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Scailp
Of recent years my explorations in Roundstone Bog have repeatedly led me to a place called Scailp. There are several distinct ways of getting to it, none of them easy, from the seaside village of Roundstone itself. Bogland is an obstructive, argumentative, quibbling, contentious terrain; it demands step-by-step negotiations. I am left tired but exhilarated by the feat of getting to Scailp and back again in an afternoon; I catch myself admiring my ability to move fast over such a tricky surface, and have to remind myself that this is a loan from fortune and will be soon withdrawn. Ideally, I feel, a walk should be undertaken with the respect for its own timescale and structures and ceremonies of mood one brings to the hearing of a piece of music. Conversation, except on what’s to hand or underfoot, is redundant, inopportune. Solitude is best. I cannot dance, perhaps because dancing takes place on the flat, on a surface that suggests no rhythms and leaves my will floundering in self-consciousness; instead I aspire to a compensating gift of walking, not in a way that overcomes the land but in one that commends every accident and essence of it to my bodily balance and my understanding. Sometimes, though, after one of these almost ceremonial or ritual walks I am disappointed to find very little in my mental knapsack; I have taken the distance only in my stride and not in my mind. But perhaps that is for the best in the case of a walk with a goal like Scailp, where there is nothing, or almost nothing; I go out there to wrestle with emptiness, and success would be to bring exactly nothing home with me, not even a catalogue of finds and observations or that rather exciting ego-whiff of sweat and wilderness.
Because Roundstone has spread so far along the coast road in both directions the quickest way out of the village is to strike inland, up the lane from the harbour past the back premises of O’Dowd’s bar and Fair Green, the neat little estate built by the County Council in the 1980s. Soon I have to choose between going straight on towards the ragged steeps of Errisbeg Hill, or taking a turning to the right along a track that rises slowly across the flanks of the two lesser and more rounded heights, Roundstone Hill and Letterdife Hill. This time I will take the road ahead. It leads past a scattering of cottages and some recently built bungalows with many dormer windows and smooth lawns that alternate strangely with rough fields overgrown with thickets of furze; the village has clearly staked its claim to this triangle of underused farmland between the built-up coastal zone and the line of hills. Telegraph poles lean into the branches of alders along the margins of a dark little wood; there is a wind-tousled rusticity about the scene; it needs to comb its hair and tuck in its shirt-tail before returning to the main street. The drainage channels along the roadsides are crammed with a plant life that mixes the native-born and the feral intruder; tall ranks of reeds that bow and scrape and whisper among themselves as one passes alternate with dense brakes of the rattling bamboo-like stems of Japanese knotweed, an invasive alien that can drive its shoots through cracks in concrete. I remember passing an elderly man with a long-handled rake laboriously dragging masses of sodden vegetation out of the drainage channels of a damp roadside field; he wiped his surly brow and swore, ‘This is the last time I cut rushes and leave them to grow after me!’ meaning that in future he would poison them. But he went into the old folks’ home in Clifden the next year, and his field is full of rushes again. The small farmer is dying out and tall straggling furze bushes overrun the former pastures; sometimes someone sets a match to them and blackens an acre or two, but the next June they are as golden as before; there is nothing for it but to sell off the land as building sites.
Further up, the narrow road becomes a boreen hedged with fuchsia and berberis, and climbs to a rickety old gate constructed of odds and ends tied together with twine, which gives onto the boggy commonage hillside, the ‘mountain’, as such land is called in Connemara, whether it be upland or lowland. Outside one of the last cottages I often used to meet Tommy O’Donnell, a sheep farmer, from whose nearly forgotten Irish and obscurely mouthed English I tried to make out placenames and local histories. Tommy was half a head taller than me, cadaverous and hollow-cheeked, nothing but skin and tendons and bones. In his weather-darkened work clothes he was a dreadful silhouette, all height and edges, with no thickness to him, a memento mori from bad times, an apparition from the famine graves he told me of in the bushes behind his cottage. When he stood before me with one lanky arm stretched out at right angles to grasp his long staff, he framed a door-shaped view of the hill beyond. I used to think he was the ideal farmer, as he knew his sheep individually and remembered their mothers and grandmothers too, or so he told me once when he was grumbling about the fox that had come down from the hill and savaged a lamb. (He suspected me of tending to favour the fox, which I did not, since it had also taken every one of the guineafowl I was trying to keep at the time.) But I am told that in his last few years, whether it was because he was getting too arthritic and scatterbrained to mind them, or because the headage payment schemes with which the failing way of life of the West was being artificially prolonged had tempted him into taking on too many, his sheep suffered dreadfully. Once when a little girl from London was holidaying with us I brought her up here, hoping that she would be charmed by the sights and sounds of rural life. We stopped to chat with Tommy while his scraggy yellow-eyed sheepdogs sniffed suspiciously at her, and Tommy held forth in such horrid detail about how after days of ceaseless rain he’d found a ewe stuck in a ditch, all waterlogged and maggoty, that I was glad the child was indifferent to the countryside, to the point of deafness and blindness.
The path leading on from O’Donnell’s mountain gate points one in the right direction, towards the pass between Errisbeg Hill to the west and Roundstone Hill to the north, but very soon becomes indistinguishable from the numerous little watercourses that come braiding down to meet the climber. The going is difficult, stony and steep in places and in others soft and slippery, often combining both qualities into one pace. The central areas of the saddle—An Gleann Mór, the big glen—are crossed here and there by the broken-down trenches of long-abandoned turf-cuttings, and are usually so wet that it is best to keep to the hillsides on one side or the other. On the left, clinging to the skirts of Errisbeg Hill, which comes stepping down in little precipices here, is the Path of Afola; at least, John King, another sheep farmer with whom I have often walked the hills, tells me it is a path, but it is not readily distinguishable from the wayward and interrupted slots worn by sheep into the heather. I have written down the name as it sounds; the second element is probably the Irish athbhuaile, ‘former milking place’, for, as I will explain, in the old days cattle would be grazed on isolated grassy patches in mountain land like this during the summer milking season. There is a pleasant Irish phrase for a nostalgic return: Cuairt an lao ar an athbhuaile, the calf ’s visit to the old milking place, which I am reminded of every time I pass this way to revisit Scailp.
At the top of the pass—ill-defined, the terrain being so irregular—a view of the low-lying tangle of land and water beyond begins to open up. A flush, a spongy patch of sphagnum moss collecting the run-off from the hillside, feeds a tiny stream that rapidly grows in volume and volubility as it falls northwards to the first of Roundstone Bog’s hundred lakes. A hundred yards further down a few clumps of a heather taller than the common sorts appear on its banks, and where the stream makes a dog-leg to the east between two knolls before continuing its downhill course it is densely overgrown with heather three or four feet tall. This heather is one of Roundstone Bog’s famous rarities, the Mediterranean heath, Erica erigena, which grows here in the Gleann Mór and in a few scattered localities near the west Mayo coast, and is otherwise absent from Europe north of the Iberian peninsula. Whether it is a true native of Ireland is debatable, since its pollen, unlike that of Connemara’s other rare heathers, has not been found in peat deposits from pre-Christian times, and the earliest notice of the plant is due to Edward Lhwydd, the Welsh enthusiast for all things Celtic, who visited Connemara in about 1700. It may in fact have been brought to Ireland as packing around wine casks; both the O’Flahertys of Connemara and the seafaring O’Malleys of west Mayo carried on a flourishing smuggling trade with Portugal and Spain. It was rediscovered by J. T. Mackay of Trinity College, Dublin, in 1830, and although he noted the location as being ‘on a declivity, by a stream, in boggy ground, at the foot of Urrisbeg mountain . . . on its west side’, I think this hollow in the Gleann Mór, on the north-east flank of the mountain, is its locus classicus, as the botanists say, for the place is called French Heath Tamhnóg by the very few people who have names for such out-of-the-way (and egregiously unclassical) spots these days. A tamhnóg is a little grassy patch or formerly cultivated patch in a bog, and the other part of the name must be due to a local misremembering of what some visiting botanist had to say about the remarkable heather that had overgrown it. Mackay sent off 150 specimens of the plant to the master-botanist of Kew, Sir W. J. Hooker, and the following year sent a young friend of his to collect a cartload of it; all this must have impressed the Roundstone people with its importance. They had their own interest in it too: in 1900 a visiting botanist found that ‘the heath had in many places been ruthlessly uprooted and was lying around in withered heaps’, as it was being harvested for use as brushes, both in the home and for spattering the potato fields with copper-sulphate solution against potato blight. Nobody disturbs the heather nowadays, or searches out French Heath Tamhnóg, which, quite apart from the charm of its odd name, is one of the most attractive hidey-holes of Roundstone Bog. When I visited it on a sunny day in mid February recently the heather was a vivid pale green against the wintry grey of the surrounding slopes, and a few mounds of it were already covered in tiny pale-lilac flowers. The tubular blossoms are only a few millimetres long, and with a hand lens one can see the chocolate-coloured anthers just showing in their mouths like the tips of velvet-gloved fingers. It is best to keep to the eastern rim of the hollow while examining the heather, though, and not to tread into it, for this is treacherous ground: the stream divides and subdivides here to flow through the leg-deep clefts of a boulder-bed completely hidden by the waist-high shrubs.
Beyond the tamhnóg the stream gathers itself together again, and even where invisible it becomes increasingly audible, flinging itself onwards as if rejoicing in its name, the Róig, the attack or onrush. That day in February the lake at its foot was as darkly brilliant as blue-black ink, and two whooper swans were sailing in and out of its reed-beds. Loch Roisín na Róige, the lake of the small headland of the Róig, is well known to local anglers, but I have never met anyone there. After skirting its banks, which are delicately fringed with little bushes of Mediterranean heath and bog myrtle, one crosses a third of a mile of low rocky ridge separating it from the next lake, Loch Bólard, which is immense (on the local scale) and spreads arms in all directions. An isolated hill, unnamed on Ordnance Survey maps, rises eastwards from Loch Bólard. In the days of the Penal Laws the Mass used to be celebrated secretly in this remote spot, according to a collection of folklore published in 1941. The editor of this work, Seán Mac Giollarnáth, writes the name of the hill as ‘Cnoc na gCorrbhéal’ but does not explain its meaning (corrbhéal looks as if it means ‘projecting mouth’), and in documentation of the post-Cromwellian settlement it occurs as ‘Knocknagurveele’; perhaps the last word is corrmhíol, in which case the name means ‘the hill of the midges’, although since midges are a torment to shepherds, anglers and turf-cutters throughout the region it is not obvious why they should be especially invoked by this placename. My goal, Scailp, is on the lowest slopes of this hill, four or five hundred yards up the eastern shore of the lake.
Alternatively, one can find one’s way to Scailp by keeping to the right or eastern side of the Gleann Mór. This involves scrambling up and down some abrupt knolls of rock and plunging through some foot-swallowing quags, but one has an unexpected guide in the form of a low ridge, the worn-down remains of an old sod fence. I have come across nothing comparable to this fence in Connemara. It stretches for two miles over hill and dale, in three lengths each as straight as a ruler. The first runs from the limitsof cultivation near O’Donnell’s gate across the shoulder of Roundstone Hill to a turret-like prominence called An Meall Mór, the big hummock, near the saddle-point of the pass; the second, from there for a mile down into and across a very soggy bottom called Gleann an Uisce, the glen of water, and up to the little summit-cairn of Cnoc na gCorrbhéal; the third, from that point down the north-eastern side of the hill to the shores of a lake, Loch Dúlach. Comparing the view of it as seen from An Meall Mór with an old six-inches-to-the-mile Ordnance Survey map one sees that it follows the boundary of a townland called Letterdife. Townlands are the smallest administrative land divisions of Ireland; there are about three hundred of them in Connemara (which itself is a vaguely defined and unofficial entity), of sizes ranging from a few dozen to over five thousand acres; Letterdife with its 1595 acres is typical, being mainly open mountainside and bog apart from a strip of cultivated land hugging the shoreline and divided into little stone-walled fields, with a dozen or so houses scattered along the coast road. ‘Letterdife’ is the anglicized form of the original Irish name, Leitir Daibhche, the rough hillside of the dabhach, which could mean a barrel, or a spring well, or a cave (there is a small cave on its foreshore, now blocked up). Most townlands are of ancient origin and their boundaries were maintained solely in memory passed down from generation to generation; not until the Ordnance Survey of the 1830s were they given precise mapped-out limits, and Letterdife is the only case I have come across in which those limits have been drawn on the land itself in such a way, imposing a rectilinear abstraction on such recalcitrant reality. The Moot, people call it, from the Irish móta, an earthen embankment. Who built this extraordinary boundary fence, which to have been of any use must have stood high enough to stop cattle from straying? There seems to be no tradition about it, but clearly a team of men must have worked on it for some years, no doubt under a relief-work scheme of one of the hungry decades of the late nineteenth century. And by whose orders? Most probably those of Henry Robinson, the landlord’s agent (and no relative of mine), whose mansion was in Letterdife, just north of Roundstone village, and who would have had cattle on the hillsides inland of it. Weather and the trampling of stock have reduced it to a soft bank a foot or two high, which one could easily step across without seeing it in the general irregularity of the ground, but which, once noticed, perhaps as the westering sun picks it out as a dark seam across the crumpled tissue of the land, is still an eye-compelling anomaly, a fading rebuke to this entropic chaos of stone and water.
Having followed this marker across the valley bottom one has only to cling to the skirts of Cnoc na gCorrbhéal around to the left for a quarter of a mile, past some haphazardly piled clutches of blackish boulders—gross geological monstrosities, thundercloud eggs—to find Scailp. And so, having reached it by one route or another, what is this place? A steep little coomb of the hillside, tumbling down to the lakeside; a roughly built stone hut, roofless and full of bracken, crouching in the shelter of a lumpy rock outcrop; a patch of green grass on top of a knoll where sheep sometimes lie beside a hollowed-out stone-heap, the remains of a pen for lambs; a silvery tree trunk, almost branchless, rising out of a split rock; a wind off the lake and the bog beyond it stretching to the horizon, a presence of pure space. A scailp can be a cleft or small cliff, a clump of bushes or briars, a hut roofed with sods of turf, and so on—any one of a variety of poor nesting places. And, the lake being Loch Bólard, this hillside must be the buaile ard, high ‘booley’ or milking pasture, from which it derives its name. ‘Booleying’, a small-scale version of the ancient life-pattern of transhumance practised in the Pyrenees and other regions where nomad shepherds used to move flocks of thousands of sheep a hundred miles or more between lowland and upland, has been recorded in Connemara from centuries ago.
