Iargúltacht
I’m driving down the road to Corraun which like all roads in the West of Ireland, is fit and trim, with nary a wasted inch of width and heavy on curvy excitement. On either side of the road, stonewalled fields bustle with the green-yellow-orange glory of an Irish summer: Birds flit watchfully from trees to thorny bushes: Black-faced sheep stare suspiciously from the fields, wool coats already shorn revealing their grey-white skin and the pink underside of their distended bellies: One, EU subsidized, cow noses around the field searching valiantly for a blade of grass between the clumps of vibrant green rushes.
My mind has been fully cleared by a week holidaying by Clew Bay; breakfasting with Clare Island looming over the sparkling Atlantic water; lazy mornings over-caffeinating as I ploughed through as many books as my tiny mind could absorb; afternoons lounging on beaches of soft-sand pulverized in place by the mighty ocean; dinners with way too much wine, foolishly followed, mixing grape and grain, by way-way too much Irish craft beer.
Tomorrow, we leave this landscape and won’t see it again for at least a couple of years.
With everyone else back in the rental house, glued to the television as Belgium and Brazil play the World Cup quarter final all the way in Kazan, Russia, I felt the pull of the local landscape, a longing for a last sensory feast of stony fields overgrown with green-yellow whin bushes, slanting black rocks fringed in white waves.
So, I got in the car and started driving.
In the suburban US, a road can literally take you nowhere, as it winds past one split-level ranch house after other, all unique only in how much they’ve amended their cookie-cutter-ness.
A country road in the stubbornly wild landscape of the West of Ireland is a winding pathway that connects communities, often doing a favour to what was once the wealthy landowners.
The Corraun road doesn’t do favours; there is no once-wealthy land to be owned. The road, sinews between stonewalled fields of rushes and whin, the purple blaze of blanket bog and the foamy-white-fringed rocks of the Atlantic coast.
I drive along slowly, breathing in deep gulps of the salty air pushing in my open window, the radio tuned to a station from not-so-distant-across-Clew-Bay Connemara, my eyes open and alert. Like a patient desperate to heal, I’m trying to absorb as much of this landscape medicine as I can before a three-thousand-mile flight drops me on the opposite side of the Atlantic, where lives a joltingly different world.
“An’ now folks, hope yer weekend’s off ta a won…derrr…ful start,” the radio intones. “A quick birthdah greetin’ ta Molly-Ann Jiyce from balow in Knocknagallert, Molly turns eighty…eight years young tadah!”
I reach for the radio dial.
“An’ for Molly’s eighty-eight birthdah, we’ll play Johnny Cash’s …”
I pull my hand back, anticipating a confluence of poignant emotions.
“Folsom Prison Blues.”
“Poor Molly, goin’ ta prison for her birthday,” I say aloud to no one on the wild-chance that the black-faced sheep’s ears can catch and decode my syllables.
The radio is local-radio silent for a few minutes as the DJ tees up the CD; his exasperated breath audible over the air.
“Hear … that lone…some whip…poorwill, … he sounds too blue to fly ….”
“Gud on ya Molly, fair trade; Hank for Johnny, an’ ya weren’t locked up fer yer eighty-eight!”
The sheep’s black faces give nothing away.
On I drive; streams relentlessly bleed groundwater from the bogs into the ocean; all around me this year’s crop of sun-blanched rocks thrive in the fields; Clare Island’s unbalanced beauty dominates the blue-sparkling horizon.
At a clearing on the side of the road, a Wild Atlantic Way’s wavy squiggle – formed of self-rusting steel; the metallic metaphor of human existence – announces a point of particular interest.
“I’m so lone…some … I ah … cud crryyy,” Hank Williams intones as my car crunches over the clearing’s stone chips.
The Wild Atlantic Way, a branded path down Ireland’s entire west coast that brings order and system to wandering tourists, has an information board at this site recounting, in dramatic detail, the 1588 sinking of the Spanish Armada … a short four hundred and thirty years ago. This is a mere blink of time for the Irish who consider it short term memory loss if you don’t know the Confirmation names taken by the barmen in the Dublin pubs Brian Boru binged through the night before the Battle of Clontarf in … 1014.
The Spanish King Phillip in 1588 had been self-defeated in his arrogantly disorganized attack on his heretofore sister-in-law, now sworn enemy, Queen Elizabeth. Just a few years earlier Phillip had married Elizabeth’s half-sister, who, definitely needing a better agent, got herself branded as Bloody Mary. One of the Spanish nobles accompanying his king on a sojourn to England, where Philip failed to fulfill his marital duties of siring a Catholic heir to the English crown, wrote back to Spain in disgust at the English aristocracy whom he described as “fat, drunken and pink!” Mary’s death, after a phantom two-year pregnancy, resulted with no Catholic heir, no more informatively insulting letters home, and ultimately a lengthy war between England and Spain.
The Wild Atlantic Way story board, half in Irish, which I dutifully attempt and fail to read, gives the necessary basics: Some of the defeated Spanish Armada attempted to round Ireland and sail to the Iberian Peninsula, thus escaping Elizabeth’s fleet. Of course, they should’ve checked in with some a the lads from Corraun and Achill Island before endeavouring such a gambit. The vengeful Atlantic, no doubt upset at a man’s using its surface to slaughter one another, threw a vicious gale in their path, destroying about a third of the ships in the Armada, crushing them ruthlessly against the black rocks of the Irish coast.
So goes life: The story board’s just-the-facts dry account is enlivened by a dynamic rendering of Spanish looking types either waving to the shore for help or they Real Madrid backs screaming to the referee to call an offside, or perhaps both.
On shore the reaction would have been complicated, as is anything involving humans.
For sure the average Irish person looking on would have seen their fellow Catholic, anti-Queen-Elizabeth, Spaniards as drowning allies. Plus, the Spanish had been visiting the west coast of Ireland for a long time, trading, as the old saying goes, “warmth on the inside for the warmth on the outside:” Wine for wool!
There was also that bit a Spanish-Irish interactin’ of a different ilk, done with a heap a gigglin’, behind the reek a hay … thus the “black Irish;” a small subset of the Irish race who don’t contract skin cancer after one sunny afternoon blustering through the heat on the beach.
The English were at the time much more concerned with Scotland, an ally of Elizabeth’s most snobby enemy, France. As such the English weren’t really paying all that much attention to Ireland, just burning down a few towns every now and again, slaughtering all the inhabitants to let everyone know who’s the boss.
The local leader of the land, to which the storyboard drowners waved, was none other than Grace O’Malley, a pirate queen and a force of nature all by herself. Pirating was a legit business back then, with Elizabeth investing her private funds with the most successful pirate of them all, Sir Francis Drake.
Although Grace might be disposed to pirating the odd Spanish freight ship, she did reform herself to help the drowners, to the vicious displeasure of the English hegemon charged with ensuring the Irish suffered just enough such that, later in history, they’d be adequately tuned up to create great art. I won’t issue this bollox’s name; let him languish in the anonymity he deserves. Just think of him as the mindless villain in a Netflix series that you stop watching halfway through your first bottle of wine.
Anyway, after the usual storming in and out of drafty castles, scabbards rattling like the tailgate of an old cattle-lorry, Grace did what a lot of Mayo people do in a crisis: She headed off ta London. Back then, there wasn’t a bus leaving every day from in front of Flannelly’s pub that’d drop ya off at Euston Station for £20. No, Grace had to sail her own ship over.
Still, the not-so-little lady from Mayo made it to London. After the standard civil-service hanging around lonesome corridors for days, she finally had a meeting with Elizabeth. Over a couple of glasses of rosé, the two queens quietly set the seeds of feminism, while in the anteroom, a seething pit of vengeful male civil servants, in white bloomers, metamorphosed into the phenomena that would go on to destroy the world: Angry White Men.
Who knew so much hid behind the Wild Atlantic Way storyboard.
Back in the car, I’m forced to change radio station as the planning for a “kisshin’ contest in Oughterard” produces more snot rattling giggles than is safe for a boring human male’s ears.
I drive on through Corraun, my musing about kissing contests and colonial injustices getting flushed from my tiny brain when a badger breaks from the undergrowth at the side of the road and scoots along the ditch. The normally nocturnal mammal’s broad back, grey-white-black and stained brownish from rooting below ground, darts along ahead of the car, and in a flash it’s gone! Down a black hole in the ditch.
Buoyed by the sight of Irish wildlife outside of a pub, I hit for Ballycroy – allegedly one of the darkest places on our planet: Dark as in an absence of light pollution; not Jim Jones drink this lemonade dark.
I let my sneaker speed the car along, no more dawdling along the coast contemplating four-hundred-year-old Spaniards perishing on the waves of the “wine dark sea.”
Turning left at a sign for Bangor, the road winds uphill, brash green growth dangling out over the tarmac. I slow to admire the cut-stone, Roman arched railway bridge of the old Achill line; a train line infamous for its once-upon-a-time carrying the dead, now a tourist bike trail.
At the top of the hill, the road bursts out upon the coast again; weather-beaten mountains, swipes of purple heather dotted with mint-green algaed rocks, fringed with green-yellow whin bushes. The colours of the mountain all foiled by the metallic grey of the ocean and sky.
The car groans along the side of the mountain and up onto the flat plain of the bogs. Here the growth diminishes, as the bog can’t even support a scraggly bush. Old barbwire fences, exhausted by time, wind, and rain, sag listlessly.
The wind ruffles swathes of barely-purple heather between black watery bog-holes.
In what was once a field hewn from the bog by human toil, but now re-invaded by bog plants, stands the skeletal remains of a small stone cottage. Only the spiney gable supported by the chimney still stands.
Long gone is the family, their possessions, their memories.
The boggy plain stretches for miles and miles.
Long winter nights in a barren place such as this; with rain sheeting in off the Atlantic day after day after day; the wind wailing as it tries to tug the thatched roof from the house; under this kind of relentless pressure, the Irish language forged an alluringly apt word for such a landscape.
Iargúltacht: An isolated, remote land, the loneliness of the wind shivering the soul.
Forty or fifty bog miles north of here, with the Famine eliminating Ireland body and soul, a group of Quakers undertook a survey to determine how to keep Irish peasants from starving to death. While out on the land meeting the dangerously malnourished people, they were directed to the bog to meet the worst cases. There, living in watery caves cut into the side of open turf banks in the bog, they met whole starving families. These people had been evicted by their landlord, who had cleared his land of all humans and human habitation so he could switch to sheep farming. Raising sheep was considered a less risky endeavour than trusting Irish peasants to successfully wring their rack-rents from the thin soil. The English Quakers found Irish families languishing in the watery darkness of a bog-hole, parents huddled with shivering, naked children; no one with the energy to seek food; everyone succumbing to an agonizing death by starvation.
A signpost for the Inis Bigil Ferry makes me turn left and away from the direction of those deadly bog-homes. A ferry, the change of state that it implies, moving from land to water to land, will move my mind from the morbidity of reality.
The road leading to the Ferry telescopes narrower and narrower, blackthorn bushes bustle in from the sides, grass juts from cracks in the tar. Behind the blackthorn hedgerows the fields are heavily populated with clumps of rushes and sparsely dotted with boney-legged-black-faced sheep. Spindly electricity poles, an alien lifeform on this wild and windswept landscape, repeat the only sign of human regularity in sight.
I drive on to the Ferry pier; bushes’ straining limbs whipping the side of the car.
The pier is deserted: A prefab cabin, locked up for the evening, and a metal ramp slicing off the side of the concrete pier to a loading platform the only sign that a ferry operates from modest port in a storm.
I step out of the car and walk down to the pier.
Wind sweeps in off the Atlantic, making me squint, ruffling my hair.
Across the channel, a few hundred yards away lies Inis Bigil.
This channel is known to be particularly dangerous; over the years it has taken lives.
I stare at the low, scrubby land of Inis Bigil.
We humans are a curious species: Communal, if not herding, by nature, we huddle together in cities, towns, houses, restaurants and bars.
Yet somewhere inside we crave loneliness. Not a big heap of loneliness, just enough to let us know we can in fact exist as a solitary individual.
Through the channel the Atlantic rushes.
I look behind me for the car.
Pacified by the sight of is solidity and reliability, I clinch the key in my pocket.
I turn and stare out across the channel indulging myself in a serving of iargúltacht!
For a full account of the Quakers’ needs survey in north Mayo, and some particularly disturbing reports on evictions on the Belmullet peninsula see the original report scanned into Google Books: