Setting Foot on the Shores of Connemara by Tim Robinson Read Free Book Online

intersect, giving as it were an accurate fix on a point of reality, which therefore could become a reference-point of my own intuitive surveying.
    But today I was to be disappointed. The first of the two marks the islander had to show me, the heel-print, in a stone of a field-wall near his house, appeared to be natural, but I could add nothing to his description of it and he had no legend to account for it. The second, the bird’s footmark, was in a sheet of bare rock at the highest point of the island, and I could tell him it was thebench-mark which the old surveyors carved on points the heights of which were given on the map – and that here we were therefore exactly so many feet above sea-level. But for my purposes a secondhand trig-point would not do.
    The dubiously holy well was in a field largely of bare rock not far away, and as soon as I saw it I knew how the doubt had arisen, and that it would play a part in my own mysterious triangulations even if it would not appear on my finished map. Many of the holy wells of the west of Ireland are not true springs but mere hollows in the rock that hold a little rainwater, sometimes through such long droughty periods that it is easy to share the old folks’ belief that they never run dry. Now only a few days earlier on another island I had seen such a well, dedicated to St Ann, which was a perfectly triangular hole just a few inches across. The granite of this region is cut through by long slanting fissures that run in various directions, and there three such planes, happening to intersect just below ground-level, had left a tetrahedral piece of stone isolated between them to be plucked out by the glaciers that scoured the region during the Ice Ages, or dissolved away by trickling rainwater in subsequent millennia. The puddle we were now looking at was another, rather larger triangle, and just as it had immediately appealed to me as being custom-built by Nature for my personal system of co-ordinates, it must always have seemed to the old folk of the island to relate to the St Ann’s well which they would have visited, and therefore to bear some significance , which in this case it appears had never become explicit, for there were none of the usual accumulation of little objects – pebbles for counting the ‘rounds’ of prayer, coins, holy medallions, teacup-shards, horseshoe nails – that mark a well at which wishes are efficacious, and the young man had no qualms about letting his dog drink from it. And although I am acquiring a reputation in these countrysides for my devotion to the cult of blessed wells, I did not feel I could pronounce on the genuineness of this one, precious though it would be to me.
    By the time the islander had finished naming for me all the inlets and headlands visible from this height, the state of the tide was on my mind. I said goodbye and thanked him, and walked on down to have a quick look at a cluster of roofless cottages on a steep slope above a little bay. The overgrown kitchen gardens andlanes around them trapped me in brambles and ambushed me with tottering walls, and it took me so long to work my way through them and around the coast to the beginning of the Road of the Islands that I felt I should hurry. Then the three islets flustered me with clifflets and pockets of bog, and in the end I went so far astray on territory disputed between marshland and seabed that I began to imagine that the final causeway to the mainland must already have been submerged, and that I would have to bellow until someone launched a boat to fetch me off. But then the causeway came in sight, a broad firm path still well above the waters, with the look of one saying calmly, ‘You could have taken another hour, or half an hour at least,’ or even, reproachfully, ‘By hurrying you risked something more than being stuck on an islet for a few hours. You might have blotted the ironies of your meeting with today’s Connemara man, or even mislaid one of the