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

Twelve Bens huddle like sheep; there are in fact eleven summits of between 1700 and 2000 feet in height, with names like Binn Bhán, white peak, and one which is not a peak but a massive lump, called Meacanacht, probably from an obsolete Irish word meaning a lumpy thing. While the sharper tops are of quartzite, a rock resistant to weathering and inhospitable to vegetation, Meacanachtis of kinder stuff, a schist that breaks down into clayey soil; its southern face is green, and rare alpines lurk on its north-facing precipices. Farther east and separated from the Bens by the majestic Inagh Valley are the Mám Tuirc mountains, a line of peaks forming the boundary between Connemara proper and its eastern province, the Joyce Country. Mám Tuirc itself, the pass of the boar, towards the northern end of the range, is hidden from me by the Bens, but I can make out the broad saddle of Mám Éan, the pass of birds, near the southern end, where the ancient Celts used to celebrate the festival of Lughnasa at the beginning of harvest-time . Later this site was Christianized, and legend brings St Patrick there to bless the lands west of it from that vantage point. For the Pattern Day festivities that succeeded to Lughnasa, Connemara and the Joyce Country would meet there, to pray, to drink poitín, to enjoy a blackthorn-stick fight. A few years ago the clergy imposed the alien rite of the Stations of the Cross on Mám Éan, but even while the priest is conducting the ceremony folk faithful to the old ways still clamber into St Patrick’s Bed, a hollow of the steep hillside only a few feet away from the new marble altar, and turn round seven times, sunwise.
    Although the clustered Bens and the oblique line of the Mám Tuirc peaks look unrelated when one clambers among them, their essential unity is clear in this view from Errisbeg. They are the remains of one great ridge running from east to west, which dates from the Caledonian period of mountain building some 450 million years ago, when two of the plates that make up the earth’s surface were slowly driving against one another, the resultant crumpling being the origin of the mountains of Scandinavia, ‘Caledonia, stern and wild’ itself, the northern half of Ireland, and Newfoundland. A sandstone of even earlier date was pinched in the interior of a giant fold here, and recrystallized under immense pressure to produce the unyielding quartzite of the Connemara peaks. Clay and limestone materials caught up into the outer layers of the fold were metamorphosed into the softer schists and marble that have worn down since then to form the lower land south of the mountains , the corresponding but narrower valleys north of them, and the broad north-south corridor of the Inagh Valley. The blackish crags of Errisbeg itself are of gabbro, a dense basic rock that came up molten from the earth’s mantle some tens of millions of yearsbefore the Caledonian convulsions. The lovely cone of Cashel Hill rising from the head of the bay east of Roundstone is of the same rock, and there are a few similar dark hills north of the Bens, including Dúchruach, the ‘black stack’, that lowers over the wooded valley and lake of Kylemore, a sympathetic backdrop for the nineteenth-century gothic fantasy of Kylemore Castle. Thus there are dark hills both north and south of the pale quartzite mountains, preserving the approximate symmetry of Connemara about its east-west axis.
    The Ice Ages, starting about one and a half million years ago and perhaps not all past yet, have carved up all these variously resistant rocks into the welter of forms that meet the eye today, excavating the valleys between the mountain ranges and the great fiord of Killary Harbour that divides Connemara from the Mayo uplands to the north. Some of the material removed by the glaciers was dumped when they melted back, in the form of the low rounded hills of boulder and clay called drumlins by geographers. These isolated hills, usually of