Robinson - Connemara: listening to the wind

Hundreds of Connemara people have helped me in my explorations over the last third of a century. In relation to the areas treated in this volume I would particularly like to thank Mchel King and Paddy Folan of Inis N, Tommy ODonnell of Cgla, and John King, Joe Rafferty, Mirtn OMalley, Paddy McDonagh and his father, Pat, all of Roundstone, for their knowledgeable company on land and sea. Conal OToole and Tom Woods instructed me in turf-cutting, and the late Mchel Breathnach was generous with Irish-language lore, as were Willie OMalley of Ballinafad and John Barlow, originally of Seanadh Chaola, with local history. Some of these are among the Connemara friends who figure in these pages; other portraits are composites or chimeras, not to be identified with any single person alive or dead.

Among the many experts who have overseen my amateur efforts in various fields I am especially grateful for the cooperation of Liam Mac Con Iomaire in translations from Irish sources, and the advice of Dr James White and Dr Micheline Sheehy-Skeffington on botanical matters, Professor Michael OConnell on the changing environments of prehistoric times, and Professor Paul Mohr on the rocky basis of it all. I thank Dominic Berridge for the loan of Berridge family papers, and Patrick Gageby for furnishing me with old ecclesiastical books. Finally, I deeply appreciate Brendan Barringtons trusty editing. The book is for M, as always.

TR

A small concrete cross stands by the road that follows the river from Ballynahinch to the sea. The proprietor of the Anglers Return, two bends of the road and the river further on, told me it marks the place where one of the gillies was found dead of a heart attack. Wasnt it good that he died looking out at the river hed worked on all his life? she added. But from the time of the tyrannical Tadhg OFlaherty, who forbade fishing in the lake by his castle, to the fish-ins of the Gaelic Civil Rights Movement in the sixties, the fisheries of Connemara have been occasions of resentment. Perhaps the man died cursing the river that had brought him a lifetime of midge bites and the condescension of the rich.

Whatever the burden of the gillies last breath, it was dispersed into the air to be degraded by the hiss of rain or eroded molecule by molecule in the Brownian fidget of drifting pollen grains, and captured, a little of it, by the tilting, spilling cups and saucers of the water surface, dissolved, hurried under the old bridge at Tuaim Beola and added to the sea. So one can imagine it infinitesimally present in, and persuasively interpreting, the sough (which we should not delude ourselves is a sighing) of the Ballynahinch woods, the clatter (not a chattering) of the mountain streamlets, the roar (not a raging) of the waves against the shore.

These indefinite but enormous noises are part of Connemara. Sometimes from my doorstep on a still night I become aware that the silence is set in a velvet background like a jewel in a display case, a hushing that, when attended to, becomes ineluctable. It is compounded of the crash of breakers along distant strands, variously delayed, attenuated, echoed and re-echoed. A frequently falsified but never quite discredited forewarning of gales, it is an effect that, from our perspective here, precedes its cause: a depression moving across the Atlantic and advancing its concentric rollers towards our coast. By the morning, perhaps, a tumult of air will be battering the windows, all its wavelengths, from the vast heft of gusts over the hill that half shelters us, to the spasms of the garden shrubs and the fluting of a dry leaf caught between two stones, merging into one toneless bulk noise. Going here and there in thought through the pandemonium, only the most analytic listening can disengage its elements: shriek of sedge bent double out on the heath, grinding of shingle sucked back by the reflux, slow chamfering of a stones edge by blown sand grains.

Such vast, complex sounds are produced by fluid generalities impacting on intricate concrete particulars. As the wave or wind breaks around a headland, a wood, a boulder, a tree trunk, a pebble, a twig, a wisp of seaweed or a microscopic hair on a leaf, the streamlines are split apart, flung against each other, compressed in narrows, knotted in vortices. The ear constructs another wholeness out of the reiterated fragmentation of pitches, and it can be terrible, this wide range of frequencies coalescing into something approaching the auditory chaos and incoherence that sound engineers call white noise: zero of information-content, random interference obliterating all messages, utterly dire, a metaphysical horror made audible, sometimes dinned into prisoners heads to drive them mad in the cells of their brains.

Similar too is the sound of the past, the wreck of times grand flow in tortuous passages. It includes and sometimes drowns the sound of history. History has rhythms, tunes and even harmonies; but the sound of the past is an agonistic multiplicity. Sometimes, rarely, a scrap of a voice can be caught from the universal damage, but it may only be an artefact of the imagination, a confection of rumours. Chance decides what is obliterated and what survives if only to be distorted and misheard. Of the gillie who died by the river, I know nothing more, but may yet find out something. But who, for one of the crowding shades besieging my book, was Cuach na Coille, the cuckoo of the wood? I hear of her from a single source only, and only this: that she was a beautiful horsewoman who lived in Derryclare Wood. I fear that nobody living can tell me more. Even in the ancient forest itself, where slender shafts of sunlight look almost material enough to cast a greenish shadow and sometimes in the restless canopy a cuckoo claims to be here/there, the mysterious horsewoman does not appear, tantalizing with her untold tale. Hers, with his, may stand for all Connemaras abolished voices.