Guest Column: A visit to County Clare following St. Patrick’s Day

There was music along the street. A faint, insistent melody of fiddle, pennywhistle and the muffled thump of a handheld drum sounding through the main street of Ennistymon, County Clare, a little market town set above the falls of the River Cullenagh. 

I tracked the music to its source, Nagle’s, a low-ceilinged, stone-floored pub, riotously jammed on a Saturday afternoon. The musicians sat on a bench in shadows along the wall near the front door: the pennywhistle player smiling with his eyes at the crowded room, the bodhrán player bowing and rocking over his pounding drum, the long-haired fiddler in a flat cap working furiously, nearly putting out the eye of the pretty redhead sitting next to him. 

All three young men looked as if they had recently seen some hard traveling. After every tune, they were joined by new players: a farmer with a harmonica, a boy making do with spoons, an American backpacker welcomed with his guitar. 

Many years ago, Mary and I had come to this part of Clare from Dublin. We rented a small, sound house on a cliff overlooking the Atlantic. There we spent the winter, and I worked on a novel begun in Dublin. We would travel to the big city occasionally in our battered death-trap Mini, happy as farm kids off to the bright lights, but were always happiest on the way back to Clare. Spotting the ruins of the church on the highest hill of Ennistymon, we knew we were home. Standing against the wall of Nagle’s, watching the road-weary musicians play their soaring, pagan music, I wondered why we had ever gone away. 

I’d come back to see the Burren (from the Irish “bhoireann,” or rocky place), the landscape of treeless, limestone mountains, fields of stone and rocky valleys that stretch over 100 square miles of northwest Clare. It had always had a hold on me, especially through the years I was away from it. 

After spending a few days on the Burren, I knew I’d been dead wrong in my belief that because of its otherworldly, stark landscape, that the Burren is a cruel place. (St. Patrick for one, didn’t think so, blessing a well that is still a place of veneration.) I had never seen, for example, the beauty and variety of its wildflowers, the astonishing flora that grow from the limestone fissures, mysterious alpine, Mediterranean and tropical plants that flourish side by side in the west of Ireland. 

The Burren is a place that on first sight lets you take from it what you need. I had needed a cruel landscape to describe a battle with cruelty that a character I created was waging. One of Oliver Cromwell’s men, Ludlow by name, had needed something else. He wrote: “ … savage land, yielding neither water enough to drown a man, nor a tree to hang him, nor soil enough to bury.” In the employ of the mass murderer of the Irish, Mr. Ludlow was looking at the Burren in terms of practicality. One of the mysteries of the place is that your initial response to it describes you, and not the landscape. 

The stones speak

I got in touch with Christy Browne, an expert on all aspects of the Burren, and he began by describing the geologic history of the area. The limestone of the fields and mountains was created from sediments of a sea in the Carboniferous period that had been compressed into rock and, when the sea level changed, formed and re-formed by tide and erosion. Two hundred and seventy million years ago, the movements of the earth’s crust threw up the Burren as a plateau, and then the Ice Age finished the job, sculpting the Burren into rounded mountains and valleys of stone and shale, leaving the “perched boulders,” some as high as 20 feet, dominating the fields. 

More than 5,000 years ago, when the first settlers arrived, they saw the land as something easily cleared and the grass growing out of the limestone as rich feed for their cattle. They also learned that limestone is a natural heat retainer and, like few farmers in the world, drove their stock up the mountains to spend the winter. Their descendants do so to this day. 

Out on the Burren, this sense of continuity, of landscape and people, is easily understood. In the quiet atmosphere, under a huge bowl of changing sky, you feel a vivid sense of time, and timelessness. The whole history of Ireland can be read in the Burren’s ruins. Christy and I went to see some of the Bronze Age “cooking places,” horseshoe-shaped stone containers that would hold up to one hundred gallons of water, heated by hot stones. “Throw a joint of meat in there,” Christy said, “a little wild thyme found over here. I’d say 20 minutes to the pound.” 

Nearby were the ruins of a ring fort. Solemn cows looked up at us and then grazed on grass in patches among the stones. Christy was telling me about the Celts when he interrupted himself to point out a small yellow carpet of plants growing in the fissures called “Lady’s Bedstraw,” once dried to stuff 

mattresses. He bent to cup in a hand a purple hybrid orchid. “I took a man out here last spring, a retired tea planter in India who’d settled in County Cork. The only thing he wanted to see was orchids. Nothing but orchids. He had no interest in anything else.”

“Mad for orchids,” I said.

He rose and smiled, saying “Or just plain mad.” 

We walked over to a band of sharpened spikes of stones set perpendicularly to the ground around the Celtic fort. These were chevaux-de-frise, set to allow people on foot to squeeze through and escape from an attack by cavalry. Beyond them were the ruins of the fort, probably constructed about the time of the birth of Christ. With walls 18 to 20 feet thick and entrances sometimes underground, they were sound protection in an age of tribal warfare. 

The Celts were a people who migrated from somewhere in Eastern Europe with a distinct language, culture and religion. They introduced iron, a much more durable metal than bronze, to Ireland, and were a people enthralled by the arts of poetry, sculpture and jewelry design. Their religion was a sort of pantheism. “That,” Christy said, pointing to a perched boulder, “is where a divinity lived. That,” pointing to a stunted hazel tree, “is holy. God didn’t just live in the sky, but in the rocks, wells, flowers.” 

The Celts were also enchanted by war, and because cows were money, they were constantly involved in cattle rustling. One of the greatest epic poems in the Irish language (still the primary language in parts of Kerry, Galway, Donegal and the Aran Islands) is Táin Bó Cúalnge, or Cattle Raid of Cooley. A prime example of Irish exaggeration of the mundane into art. 

The Celts have been described variously as intuitive, reckless, impulsive, mystic, melancholy. Listen to the speech of the people who love to turn the language on its ear and you’ll hear, from nearly everyone you meet, tones of mysticism and melancholy tempered by a jaunty joie de vivre. 

Maintaining itself

We drove along a ridge of a valley and there, beyond rolling limestone hills, was Galway Bay changing color under the shift of clouds. Lipstick-red roses grew wild in the rock fences at the side of the road. These fences are constructed to let the savage Atlantic gales blow through with no damage. I asked Christy why these sights, from megalithic to medieval, were in such good repair. 

“Respect,” he said. “Certainly, respect for the past. But also, superstition. That old fort we saw, some people refer to them as ‘fairy forts.’ Now, we’re not talking about Tinkerbell. But beings that are mischievous, at best. Evil, at worst. Farmers wouldn’t cut a bush, move a stone — most of them respecting where they lived, but some were afraid of the power of the fairies. Most superstition has died out, and a good thing. When I was a boy, we were told to stay away from certain people, usually the odd duck, because it was said they went out at night to be in league with the fairies. And, even today, old beliefs exist. Some people out here won’t start a new enterprise on any day but a Friday. They won’t spend or lend money on a Monday. The superstitions are so old, they don’t even know where they come from.” 

Ahead, half a mile or so, was Corcomroe Abbey, set at the base of a Burren hill, commanding a long view of the valley. It is a stunning sight, founded for French Cistercian monks in 1194 by the king of Limerick. Walking around and through the place, Christy noted various styles of pillars, different because of the different artisans who had built them, each adorned near the top with stone-cut Burren flowers. Most beautiful were the long windows, framing a stretch of treeless Burren mountain, shifting by the minute from homely gray to black to purple and then a dazzling white. 

The monks christened this place Sancta Maria de Petra Fertilis — Holy Mary of the Fertile Rock. They brought education of a high standard to the region and were a vital part of the life of northwest Clare until the abbey was dissolved in the 17th century by what is known as the Penal Laws. This legislation was aimed at destroying the Irish language and the Catholic faith. At the former, the laws were mostly successful; the latter only bound the people tighter in their hatred of English rule. Catholic education was illegal; Catholics were forbidden to buy land, mortgage what they had or rent it for profit. Catholics could not vote, be elected to office, keep a gun or a horse worth more than £5. Priests were ordered out of Ireland and if caught returning, faced being hanged, drawn and quartered. 

These laws had a profound effect for centuries to come. The historian Robert Kee wrote: “This division between Catholic and Protestant, which was to shape for so long the whole character of Irish society, heightened an even more fundamental and obvious division common to every society: the division between rich and poor … Catholicism and all the older traditions of Ireland, including the Gaelic language, now colored poverty with a special identity, making the poor, even more than in most countries, a nation of their own.” 

Christy and I stood in the churchyard among the ancient Celtic crosses, wildflowers at their bases. No people could be seen down the whole valley, no sound except for a breeze in the bushes. “Who maintains this place?” I asked, looking back at the strong walls of the abbey. 

“It maintains itself,” he said.

The mystery of the flag

We stopped for a pint in O’Lochlen’s pub in Ballyvaughan. We were the only patrons in the small (as are most pubs in the towns of Clare) and beautiful place, with an old monument of a cash register and, in the doors, glass the color of tarnished gold, decorated in swirling, coiled Celtic designs. The publican O’Lochlen served us and sat in the gloom on a high stool behind the bar, talking with Christy across the room. I sat at the bar, looking out the door, across the narrow road to O’Lochlen’s cows grazing in a green field. 

After learning I had lived in the area, the publican asked if I had ever known a certain man. He had a tall flagpole erected in front of his house and would run up the Irish tricolor now and then. It wasn’t a daily occurrence, but seemed to be done on a whim. Then someone discovered a pattern. Saint Patrick’s Day. The anniversary of the signing of the Anglo-Irish Treaty. “The Fourth of July, your day of independence,” said Christy with a smile. “His own birthday. His children’s birthdays. Oh, it was the talk of the town when his flag would go up. We were all detectives, figuring it out.” One day, after months of an empty flagpole, the town woke to see the flag flying. Calendars were brought out, the date discussed by everyone, but no one could connect it to an event. 

“Finally,” O’Lochlen said, “it was decided that the night before, your man had a bit of success with his wife in bed.” 

Finding the abandoned village

I went out alone the next day, carrying a pack with a picnic lunch. It took a while before I found the abandoned village. Christy had given me directions, but I was happily disoriented and decided I’d ignore them and follow my nose. I walked up a switchback lane and came to a farmhouse, where a young mother, baby on her hip, told me the village was “just above.” 

The lane narrowed as I climbed higher, and at the last curve a tree sheltered the entrance to the village. The backs of two roofless stone houses formed a gateway to a pavement of rain-and-wind-polished limestone, colored here and there by flowers. There were a dozen deserted houses, most of them three rooms, nine by 12 feet, some covered in ivy and bramble: the town of Cathair Bheannach, or The Fox’s Den. As author John Feehan wrote: “It is impossible to walk amongst these ruins without feeling at one with the people — with their misfortune, their anguish, their pain.” 

The misfortune of the villagers was the Great Famine of the 1840s. The poor of Ireland lived on a variety of potato that today, some people say, would be unsuitable for livestock. When a blight hit the potato, the people either starved to death or left, if they could, for America in what were called “coffin ships,” so many died on the journey. In 1841, the population of Clare was 286,394. The famine killed half of that number. A British officer reported viewing a turnip field: “I confessed myself shocked by the extent and intensity of the suffering I witnessed, more especially among the women and little children … devouring the raw turnips, mothers half-naked, shivering in the snow and sleet, uttering exclamations of despair whilst their children were screaming with hunger.” 

I spent half an hour alone in the abandoned village, the occasional buzzing of a bee making the quiet deeper. Walking back down the lane, when I passed the farmhouse, the baby began bawling. A long wail that made me shiver in the warm sun. 

Silence

I went into a field and had my picnic of bread, cheese, an apple and chocolate. The mountains of Connemara were in a purple mist, 30 miles away. There was a scent of the sea mixed with mountain thyme, sage, the heady perfume of wildflowers. Silence, and cloud shadows moving slowly over the bare Burren hills. I stayed until cows entered the field, all staring at the stranger lying in the grass. It was time to go home. 

This story appears in “My Life In Pieces,” published by Brick Tower Press.