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

co-ordinates of your dream.’

3
The View from Errisbeg
    In my face, the Atlantic wind, bringing walls of rain, low ceilings of cloud, dazzling windows of sunshine, the endless transformation scenes of the far west. Underfoot, dark crystalline stone, one of the many summits of a dragon-backed hill, the last, beyond which the land tails off into a bleak peninsula, clusters of foaming rocks and a lonely lighthouse. And spread below, to the north, a bewildering topography of lakes lost in bogs, across which scarcely less comprehensible maps of cloud-shadow race inland, towards mountain ranges. Eastwards, a wrinkled golden spread half unravelled by the sea, dotted with the tiny white rectangles of human habitation; off this, to the south, islands, the nearer ones gold too, those on the horizon grey-blue; finally, closing the south-east, another land, of hills the colour of distance itself.
    The hill is Errisbeg, which shelters the little fishing-village of Roundstone from the west wind, in Connemara; the portion of the world’s surface visible from its summit comprises the suite of landscapes grouped around Galway Bay which it has been my wonderful and wearying privilege to explore in detail over the last fifteen years, the Burren uplands in County Clare, the Aran Islands, and Connemara itself. Most recently I have been enquiring out the names of those lakes that lie on the dark plain below like fragments of a mirror flung down and shattered. The elderly men who used to herd sheep, fish for brown trout or shoot the white-fronted Greenland goose out in that labyrinth can recall about two dozen of the names of the larger lakes, and there are a similar number whose names I am beginning to despair of, not to mention countless little ones, all within an area of about thirty square miles. One is called Loch Beithinis, birch-island lake; for while the lakes themselves are often hard to find among the slightundulations of the bog, the wind-shaped domes of the dense little woods on their islands are visible from greater distances. Crows nest in most of these islands, and the occasional merlin; some are heronries, and the trees of one have been reduced to skeletons by the droppings of generations of cormorants. The vegetation of these ungrazed patches suggests that but for the omnipresent sheep at least the better-drained parts of the low-lying blanket boglands would be covered with a forest of sessile oak, holly, yew, birch and willow. As elsewhere, it is human activity that determines the texture of what appears at first glance to be untouched wilderness, a fact that complicates the conservationist case somewhat . However, this area, which is becoming known as Roundstone Bog, having been spared by forestry and commercial turf-cutting so far, should most certainly be preserved as it is; apart from its ecological uniqueness, it harbours one of the rarest of resources, solitude.
    One road winds across this bog, along which the traveller can enjoy a sky undivided by wires. I can just make it out from Errisbeg, clambering around the knoll called Na Creaga Móra, the big crags, famous in botanical literature as the station of a heather, Mackay’s Heath, discovered here by the self-taught Roundstone botanist William McCalla in 1835, and otherwise only known from Donegal and Oviedo in Spain. The other rare heathers of Roundstone Bog are the Dorset Heath, of which half a dozen tussocks here constitute the entire Irish population, and the Mediterranean Heath, which grows in the streaming valleys of Errisbeg’s north-east flank, and in Mayo, and is otherwise restricted to Spain and Portugal. It is the warm breath of the Atlantic that fosters such southern exotics in this almost tundra-like terrain.
    Following that road with my eye, I see it disappear north- westwards , where the Protestant spire and the Catholic spire of Clifden show above low hills, the western decrescendo of a symphony of mountains all along the skyline. Due north of me, the