just as wild and essential as the countryside itself are its colorful characters, friends and legends and neighbors alike: a skeletal, story-filled sheep farmer; an engineer who builds bridges, both physical and metaphorical; a playboy prince and cricket champion; and an enterprising botanist who meets an unexpected demise. Within a landscape lie all other things, and Robinson rejoices in the universal magic of becoming one with such a place, joining with "the sound of the past, the language we breathe, and our frontage onto the natural world." Situated at the intersection of mapmaking and mythmaking, Listening to the Wind is at once learned and intimate, elegiac and magnificent—an exceptionally rich "book about one place which is also about the whole world" (Robert Macfarlane). "Visitors to Connemara, that expanse of stony beauty in the west of Ireland, are often struck by its stillness. [This] collection of essays succeeds in the difficult task of staying true to the verities of a place on to which so many fantasies have been projected." — The Guardian

Forgotten Roundstone

SMUGGLERS AND ASYLUM SEEKERS

Ever since I was shown it by a Roundstone builder twenty years ago I have been intrigued by the curious markings on a stone set into a wall of a big barn of a building, tending to the ruinous, known as the Old Store. The grim half-derelict structure, which has now been replaced by a palatial holiday home, stood by a little quay at the bottom of the lane that drops steeply down to the shore from the corner of the village street by the Catholic church. It was a two-storeyed building, dank and grimy, surrounded by half-demolished extensions and mangled rusty machinery, with a gapped and sagging slate roof which looked as if it would be ripped off by the next storm. Its rough masonry of local granite was patched with concrete blocks, having been breached repeatedly to adapt it to a long history of varied uses, for in its day it had served as a fish-curing station, as a store for fishing gear, kelp and carraigín seaweed, and as a seaweed-fertilizer factory. At the time I was conducted into it to view the interesting stone, the Old Store belonged to a local company, Kerry Shellfish Ltd, and the builder, if I remember aright, was engaged in making concrete tanks in it to hold lobsters and crayfish awaiting the lorries that would take them across to France. The earliest-looking part of it was a rectangular building oriented north–south, perhaps forty yards long and twenty wide, and had been extended to the north; to see the stone we had to pick our way across the detritus of many decades into the darkness of the extension, and crouch at the bottom right-hand corner of the interior wall that would have been the north gable wall of the original building—that is, just where one might expect to see a foundation stone. On first running my finger along the shallow grooves in its face I thought we were dealing with a cross-inscribed stone laid on its side, perhaps robbed from some ecclesiastical ruin; but when I made a rubbing of it I found that the shape was more complex: a horizontal about ten inches long with a small squashed circle or D-shape around one end of it, crossed by three shorter verticals with angular terminations that were difficult to make out. In the bottom left-hand corner, a date, 1731, was fairly clear. I have shown it to various archaeologists; the best they can suggest is that the inscription could be a merchant’s mark or guild insignia, perhaps a stylized representation of a plough such as occurs on some Galway gravestones. To me it looks like a key, and as such I shall use it to gain entry into Roundstone’s history.

In 1731 neither Roundstone nor the road through it existed, for it was not until the 1820s that Alexander Nimmo designed the harbour and laid out the village along a section of his new coast road. (It is often stated that the name ‘Roundstone’ is derived, half by translation and half by phonetic imitation, from its Irish name, Cloch na Rón, which means ‘the rock of the seals’. This may be so, but on the other hand the two names may be quite independent. The bay is referred to as ‘Round-stone haven’ by Roderick O’Flaherty, writing in 1684, and the rock from which it is named and which stands like a marker on the west side of its entrance is strikingly round.) William Larkin’s map of 1819 shows that the predecessor of Nimmo’s road, passing through the district from Ballynahinch to Bunowen, kept to higher ground around the flanks of Errisbeg Hill. It would have been a rough track or bridle-path at best, and it can still be made out in places, along the line of the wall dividing fields from the open commonage of the hillside. Larkin shows very few buildings down by the shore, but one marked ‘Store’ on his map undoubtedly represents the Old Store or a predecessor on the same site, as does a ‘storehouse’ marked on an even earlier map in an atlas of charts published in 1775 by Murdoch Mackenzie Senior, who surveyed the bay in 1766.

These dates carry us well back towards 1731; we can assume that there was a store here then, no doubt one a good deal smaller than the Old Store itself. The little harbour by it, a squarish inlet whose banks have been lined with stone and built up to form the quay beside the store, looks as if it might be of that same age or earlier. Who was using it?—for official reports agree with the maps that there were only a few scattered cottages within a mile of the place even down to Nimmo’s arrival. By chance, we can answer that question; an individual voice from that era, aggrieved, plaintive, makes itself heard above the susurrus of the forgotten. In a handful of letters dated 1737 and preserved in the Public Records Office we read of the smuggling of wool out of Roundstone Bay and the disgraceful failure of the authorities to suppress it. One H. Littleton, Town Major, a disillusioned officer of the garrison in Galway, writes:

It is certain the most part of the wool run out of this kingdom is run out of Roundston’s Bay, 30 mile from this place, it lying very commodious for that purpose and nobody to hinder it, the Collector and Surveyor having lived here near 30 years and by that means in league with the most part of the country … The Spy man-of-war has been stationed here for near 4 years and near 100 ships have loaded with wool in that time and sailed to France from Rolston’s Bay, without any molestation …

This claim may well be a gross exaggeration, but one can see why a store was needed, to house the wool going out, and the brandy, tea, silks and other goods coming in. Ireland at the time was suffering under legislation aimed at disadvantaging its trade in favour of that of England. Since the 1690s Galway had been among the ports from which the export of wool was forbidden except to England; however, by our date of 1731 its contraband trade was flourishing. Because Connemara was almost inaccessible by land there was a lawful seaborne trade along its coasts, and the illicit trade could be conveniently combined with this; ships leaving Galway in ballast or with partial cargos could take wool on board in dozens of creeks and pools of this ideally complicated coast, with little fear of detection. Many of the Galway grandees were heavily involved, and officials winked at the business, according to the indignant Littleton:

Martin Kiernan, Esquire, and Andrew Morrish, merchants in this town, loaded a ship with wool at Round Stone Bay, and Michael Fearservice, master of said ship which is called the Ould Margret; Thomas Blake of Menelough and Jonuck Bodkin and Leo Bodkin, merchants in this town, loaded a ship with wool at Round Stone Bay in the beginning of October last … and the said Bodkins runned many hogsheads and ankers of brandy in the said Round Stone Bay and brought it safe to Jonuck Bodkin’s and Leo Bodkin’s farm to Oranmore … James Disney the Collector’s son, and James Figgi, the Barrack-master of this town, runs as much wool as any of the gang …

In another letter Littleton exposes the comfortable relations between the smugglers and the revenue services:

A ship belonging to Jonuk Bodkin and other merchants sailed, 13 April last, to Roundston’s bay and loaded wool for France; I cannot say but she took her leave with good grace, for she saluted the garrison and the man-of-war with seven guns; the man-of-war sailed, 16th April, at 4 o’clock in the afternoon, from New Harbour, about three miles from this garrison, but according to custom went too late …

The immediate occasion of Littleton’s correspondence was the misfortunes of an ex-smuggler surnamed McDonagh, who had turned informer. McDonagh claimed to have been inveigled into a public house by a priest, kidnapped by ‘a great parcel of gentlemen, or ruffians as I may call them’, carried off he knew not where in County Clare and, a month later, from place to place in County Galway, kept in fetters and moved by night slung under a horse’s belly, until he mysteriously escaped, and endured four days without food on a mountain unable to put his clothes on because of his handcuffs, before ‘the great God and a poor countryman’ saved his life and he was able to throw himself into the hands of Mr. Littleton, ‘the sincerest person to the Government that I know in this part of the country, for there is such factions here, that it is but few in employments here but is in favour with all the runners of wool’.

Among the gentlemen-ruffians that carried McDonagh off were the Bodkins, two sailors from the Spy, some servants of Thomas Blake of Menlo, and a steward of Anthony Martin of Dangan, near Galway. At this period most of Connemara, including the Roundstone area, belonged to the Martins of Dangan, and Anthony’s son Robert was soon to build a house at Ballynahinch which he claimed was an inn and is likely to have been a base for his smuggling operations. Larkin’s map shows a path (the present-day Farrell’s Road) running northwards and obliquely up the hillside from the site of the Old Store to join the old track leading directly to Ballynahinch; we may visualize a train of Connemara ponies climbing up it laden with hogsheads of brandy and ankers of tea, and poor McDonagh slung underneath one of them.

As has been mentioned, Larkin’s map of 1819 shows very little habitation in or near the present village of Roundstone, but it does mark a settlement of five cottages and a chapel just over a mile away to the west, and names it as ‘Coogaula’. In those days this hamlet was reached by a track branching off the road across the mountainside above it; nowadays it lies on the north side of the coast road a short way beyond the end of the village. When I went to look for traces of the chapel I met a garrulous and slightly distracted old lady who, on the strength of her Irish, was the sole surviving justification for the townland of Errisbeg’s status as part of the Gaeltacht. As I learned later, she was also regarded by the credulous as one of the neighbourhood’s two witches; she used to go round enquiring for kittens, which people did not like to give her as they did not know why she wanted them. Old Sorcha pointed out a half-built holiday home just above the road, where the chapel used to be, and told me work had been abandoned on it because of the ill-luck arising from building on such a site. (Of course the house has now long been finished and lived in, without dire consequences.) She was also concerned about another house below the road, which she said had been built on a path leading to the chapel, a thing that should not be done. From her dark look I intuited that the inconvenience would be resented by otherworldly beings rather than by humans.

As to Larkin’s Coogaula (pronounced ‘Coogla’ these days), in 1959 a visitor to Roundstone, the novelist and future chairman of the Arts Council Mervyn Wall, found that the settlement’s own view of itself was that it had been founded by refugees from Down, Armagh and Antrim, driven from their homes by Cromwell. Patrick Bolton, a small farmer of the locality, told him:

My ancestor was expelled from Derry. He was allowed to take as much of his property as would fit in a cart. He put his wife on top and went on foot himself, leading the horse. The way he came was down between Lough Corrib and Lough Mask; and when he came to the sea, he stopped; and my people have been here since.

Mervyn Wall’s report of this (in a radio talk) was noted by a Patrick Tohall, who had published an account of the Diamond Fight of 1795 and the subsequent migration of Ulster Catholics to Connacht, and who later came to investigate the Coogla community for himself:

Mr Bolton recounted the surnames as Bolton, King, Lavery, McCahill, McCulla, Moran and Shiel … the residents were called ‘Na h-Ultaigh’ [the Ulstermen]. The only house remaining is the Shiel home, still occupied by Martin Connolly, their descendant in the female line. Six of the seven migrants were Weavers, the exception being McCulla who was a Nailer … Mr. Bolton refers to a hereditary document describing the original exodus, including reference to wicker curraghs used to cross Lough Cong [an error for Lough Corrib, surely]; but the document cannot be traced … On the other hand his approximate calculation by generations which had been surmised as 1675, worked out, when tested by him in conversation, to a revised surmise of 1775, which is near enough to 1795.

Well, as Sorcha said to me, ending one of her old tales with an echo of a standard formula of the oral tradition, ‘That was a long time ago, and we weren’t in it then, and that’s a good thing because if we were we wouldn’t be here today!’ In the long perspective of time Cromwell has come to stand for all ancient oppressions, and it seems that our Roundstone Ulstermen were not the only refugees in Galway and Mayo to adopt what Tohall calls ‘the Cromwell fiction’.

In fact the sparse population of Connemara may have been substantially increased by the events of 1795 in Ulster. The Defenders were an armed and oath-bound organization of rural Catholics, inspired by the recent French Revolution and reacting against increases in taxes and tithes, the shortage of land due to the expansion of the linen industry, and the aggressions of the Protestant ‘Peep o’ Day Boys’. At the Battle of the Diamond, fought at a crossroads near Loughgall, County Armagh, Defenders took on Peep o’ Day Boys and lost; the outcome was the foundation of the Protestant Orange Order, and the expulsion of many Catholic peasants. In Galway too the Catholics had to endure not only the frosts of colonialism but also the blasts of sectarianism. The Catholic Martins had managed to assemble and hold on to their thousands of boggy acres through the period of confiscations following Protestant King William III’s triumph over Catholic James II in 1690, but Robert Martin, while remaining the staunchest Jacobite and the leader of the Catholic faction west of Galway, had found it necessary to obtain official certification of his adherence to Protestantism. His son Richard was the first Martin to be educated at a Protestant school, but several incidents of Richard’s life show that his heart was with the Catholic cause. According to a Dublin newspaper report of 1796:

The persecution in the county of Armagh is not exhausted, although it has scattered thousands of miserable victims in every direction and left them to the winds of heaven. A computation may easily be formed of the extent of this mischief from the fact that a single gentleman, Col. Martin of the county of Galway, has given asylum to more than a thousand souls on his own estate, all peaceable, inoffensive and living by the labour of their hands … We have seen a proof sheet of a print of the refugees coming from the north to Connemara displaying more misery and wretchedness than any man of any religion would wish to see fall to the lot of a fellow creature.

Twenty-eight years later a jocose article in The Times attributed Richard Martin’s electoral successes to this huge influx:

Mr Martin owes his constant return to Parliament to an act of the greatest virtue and hospitality. When the Orangemen of Armagh were banishing the Catholic peasantry—when they were putting nightly on the doors of the Catholics ‘to Hell, or to Connaught,’ and if the summons was not obeyed by an immediate disappearance, conflagration and murder were the consequence—Mr Martin received into his wilderness the almost countless multitudes. He did more. He made freeholders of them; for in that free country a tract of mountain or of bog, the fee-simple of which would not seduce 100L [£100] out of the pockets of any man in his senses, was sufficient to constitute some hundreds of electors; and they are grateful. He keeps a storehouse of brogues, which he opens at the time of election to his constituents, and they sally forth in genteel though exceedingly inconvenient style, to vote for the ‘veisther’ (master.) They regularly deposit the mark of distinction on their return, any thing in the shape of a shoe never having been seen on a human foot, except septennially, in the whole of Connemara.

What truth there is in the contemporary estimates of the numbers driven out of Ulster, I do not know. I have seen it stated that 1,000 came to Galway and 4,000 to Mayo, while 6,000 sailed for America and no fewer than 20,000 for Scotland—but the muse of the history of sectarianism is Exaggeration. I have not come across any traces of other such refugee communities in Connemara. Pat Bolton, I have been told by several who remember him, was an incorrigible fabulist—his account of helping Seán McEntee with the Howth gun-running was a classic—but the basic facts about a settlement of folk from the North seem to be well founded, and so perhaps Pat’s ancestor did come grinding along the bridle-way around the shoulder of Errisbeg with his wife on top of a cartload of household goods, sniff the breath of ocean on his face, and turn off down the narrow boreen to where the promised land of Coogla, Cúige Uladh, the Province of Ulster, stands today.

NIMMO AND HIS BROTHERS

Alexander Nimmo was a phenomenon. He was only forty-nine when he died, and even a bare listing of his works, travels and accomplishments suggests that he must have bowled through life as if in a post-chaise, flinging out plans and proposals that kept hundreds busy for years after he had vanished over the horizon. Little or nothing is known of his private life and even within his short career there are periods of years in which he seems to disappear from view; during one of these he apparently carried out a one-man visual survey of the surface geology of the whole of Ireland. He was born in Scotland and his contributions to British civil engineering are notable, but he spent most of his working life in Ireland and left his mark on every corner of the country. His reports are refreshingly clear of the repetitive complaints about Irish fecklessness and papistry that disfigure so many nineteenth-century commentaries on the woeful island. A technocrat who never thought it needful to mention his own humane intentions, he held that the poor people of Ireland were perfectly capable of relieving their own distress by doing thus and thus according to his succinct recommendations. Connemara received much of his attention. Connemara’s poverty, infertility, bogginess and stoni-ness did not perplex him; he knew just how and where to bridge its gaps and make its crooked ways straight. Thomas Moore had famously referred to ‘t...