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

was another two hundred years before the region ceased to be under Gaelic rule.
    Passes are impressed upon the physical landscape by great forces of nature – in this case the glaciers of the Ice Ages. Subsequently, history follows these ways of least resistance and scores them into the cultural landscape of lore and placename. In one’s own mental map of a region it is the weight of significance they are made to bear that incises the passes so deeply. Mám Chatha stands in my mind for two complementary rites of passage: the indefinitely repeated seasonal transit of cattle between upland and lowland, and the crossing of a threshold between prophecy and the reality of death upon a particular day in history. Tracking the past and present of this landscape through Mam Chatha, Imeet ‘the sorrowful one of Burren’, and it is under her shadow that I think of its future. For Brónach Boirne is not just a banshee , the time-serving otherworldly retainer of a local dynasty; she is the reapparition of the Celtic divinity of the territory, a nightmare to the usurper, a vision of beauty and fruitfulness to the one who cherishes it. Should she make herself visible to our exploitative generation it might well be as the evil prophetess of doom. Indeed our heads could be in the middle of the heap – for if we cannot save such a place as the Burren from spoliation, there is nowhere safe on the surface of the earth.

5
Space, Time and Connemara
    Connemara – the name drifts across the mind like cloud shadows on a mountainside, or expands and fades like circles on a lake after a trout has risen. Fittingly, there is no official boundary to the land under the spell of this name. It is also true that real landscapes , unlike painted ones, contain their frames, so that each is potentially world-embracing. But such a name as this cannot be left to dissipate its powers of evocation like a scent unstoppered; the topographer, rather, should delight in its sparing, subtle and elusive application.
    On the one hand, a modern and commercializing tendency is to call everything west of Galway, Connemara. But the territory so defined is best called, in modern Irish, Iarchonnacht, for it is that described, with the bitter exactitude of regret, by Roderic O’Flaherty’s West or H-Iar Connaught, written in 1684, not long after his clan had been dispossessed by the Cromwellians. His book traces its bounds from Lough Corrib to Slyne Head to Killary Harbour (and embraces the Aran Islands ‘as in a sea- parenthesis ’, to borrow his pleasing phrase). On this classic definition, Iarchonnacht includes Connemara, but exceeds it eastwards.
    On the other hand, the territory of the O’Flahertys’ early mediaeval predecessors the Conmaicne Mara (which is the historical kernel of Connemara, both place and name) is too restrictive, for it lay west of the Mám Tuirc watershed and the Inbhear Mór, the ‘big rivermouth’ near Ros Muc, and so did not contain the full essence of Connemara, a prime ingredient of which is given by the Irish-speaking granite-and-waterlands further east and south. This last area, though, is culturally continuous with Cois Fharraige further east again, and aspires to unity of social action with it under the name of Conamara Theas or South Connemara. Ó  Bhearna go Carna, from Bearna to Carna, is the phrase favoured by Gaeilgeoirí to delimit this linguistic homeland – but most Bearna people would direct you back westwards if you enquired for Connemara there, being close enough to Galway city to share its sense of Connemara as wilderness and westernness itself.
    The problem, then, is exemplary, and insoluble. Place flows into place, or holds rigidly distinct from it, according to one’s mode of thought. My mode, to declare it at the outset, is that of the discriminating earth-worshipper. For me, Connemara is the land that looks upon the Twelve Bens, that close-knit, mandala-like mountain range, as its stubborn and reclusive