A Land Without Shortcuts16

This essay was written in 2010–11, and delivered as the Parnell Lecture at Magdalene College, Cambridge, in February 2011. It is published here in its original form.

To be summoned to Cambridge from nether Connemara to deliver the Parnell Lecture was a surprise – honorific, but alarming. What to bring, from that famous far-off land? Well, it seems I can begin with good news: The West of Ireland has at last discovered its reason for existing. As you know, Connemara is the land of cloud-shadows drifting across mountainsides. Roundstone, the little fishing and tourist village I live in, is, I claim, the world capital of rainbows. And it has now been discovered that cloud-shadows can be strip-mined, that rainbows can be smelted. For clouds and rain are symptoms of weather, the almost continuous succession of cyclones coming in from the Atlantic, bringing powerful winds, towering waves. Their energy has been going to waste for millions of years, but now it can be tapped; the technology exists, or soon will.

But the trouble with wind energy is that it is not reliably there when you want it. The answer is pumped water storage. Use the electricity from forests of wind turbines and shoals of wave energy converters to pump seawater up into reservoirs in the mountains, and at times of peak demand let it flow down again through generators. And where could one find a landscape better adapted to this grand scheme? In the west of Ireland we have mountains with high glacial valleys, easily dammed, close to an oceanic coastline. These gifts of nature mean that Ireland could not only fuel its own homes and factories but sell the surplus to Europe, exported through a network of pylons and powerlines. All this will be unpolluting, greenhouse-gas-free, a noble and profitable Irish contribution to saving the world. An enterprise boldly calling itself ‘Spirit of Ireland’ is working out the details even now.

In expressing my horror at this vision of the future, I don’t want to sound like a climate-change sceptic. The globe is warming; we are facing into an era of floods, fires, famines; little doubt about it. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is 95 per cent certain that this is due to human activity. But even if the IPCC authorizes as it were a 5 per cent duty-free allowance of scepticism, I will not avail of it. There is of course intense technical argumentation over the viability of green-energy schemes. But let me take the most sanguine view of them, together with the most anguished view of the environmental crux that seems to make them necessary. The question is, how much of the world do we have to spoil in order to save it? Must we accept armies of jerkily gesticulating giants on our windswept western hills, perpetually drawing attention to themselves, interrupting the flow of horizons, imposing a large common factor of sameness on wonderfully varied landscapes?

The businesses that are set to profit out of a great leap forward in the mechanization of the countryside enjoy a ready justification in terms of energy crises to come. Is there no arguing with their commodification of wilderness’s last refuges? A few years ago I flew out to the Aran Islands to participate in a debate on a proposed windfarm there. On the same flight was a vigorous young enthusiast from an alternative technologies firm. When we extricated ourselves from the cramped little flying pram of an aeroplane and stretched ourselves in the island breeze, which carried a thousand miles of ocean and a million wildflowers to our nostrils, he sniffed it and said with delectation, ‘Ah! Kilowatt-hours!’ We have a so-called Green Party in Ireland devoted to this alternative technology. Seeing it thundering down the road towards us, the alternative seems to be a choice between two ditches. For the claim that these new modes of energy production are unpolluting is false. Leaving aside the unavoidable pollution caused by their manufacture, transport, installation and decommissioning, they are through their powerful presence grossly disruptive of our aesthetic, corporeal and affective relationships with the earth. The most obvious component of this loss is that where they go, no one else can go. They mean locked gates, culverted streams, barbed wire, forgone hillsides. These are the spoil-heaps of wind-mining.

How widely applicable are the arguments, or rather the persuasions, I am advancing? Do they stand only on territories comparable in their rare beauty and interest to the ones I have chosen to live amongst, or are there less prestigious areas that could well be turned over to windfarms? Let no word of mine undermine the stance of those who would defend some superficially unremarkable or already depleted landscape of which they love certain elusive moods and secret places. But I will write in terms of what I know; and let what generalities emerge find their welcome where they can. It has been my joy and privilege over the last third of a century to explore in great detail, to map and to write about three exceptional landscapes – the Aran Islands, the Burren and Connemara – and I will describe a place from each, in search of the qualities we cherish and should protect. Now one might say, ‘But surely these famous landscapes are already protected? Is not the Burren a proposed UNESCO World Heritage site?’ Well, recently a commercial concern was wooing the people of the Burren with a scheme for pumped seawater storage in a lovely upland valley near Black Head. The idea was not well received locally, and at present planning permission for such a drastic intervention would be hard to obtain – but we are only at the beginning of the alternative industrial revolution as yet, and the statutory designations of parts of these districts as Special Areas of Protection, National Heritage Areas, Geo-parks and so on could someday be swept aside. There are already three wind turbines towering over the otherwise uninterrupted network of ancient field walls on the uninhabited Atlantic side of Inis Meáin in the Aran Islands, constantly crossing themselves as if to ward off the haunting loneliness of the place. And Connemara is repeatedly probed by would-be windfarm developers, who have had a major success recently on its eastern periphery. But I’ll not continue with the environmentalist plaint; in fact all I’ve said so far is just a few swipes of the machete to get me into the centre of the thicket: the nature of place, what makes a place out of a locality, what makes a place so precious that we feel called upon to protect it in the teeth of all rational argumentation.

The Aran Islands first, and in particular the largest of them, Árainn, where I lived in the 1970s. The three islands are fragments of a single limestone escarpment stretching across the mouth of Galway Bay; the villages keep their heads down out of the gales on the north-eastern slopes of the ridge, and on the exposed Atlantic-facing side of the ridge is a literally amazing landscape of stone walls enclosing tiny plots of rough grazing, some of them much overgrown with brambles, some of them hardly more than sheets of bare limestone, their crevices filled with flowering herbs. This side of the island, Na Craga, the crags, is not much visited since farming on the islands is a fading way of life. So the boreens and róidíní, the narrow stone-walled paths that wriggle through this maze of fields, are crammed with vegetation. Everywhere, in the spring, are paradisal visions of wildflowers; in my first years there I was drunk on flowers, on the nectar of their names. One day in the course of making my map of the islands I was in an unfrequented quarter like this looking for a ruined church I had heard of, one of the many early Christian remains of the islands, nameless and unvisited and abandoned to hazel scrub. A few generations ago, I had been told, an old man called Colm Citte had been passing this way, and had heard the sound of someone churning milk. But he was on his way to Mass, and didn’t stop to investigate; he would have been frightened of the fairies in any case. All these places are haunted by half-forgotten folktales. The area I am describing now is called Clochán an Airgid, the stone hut of the money, or the silver; there is a clochán, an early Christian beehive-shaped hut, which has been reduced to its foundations by treasure hunters following the hint of a legend. Later I wrote about the treasure I found that day, in my book Stones of Aran:

As I was crossing the field to the ruins of the church, as obscure as everything else on this occult hillside, I heard through the whispering of the still summer afternoon something that could have been Colm Citte’s otherworldly churning. Falling water is so rare on Na Craga that I did not identify the sound until I saw a recess under a little scarp at the back of the field, in which silvery drops were cascading through fronds of maidenhair fern and making them tremble continuously. Around this lovely spring were more wildflowers than I had ever gathered in a single glance. On one side of it was a small hawthorn bush with honeysuckle and meadow pea climbing through it, and a lemon-yellow spire of agrimony below, while on the other a tutsan leaned forward to display its flame-coloured berries. Brooklime was growing in the shadow behind the fernleaves, and the other flowers of damp pastures – purple loosestrife, yellow pimpernel, silverweed – mingled with the meadow flowers at my feet – purple clover, kidney-vetch, meadow buttercup, tormentil, birdsfoot trefoil. The stonier slope above the well assembled the flora of the crags at the level of my eyes: burnet rose, bloody cranesbill, mountain everlasting, milkwort, quaking grass, the tiny squinancywort, the last of the early purple orchids and the first of the common spotted orchids, all with a minutely delicate interweaving of fairy flax. Along the foot of the scarp beside the well I could see wild strawberry, scarlet pimpernel, sanicle, the elegant St John’s wort. There were tall mulleins flowering on the top of the slope, and twayblades in the shadow of the thickets around the ruin. The band of grey limestone above the well gave it the solemnity of an altar, around which the plants were gathered, each in the colours of its faith. What truth, distilled moment by moment from the rock, was held in perpetual reservation in the dark cup below? The church behind me, brought to its knees among penitential thorns, attended humbly upon the priestcraft of water.

Re-reading this some fifteen years later, I’m surprised by the salience of the religious terminology. I have no faith, no supernaturalist beliefs; so I must re-examine this. I’ll return to the question later.

Strangely, Aran presents this precious conformation of place in three locations, or even more. The reason for this generosity is geological. The island chain is carved out of alternating horizontal strata of limestone and shale – sedimentary rocks laid down in the bed of an ocean that fluctuated in depth over millions of years, the limestone representing times when the water was deep and pure, the shale those when it was shallow and muddy. A central date in this period would be about 325 million years ago. Many millions of years later, huge slow earth movements lifted the stacked-up consolidated sediments above sea level, fracturing the brittle limestone, and exposed them to wind, frost, rain and ice. On the Atlantic-facing coast the waves have licked out the soft shale bands, causing the limestone strata above them to collapse, and so carving sheer or overhanging cliffs. Less abrupt forces of erosion have shaped the more sheltered north-east-facing slopes into a series of broad terraces separated by inland cliffs or scarps ten to twenty feet high. These scarps run along the island chain like contour lines; they each have a stratum of shale usually a few feet deep at their bases, and a thicker stratum of limestone above that. All rainwater quickly sinks through the fractured limestone until it reaches an impervious layer of shale, which channels it horizontally to the foot of one of the little inland scarps, where it bubbles out in springs. Then, spilling out onto the limestone of the terrace below the scarp, it sinks from sight again, only to reappear at the foot of the next scarp, and so on until it reaches the sea. Each of these scarps has a characteristic profile. So the situation I have described, with falling water in a dark recess at the foot of the scarp, a horizontal band of limestone above that, and then a broken slope leading up a few feet to the terrace above, is repeated here and there along the course of the scarp almost from one end of the island to the other.

I remember in particular one of my favourite places, reached by walking along a grand level terrace of almost bare limestone behind the house we lived in; it is called An Poll i bhFolach, the hole in hiding. It is most secretively wrapped away in a tiny enclosure between a crooked loop of drystone wall and a nook of the scarp rising from the rock-terrace. A narrow stile in the wall admits one to this fane, or one can scramble down into it from the slopes above by means of a few steps cut into the scarp face. The water lies in a rough stone-lined hollow, reflecting many of the flowers I noted at Clochán an Airgid. This ‘hole in hiding’ has the apparent self-regard of a place little visited; it welcomes one, then waits for one to go. But human industry has intensified its mode of being: there was always a spring here, brought forth by the hydrology I have described; then the wall was built round it to stop wandering cattle trampling it into mud, and the stile and the steps provided for people fetching water from it to their beasts in nearby fields. This is a centripetal place; it draws one in and precludes the outward view. At its focus is the glint of the water that shows itself briefly before disappearing again into the earth.

There is another well a mile or so away, at the foot of the same scarp as An Poll i bhFolach and the well of Clochán an Airgid, and therefore strikingly similar to it in the formation of the cliffy slope above it. And here the mystery of water, its life-giving powers, is explicitly celebrated, for this is a holy well. In fact it is the well that inspired J. M. Synge’s play The Well of the Saints. Its legend is the familiar one of the miraculous cure of blindness; Synge himself recorded it during his first visit to the islands, in 1898. A woman living in Sligo who had a blind son dreamed of the well and the cure in its waters, and took a boat and brought her son to Aran. She declined all guidance from the locals and went straight to the well, prayed, bathed her son’s eyes – and saw his face fill with joy as he exclaimed over the beauty of the flowers around the well. This well is beside one of the islands’ most beautiful little medieval chapels, Teampall an Cheathrair Álainn, the Church of the Beautiful Four. These comely persons are by ancient sources identified as Saints Fursey, Brendan of Birr, Conall and Berchan; but I do not vouch for the historicity of their presence here. It is fitting that legend names this well as Tobar an Cheathrair Álainn, the Well of the Beautiful Four, for beauty is the characteristic I want to retain from the handful of places I have plucked out of the Aran Islands. Now I’ll go in search of a place with a different essence.

After I had made my map of the Aran Islands I looked around me, and there to the east on the mainland were the silver-grey uplands of the Burren. This is limestone country too, of heavily glaciated karst, with fertile valleys hidden from each other by rounded or terraced hills of bare, fissured, rock sheets. It is rich in prehistoric remains; within say 150 square miles, there are 66 megalithic tombs and over four hundred circular enclosures ranging from ruinous but still mighty triple-ramparted cashels to slight walls that once enclosed the stockyards of humble farmsteads. Many of these monuments are almost drowned in thousands of acres of hazel scrub. To force myself into every corner of this daunting territory I decided to visit all the ancient sites marked on the old six-inch-to-the-mile Ordnance Survey maps that were my template, and in so doing I found many more antiquities. But it was a long, lonely struggle, often in foul weather. The Burren is often claimed to be a spiritual landscape, but if so it harbours an obstructive, secretive spirit among others, one who stretches brambles across paths, makes rock slippery with rain and confounds horizons with mist. Once, as I stood in the rain in a roofless church ruin, up to my knees in wet nettles, I was shown the severed head of a statue of a bishop, by an old man who seemed quite ready to demonstrate its use as a cursing-stone by turning it anticlockwise and so inflicting a stroke or a drowning on some enemy. Suddenly I felt a revulsion against the Burren, its obscurantist myths, its labyrinthine refusal to provide an intelligible view of itself, its slithery resistance to the grip of cartography. At other times its breezy, sunny hillsides, trembling with wildflowers and butterflies, were annexes to heavenly skies. And most frequently it drifted between these extremes, moody, ambiguous, as in the place I am going to describe.

A narrow road leads up out of one of the valleys of the central Burren onto a bleak plateau; I often had to push my bike up and across it. Scanning the plateau one sees an apparently endless recession of fields separated by breast-high drystone walls enclosing little but grey rock riven by fissures full of brambles and bracken. A solitary wind-inflected thorntree and a deserted single-storey farmhouse show on the horizon. The monotony of this area challenged me. There must be something hidden among these countless walls, I felt, something I can rescue from the nullity, the sterility, of mere location and mark on my map – for it is the attention we bring to it that makes a place out of a location. I used to leave my bike by the road and spend time straying to and fro among these anonymous fields. I never met anyone there. Then I came across a field that seemed worth recording, not for anything in it – the usual wind-shorn shaggy thistly stuff lurking in every crevice – but for the walls enclosing it. In many parts of the Burren it is easy to prise up large thin slabs out of the topmost layer of rock; the builders of megalithic tombs did it, and in Aran, which shares the geology of the Burren, the making of tombstones out of such slabs, and selling them to the south Connemara folk who do not live on limestone but on granite, was a thriving industry in the nineteenth century. Limestone is of course vulnerable to erosion; it is eaten away by the carbonic acid in rainwater, and any crack that water can penetrate will be enlarged over the centuries into a crevice many inches wide. Sometimes these crevices develop into gullies and basins of fantastic shapes. And this field had been fenced with slabs set on edge that exhibited – the word is right – a great variety of amoeboid piercings that would have pleased the surrealist sculptor Hans Arp. Look through these weird windows, and what is on one side is as lugubriously anonymous as what is on the other. I wanted to put this field on my map, but of course there was no way of indicating what was remarkable about it on the map sheet; nor did I want to make too much of it in a land of such marvels as the Burren. In the end I marked it with a dot and in tiny print the words ‘a strange field’. Occasionally I hear from someone who has noticed this cartographic curiosity and gone in search of its objective correlative. Usually they have been unsure whether or not they found what I had found, or what it was they were supposed to see in it – but then there is nothing to be seen in it, just grey emptiness, nodding thistles, an occasional attendance of puzzled visitors on a mystique. I take from this instance another modality of places: strangeness.

From our little house perched on the skyline of Árainn we could look out across ten miles of sea to the ragged peninsulas and archipelagos of Connemara and its core of mountains. Nothing of the orderly levels of limestone here, instead an arrested flux and turbulence of upended and overthrown strata half quenched in a coastline of baffling intricacy. To map it seemed a reasonable conclusion to what already had become a totally unreasonable project of mapping all the land I could see from my home – as if I were so far lost that only a comprehensive universal map would find my place. At first my plan was merely to map that unmappably complex southern coastline, which I set out to walk from end to end, peninsula by peninsula, island after island, over a number of sessions of a few weeks each. This task, which seemed to impose itself like a ritual obligation of obscure significance, took so long that in the end we decided to move to the mainland and extend the map to include the mountains and the western, Atlantic, coast of Connemara as well. I was several years into this project when I came across the place I am going to select for description, out of Connemara’s fecundity of place.

Gleann Eidhneach, the ivied glen, leads up into the centre of the cluster of mountains called the Twelve Pins. In the last Ice Age a glacier nested on a sunless north-facing slope of the mountain massif, and as it grew and inched downhill under its own weight it gouged out this wide flat-bottomed valley as a way for itself, before joining other glaciers coming down out of other mountain dens, and eventually finding its way to the sea. Ten or twelve thousand years ago it melted back, dumping thousands of tons of clay and boulders, a moraine that now lies like a rampart across the valley floor. A vigorous stream meandering down the valley has breached these drifts and flows through a little canyon twenty or thirty feet deep. Thousands of years of bog growth have carpeted the valley with heather and rounded the forms of the glacial moraine; bare rock shows only on the mountain slopes on either side. The place I would describe is perched on the smooth back of the moraine. I noticed it for the first time when walking up the valley in the company of an ornithologist; we were going to look for raven and peregrine falcon nests on the precipice at the head of the valley. We stopped to rest for a moment, and, idly looking before me across the valley, I saw six little vertebrae sticking up from the spine of the moraine, that aroused my curiosity. We splashed across a couple of hundred yards of wet bog and ran up onto the moraine, where we found a line of small boulders – a stone alignment in fact, a type of monument usually dated to the Bronze Age. The boulders were of the local quartzite; the largest, at the southern end of the row, was about waist high and contained a good deal of white quartz. I did not take much notice of the direction in which they were aligned – at first glance the row seemed to be pointing vaguely at the mountain wall on the south side of the valley. But when the trained archaeologists came along to verify my report of this find, one of them – Michael Gibbons – noticed that in fact it pointed at a V-shaped cleft in the high skyline, a high mountain pass leading over into the next valley. Further, he came back to the site on the shortest day of the year, the day of the winter solstice, when the sun’s arc is at its lowest and the point at which it sets is at its southerly extreme – and found that, as observed from the stone alignment, the sun staged its farewell to the year exactly in that cleft. The following midwinter I went up the valley to pay my respects to this phenomenon. At two o’clock of the short winter afternoon the sun was blazing, but it was already in the grip of the mountains. Every minute detail of the northern side of the valley, with its little potato plots straggling up the steeps from two isolated farmhouses, was gold-washed, while the southern mountain wall was in deep shade. The last of the sunbeams were so intense that, looking along the alignment into the dazzlement, it was hard to make out what was happening. As the sun slipped slowly down into the cleft its radiance seemed to erode the profiles of the slopes on either side. The flecks of white quartz in the stones of the alignment almost leaped from their beds in the flood of energy. Then the sun was gone and the great mountain shadows stretched out across the valley floor. The longest night was beginning; beyond that, the spring was already in waiting, and all the annual phenomena of concern to the Bronze-Age folk who had wrestled those boulders into position on the crest of the moraine: the passage of migrating geese, the warmth necessary for sowing corn, the salmons’ ascent of the stream. The calendar started from this day, to which the alignment pointed as certainly as Christian spires point to heaven.

But why was that alignment built exactly where it was? For, if you think of it, as the setting sun moved across the sky, the mountain shadow with the cleft in its profile must have swept across quite an extent of the valley floor, so that there would have been many other points from which it would appear that the sun was setting into the cleft; an alignment in any of these places would function just as well as the actual one as the focus of a ritual or to mark the point from which the solstitial sunset was to be observed by some priest-astronomer of the valley community. But then the crest of the moraine is itself a proud place: it commands the valley floor and stands its ground in the face of the encircling mountains. If the spring wells I described from the Aran Islands are centripetal places, this Connemara site is centrifugal: vision is spun out from it, its mode of placehood is that of the outlook, the point of view. (Such observations belong to a field of study one could call distemics, the phenomenology of far-off things.)

But there is one defect in this grand spectacle of the solstitial sunset: the sun doesn’t quite reach the bottom of the cleft in the horizon before disappearing behind the mountain to the west of it. If the stone alignment were a little further south, or the arc of the sun’s passage across the sky were a little lower, the effect would be perfect, and even more dramatic. But consider this: The daily journeying of the sun from east to west is of course the effect of the earth’s turning on its axis. A spinning top appears to bow in all directions, as every child notices; the orientation of its axis changes slowly, sweeping out a cone; the phenomenon is called precession, I remember from my mathematical days. So too for the earth, with complications – nutations, or noddings – due to its equatorial paunch, to the pull of the moon and the other planets; the upshot of these influences being that the angle of the earth’s axis to the plane of its orbit round the sun changes cyclically by about two-and-a-half degrees, with a period of 41,000 years. This angle is presently decreasing, so that the midwinter sun seems to pass across the sky perhaps half a degree higher than it did say 3,500 years ago. So the Bronze Agers got their celestial architecture exactly right. In their day the midwinter sun, as seen from the stone alignment, disappeared precisely into the bottom of the cleft in the mountain skyline. (When I say ‘precisely’ and ‘exactly’, I am of course writing with the degree of precision one would expect of a row of boulders, rather than of a sextant.)

Making this mental correction to the spectacle of the midwinter sunset feels like adjusting the focus of an optical instrument, which is what the alignment, taken together with the cleft in the skyline, really is. From this perfectly placed place on the top of the moraine, a panorama of the mountain walls and the wide wild glen offers itself, and on the shortest day of midwinter another perspective opens up like the aperture in the dome of an observatory; one can see halfway to infinity and eternity, not only the dazzling millions of miles to the sun but the three or four thousand years back to the Bronze Age, and the forty-one-thousand-year wobble of the earth’s tilted axis. The place is a foothold on a globe that is tumbling through space and time. The prehistoric links us back to the cosmic. Antiquity is the term I’ll take to embrace both.

Do the virtually limitless depths of antiquity nullify our concerns with the present and the near future? Our barricades against global warming, whatever form they take, are hardly likely to be visible in the landscape in a few centuries’ time. Also, we human beings have discovered a way of looking at time as if it were all spread out before us like the Bayeux tapestry, and the comprehensiveness of this vision consoles us for the narrowness of the segment of the panorama representing our own lifetimes. Nevertheless, like any other animal, each of us is the embodied origin of a particular perspective on time and space: what is near and soon concerns us with the urgency of a life we feel flowing away from us even as we live it. We are inescapably at the sharp end of this outlook, whether it extends into deep time or not. The tapestry model of time offers meagre protection; we can bundle it into a wad to blunt the point but we are still impaled upon the perspectives that constitute us.

Beauty, strangeness, antiquity – three fragile moments of place. The places I have described may stand for all the delicate facets of the earth that make it into the jewel of the known cosmos. None of the places I have conjured up for you out of the Aran Islands, the Burren and Connemara are in present danger. But you can imagine how a wind turbine up on that lonely plateau of the Burren would suck all the strangeness out of it and mince it up, and how the stone alignment and its literally spectacular relationship to topography and cosmology would fare if that magnificent valley were to be dammed to store up the ‘Spirit of Ireland’. On the Aran Islands, with the decline of cattle farming and increase of building, a little unofficial quarry could obliterate a place like An Poll i bhFolach overnight; in fact the ravishingly beautiful well of Clochán an Airgid had a narrow escape from such a fate during our time on the island. And we are only at the beginning of society’s reaction to the threat of global warming. What will be the pressures on us in a decade or two? Will irresolution be replaced by panic? For we have read dire predictions. Breach the recommended two-degree limit to global warming and we trigger a runaway process of positive feedback; at six degrees, say some, the vast quantities of methane presently safely tucked away on the ocean bed come boiling to the surface and ignite in a worldwide fireball. Improbable, but if anything like that happened, the earth would surely be screaming to be rid of us. Clearly we cannot be party to the extermination of all higher life, whatever it costs to avert it. And on the current modes of calculating that cost, the West of Ireland, whatever its stores of beauty, strangeness and antiquity, would be sacrificed. In which case what I have said about my three paradigms of place can be heard as an elegy for all lost places. I want to raise our awareness of what is at stake to a level approaching pain, a pre-emptive nostalgia for the places we love – and nothing sharpens the sensibilities so much as the threat of loss.

But the die is not yet cast. There is still time for a redirected human will, informed by a truly alternative set of values, to divert the course of events. So let my three descriptions be heard instead as a call to the defence of such places. And there is a special rightness in raising this call as from the West of Ireland, for a cult of place, or at least of placenames, is traceable in Irish culture from earliest times down to the present. The foundation myth of this cult is preserved in the medieval Irish text Acallam na Senórach, the Colloquy of the Elders. This compilation of stories concerning Fionn mac Cumhal and his warrior band the Fianna has as its framing device a wandering around Ireland undertaken by St Patrick in the company of Caílte, one of Fionn’s band who has somehow long outlived his companions and is now submitting himself to the new order symbolized by the coming of the saint. At each of the forts and prominent landscape features they pass, Caílte pronounces its name and recites the events – usually bloody and uncanny – from which the name derives, and St Patrick commands one of his scribes to write them down for the edification of futurity. Thus the work enacts the passing-on of the Celtic Iron Age placelore to the Christian dispensation – and although the text as it has come down to us is a product of monastic scriptoria it is filled with a sense of yearning for the great old days when the hunters revelled in the sights and sounds of the forest and the hills, and the doors of the otherworld lay open everywhere. Dinnsheanchas, as it is called, the lore of place, the exegesis of placenames, is a persistent feature of Irish literature, down to Brian Friel’s Translations, in which a young British officer engaged in the first Ordnance Survey of Ireland in the 1830s, and an Irish peasant girl, having no common language, exchange as love-gifts recitations of the placenames each of them has grown up amongst.

However it must be admitted that this Irish fascination with placenames is too often purely nominal and does not extend to caring for the places themselves; nostalgia stands in for conservation and convenience trumps all. Here’s an evocative list of placenames from a public notice I saw in a newspaper a few years ago. They are the names of townlands, the small land divisions that often equate to a single farmhouse and its land, or a hamlet, or a stretch of commonage:

Doughiska, Garraun North, Coolagh, Glennascaul, Frenchfort, Carnmore, Lisheenkyle, Barrettes Park, Caherbriskaun, Carraun Duff, Rathmorrissy, Pollnagroagh, Ballygarraun, Newford, Prospect, Baunmore, Gartnahoon, Furzypark, Farranablake, Boyhill, Toberconnolly, Loobroe, Moyode, Deerpark, Rathgorgin, Esker, Brusk, Carragh More, Greyford, Kiltullagh, Clogharevaun, Carrowroe, Ballynahown, Bookeen, Carrowkeel, Clashagranny, Knocknaduala, Galboley, Carrowreagh, Killescragh, Caraun More, Cross, Cloonconaun, Rahally, Slievedotia, Brackloon, Rathglass, Owenavaddy, Treanbaun, Ballymabilla, Toormore, Gortnahoon, Cappataggle, Ballynaclogh, Slihaun Beg, Cloghagalla Oughter, Cloghagalla Eighter, Cooltymurraghy, Cloonameragaun, Coololla, Curragh, Barnacragh, Liscappul, Loughbown, Mackney, Garbally Demesne, Brackemagh, Moher, Dunlo, Pollboy, Tulrush, Ardcarn, Suckfield, Kilgarve, Beagh.

I wrote out this list as part of a letter to the Irish Times in 2004, suggesting that its readers might relish it. And I ended by saying:

I don’t know these little places, but I am sure they are as rich in variety and individuality as their names are, even in these anglicised forms. But this is the list of townlands to be torn through by the proposed N6 dual carriageway from Ballinasloe to Galway.

Read the list again, and weep.

But that was in boom-time Ireland, the Old Woman of the Four Green-Field Sites. The paper did not publish my letter, and nobody wept. In fact from visitors to Connemara I hear nothing but praise of the new road, which reduces the driving time down from Dublin to three hours or so; and indeed if I had to do that journey often I’d feel the same. Ours is the age of the shortcut, trading space for time; technology is shortcuts, ever abridging the gap between intent and fulfilment. And technology, having hurried us into the present crux of global warming, now offers to deliver us from it, in return for the ground from beneath our feet. But before we sacrifice the ‘hole in hiding’ (taking that tender spot in the Aran Islands to stand for all the places liable to be brushed aside by the renewable energy industries) there is much we can and should give up, if necessary by going the long way round, by abjuring some of the shortcuts of technology. I might suggest that war, the ultimate (but often delusive) technological shortcut in its impatient abandonment of the serpentine ways of diplomacy, is a luxury of which we could be sparing. (In discussion of the rights and wrongs of current and recent wars I don’t remember seeing their carbon footprints mentioned, although they must be gigantic.) But I don’t feel called upon to design the carbon-frugal, place-conserving economy we need; that’s for the experts, including right-minded technologists. However, perhaps I can say something about the re-evaluation of place that might motivate such a project.

First, the role of placenames. Reverting to that list of places knocked about by the new dual carriageway: they are given in their anglicized forms, but in most cases one can recognize the original Irish-language versions underlying them. These are both musical and meaningful. Dabhach Uisce, water hole; Lisín Coille, little fort of the wood; Baile an Gharráin, the village of the thicket; Gort na hUamhna, field of the cave; Eiscir – an eiscir is a ridge of glacial deposits marking the course of a river that flowed under the ice of the last glaciation; Sliabh Dóite, burnt mountain; Ceapach an tSeagal, the rye plot; Clocha Gealla, bright stones; Lios Capaill, ringfort of the horse … all pregnant with history and topography. To idealize a linguistic situation that in reality is often ravaged and corrupted, a placename summarizes the place’s attributes and origins, asserts its excellencies and rights to respect. Therefore the handing down and rehearsal of its placename is a place’s first defence against neglect or exploitation, against its being regarded as a mere shortcut to some other more profitable place. Among the historical roots of Ireland’s carelessness of place is the retreat of its language and the accompanying anglicization of its placenames, which have been defaced, rendered dumb and sometimes reduced to the ridiculous. To undo a little of this damage has been for me, an Englishman, a work of reparation.

One reason I have found the placenames of Connemara and the Aran Islands so fascinating is that they are for the most part in the Irish that is still current, and that my access to the language is limited, so that they appear to me as so many secrets to be unveiled, riddles to be solved, clues to a mystery, passwords to a cult. And with the word ‘cult’, a tinge of the religious comes in again. What might a cult of place entail? One could take guidance from the ancient cult of holy wells – with which I have become very familiar, my map of Connemara being constellated with the dozens of holy wells I have been shown, many of them known only to a few old folk of the immediate vicinity. The cult involves visiting, thoughtfulness, ritual handling of pebbles, water, flowers – as well as features we can do without: superstition, penitential barefootedness, repetitive mumblings. A secular version might call forth an awareness of the place’s constitution, the causal net that brought it into existence, from cosmic origins to the casual touch of local microhistory. On such occasions the basic act of attention that creates a place out of a location would be renewed, enhanced by whatever systems of understanding we can muster, from the mathematical to the mythological, by the passion of poetry, or by simple enjoyment of the play of light on it. Here is a gateway to a land without shortcuts, where each place is bathed in the sunlight of our contemplation and all its particularities brought forth, like those mountainside potato plots gilded by midwinter sunset in the valley of the stone alignment.

I bring this suggestion forward with some hesitation, being uncomfortably aware that to propose the cult of holy wells as a model for our times might appear quaint, hopelessly antiquated, terminally rustic. Have I sojourned too long in Connemara? But, reading through the descriptions of the three places I have given you, I note that in each case I have spontaneously drawn on imagery of pilgrimage and shrine. Realizing that the mindful seeking-out of place has been the half-subconscious drive of my practice in all these years of mapping and topographical writing, I can hardly disown this terminology now, unbeliever though I be. And since for centuries the material world was seen as a quarry of metaphors to describe the glories of a spiritual world, that gorgeous structure of the imagination should in return provide the liturgy and ceremonial we need for a praiseful approach to the places that glorify the here below.

Placenames, whether they exist in the mind of the Irish seanchaí, the custodian of traditional lore, or in the memory banks of a database, are only the anchor points of a discourse of place. To create a language for the secular celebration of the earth, with the height and power of the religious tradition but purged of supernaturalism, can be seen as the task of ecoliterature, tracked and made conscious of itself by ecocriticism. But can literature submit to being welded to any particular aim or study in the way these awkwardly compounded terms suggest? A better word might be ‘geophany’, with its echo of theophany, the manifestation of a deity, or the celebration of such an appearance. If I have to call on the terminology of religion it is because that is the language evolved to address the highest; and the highest is what lies under our feet and bears us up. Geophany, then, the showing forth of the earth through all the geophanic arts and sciences, should be our means towards a reformation of values. The secretive beauty of Aran’s spring wells, the strangeness of the ragged little fields of the Burren, the deep antiquity of the stone alignment in Connemara, stand here for the countless precious things for which we will be mourning, if in ten or twenty years’ time we find we have sacrificed them to the technology of shortcuts, in a misdirected effort to save the world.