Setting Foot on the Shores of Connemara by Tim Robinson Page A

has every chance of making worthwhile discoveries, or at least of bringing to the notice of academia what has long been known to the locals. Coming down from Mám Chatha once, I stopped to poke around two grassy mounds, each by a spring. Unable to make anything of their outward appearance I kicked a bit of turf off one and pulled out a small stone; it crumbled in my hand, and had evidently been in a fire. A farmer I met farther down the slope told me that these mounds were fulachta fia, the cooking-places traditionally attributed to Fionn Mac Cumhaill’s warrior band. On looking up the subject later on I learned that such mounds of burned stone are common field- monuments in many parts of Ireland, that they are usually horseshoe-or kidney-shaped (as these are), with traces of a wooden trough in the indentation of the perimeter; the water in the trough was brought to the boil for the cooking of meat by dropping heated stones into it, and periodically the debris of shattered stone would have to be dredged out and flung aside, so building up the characteristic heap around the site. When I mentioned these particular cooking-sites to an archaeologist I was told that, no, the Burren was not fulacht country; although a few had been discovered recently near Kilnaboy where the Burren merges into the lakelands south of it, in general they were features of wet lowlands east of the Shannon, and not to be expected on limestone hills. However, having learned to recognize them I noted several more in the north of the Burren, and a geologist who was working along the spring-lines for his own purposes began to record them almost throughout , wherever water surfaces. The only Burren fulacht to have been studied properly is close to a turlough south of Carran; it was found to date from the later Bronze Age, about three thousand years ago.
    All this interwoven Burren lifeworld of ruined cultures and exuberant nature is uniquely beautiful and interesting, but not very profitable for the landowner, who naturally is tempted by the availability of EEC grants to have his hillsides sprayed with fertilizers by helicopter, the result being a more mundane but productive farmland, at least in the short run. The financial, legal and moral persuasions necessary to preserve the Burren from such ‘improvement’ have not yet been discovered. In too many places, Iobserve, the land-clearing bulldozer is busy, steered by ignorance and fuelled by greed.
    Finally I come down to Lough Rask itself, a lake that is responsive to the tides although it is a quarter of a mile inland, and which occasionally shows itself to be a turlough by disappearing into its own muds. Herons nest in the tall trees around it, and bee orchids flower on its banks. It is a beautiful place, but its legend is horrific. In 1317, when two chieftains of the O’Briens were vying for supremacy in what is now County Clare, one of them, Donough, passed the lake with his army on their way to the fateful battle of Corcomroe. They saw a loathsome hag washing a heap of severed limbs and heads in the lake (the description of her in the mediaeval account of this campaign, The Triumphs of Turlough, is one of the foulest passages of literature I have come across); she told Donough that her name was Brónach Boirne, the sorrowful one of Burren, that the limbs were those of his army if he pressed on to this battle, and that his own head was in the middle of the heap. They tried to seize her, but she flew up and hovered above, spewing curses on them. But Donough told his men that she was the demon-lover of his rival Dermot and was seeking to discourage them; so they marched on (through Mám Chatha, the placename suggests), accompanied by wolves and ravens, and by nightfall most of them were dead and laid out in the abbey of Corcomroe. The battle was not without consequence, for having consolidated his power Dermot went on to defeat de Clare, the Norman lord of Bunratty Castle, in the following year, and it