Rihla (The Journey) – was the
short title of a 14th Century (1355 CE) book written in Fez by the Islamic
legal scholar Ibn Jazayy al-Kalbi of Granada who recorded and then transcribed
the dictated travelogue of the Tangerian, Ibn Battuta. The book’s full title
was A Gift to Those who Contemplate the
Wonders of Cities and the Marvels of Travelling and somehow the title of
Ibn Jazayy's book captures the ethos of many of the city and country journeys I
have been lucky to take in past years.
Quays of Connemara - Part VI
The
whole landscape a manuscript
We had
lost the skill to read
A part
of our past disinherited:
But
fumbled, like a blind man
Along
the fingertips of instinct
John
Montague
A Lost
Tradition – The Rough Field
Dolmen
Press 1972
Roundstone Harbour
I remember reading –
deliberately seeking out – Montague’s poem following a visit to
the astonishing Neolithic urban complex at Çatalhöyük (c.8000 BCE) near Konya and the earlier temple complex at Göbekli Tepe (c.9,000 BCE),
northeast of Sanliurfa (Edessa) in Turkey in April 2012; elaborate, organised societal constructs that had been in existence for millennia and were already being abandoned before even the first peoples crossed over to a post-glacial Ireland.
In Turkish Göbekli Tepe means “Potbelly Hill”, and Çatalhöyük means "Forked Mound" descriptive toponyms (or for the purists, oronyms) of the appearance of the landscape on which the complexes are found. Being a romantic traveller “Potbelly Hill” or "Forked Mound" did not – despite a well-grounded understanding of the Turkish way of calling it like they see it – quite do it for me. Surely the extraordinary legacy of these sites should have had a more descriptive memory? But then I realised, as Montague had implied, parts of our past become ‘disinherited’, eroded more by language than perhaps by time. In Göbekli’s and Çatalhöyük's case Hattian, Assyrian, Hittite, Persian, Greek, Roman, Byzantine, Arab and Turk conquest had ensured this erasure of pre-historic topographic memory.
In Turkish Göbekli Tepe means “Potbelly Hill”, and Çatalhöyük means "Forked Mound" descriptive toponyms (or for the purists, oronyms) of the appearance of the landscape on which the complexes are found. Being a romantic traveller “Potbelly Hill” or "Forked Mound" did not – despite a well-grounded understanding of the Turkish way of calling it like they see it – quite do it for me. Surely the extraordinary legacy of these sites should have had a more descriptive memory? But then I realised, as Montague had implied, parts of our past become ‘disinherited’, eroded more by language than perhaps by time. In Göbekli’s and Çatalhöyük's case Hattian, Assyrian, Hittite, Persian, Greek, Roman, Byzantine, Arab and Turk conquest had ensured this erasure of pre-historic topographic memory.
Gobekli Tepe Turkey
Temple Complex c. 9000 BCE
(April 2012)
Çatalhöyük Excavations
(April 2012)
The Goddess of Çatalhöyük (replica)
(c.8000 BCE)
Yet, by way of solace, I also realised that all was not lost is this descriptive disinheritance, at least where pre-historical memories were concerned. In Ireland’s case,
ensured by isolation and the later Bronze Age arrival of Celtic races whose language
and storytelling embraced what had gone before, the pre-history was preserved in
the landscape, a memory of a time when giants and mother-goddesses could shape
both that landscape and human destiny.
The Quays of Roundstone, Cloonile and Cashel Bays
The R341 and R342 roads
that link Roundstone and Cashel in Connemara, with a junction at Toombeola
Bridge, define a sociological tidal zone: a transition between the ancient, feral,
scavenging, small-holding, climín (climín
feamainne – seaweed bales) gathering, Irish-speaking south and south-western
parts of Connemara and the semi-planted, Victorian, English-speaking western
and north-western parts. It is a very particular landscape where the croísin seaweed
gathering poles have been laid down in favour of the theodolite.
Derryadd West Pier
The distance between
Roundstone and Cashel is only 13.5km and takes by car about twenty minutes. Yet
in that journey you not only cross over a land distinguished by a change in
language and attitude but also one that retains the lore of mythological giants
and mother goddesses who shaped and named the land before ever a Celtic
cattle-raid was made. This is all the more apparent if you hesitate on
that journey and stand for a moment on Toombeola Bridge, the “sacred centre” of
this particular journey.
Location of Bencullagh, Toombeola and Aillenacally
On one bitter-cold mid-January
day that I was there a snowfall of the previous evening, like a sprinkling of
icing sugar, separated the grey granite of the low mountains from the even
lower grey sky. Beneath me the salmon-filled Owenmore River cascaded to the sea
from Ballynahinch Lake and to the north rose the Twelve Pins, the mountains of
Connemara that are called in Irish Na Beanna Beola, the bens or peaks of Beola.
Scrahallia Quay
Cashel-Zetland Quay
Beola, was a chieftain of
the Fomorian race, the supernatural race of people who the Celts presumed had preceded them, a
mythological giant of a post-glacial era who had shaped the mountains to his
will. His burial site was supposed to be at nearby Tuaim Beola or Toombeola, where
a cairn of stones marking the spot had been robbed to build an abbey in 1427, which
then also become ruined; those same cairn stones being moved again to build a
small O’Flaherty castle on an island in Ballynahinch lake.
Canower Quay
To the north of the
bridge, beyond Ben Lettery, which overlooks Ballynahinch lake, is Ben Cullagh
or An Chailleach, the Hag, named after the mythological mother of Beola. Her association
with this area does not end there for south of the bridge there is a small,
peninsular townland that links those mountains to the sea, links Beola to his
mother, and which is called Aillenacally or Aill na Caillí, the Cliff of the
Hag.
Looking directly north along the river that drains Toombeola Lake
into the sea at Aill na Callí (Aillenacally).The first mountain to
left of centre is Bencullagh or An Chailleach (The Hag)
with its denuded quartzite scree exposed slopes.
The Caillí or more
commonly the Cailleach Bhéarra, or Hag of Beara, is one of the most persistent folkloric
memories of a mythological mother goddess, an Indo-European crone whose name is
retained on the coastlines from the north of Scotland to the south-western tip
of Ireland.
The Cailleach Bhéarra was, in our modern interpretation of the past, an inheritor of the Paleolithic (c.27,000 BCE) Venus of Willendorf, or the seated Goddess of Çatalhöyük (c.8000 BCE): the fecund goddess of winter, the earth-mother who could create and shape landscapes and individual rocks and who was also responsible for the winds and tides of destruction. In an early pagan Gnostic interpretation of the forces of good and evil that shape our human world the Cailleach represented the dark side and as such she demanded appeasement and was a primary target for eradication when the Christian missionaries landed on our shores.
An Cailleach Bhéarra Rock
Beara Peninsula West Cork
Venus of Willendorf
(c.28,000 BCE)
The Cailleach Bhéarra was, in our modern interpretation of the past, an inheritor of the Paleolithic (c.27,000 BCE) Venus of Willendorf, or the seated Goddess of Çatalhöyük (c.8000 BCE): the fecund goddess of winter, the earth-mother who could create and shape landscapes and individual rocks and who was also responsible for the winds and tides of destruction. In an early pagan Gnostic interpretation of the forces of good and evil that shape our human world the Cailleach represented the dark side and as such she demanded appeasement and was a primary target for eradication when the Christian missionaries landed on our shores.
Wallace's Quay Lettercamus
Cuan na Loinge (Ship Harbour) Lettercamus
And yet she persisted in
both memory and in the landscape. The Hag of Beara rock, a whitewashed pillar
decorated with votive coins and bric-a-brac ( appealing in the main to the fertility prowess of the Hag, a form of In-Petrous Fertilisation you might say!), near Eyeries on the northern coast
of the Beara peninsula is probably the most venerated of her old veneration
sites, and a tangible link with our pre-historic past. Nearby Dursey Island, in Irish Oileán Baoi is named after the Cailleach Bhéarra and she is thought to have her final resting place in the townland of Baile na Cailleach on the Island.
The bogland between Aill na Callí and Toombeola
Aillenacally – Aill na Caillí – Village and
Quays:
The Wrath of the Cailleach
Summer
of youth in which we were,
I have
spent with its autumn,
Winter
of age drowns everybody,
Its
harvest has come to me.
Stanza
19
Caillech
Bérri
(Old
Irish poem written c.900 CE)
The village of
Aillenacally – Aill na Callí – on the south eastern shore of the small
peninsula has succumbed to the wrath of the Cailleach. Abandoned by the last
villager Peter Ward, who had lived without neighbours for nearly 12 years, in
1995 it comprises of about 14 roofless, thick-walled cottages and
outbuildings that tumble down to the sea. It is reached by traversing a narrow
road that first dips and then rises across a boggy flatland.
On reaching the village it
is hard not, when looking back, to think of Peadar O’Donnell’s 1929 novel Adrigoole,
and the reasons for villages like his fictional village right along the western seaboard being
lost in time and place to economic emigration. The landscape is the
protagonist. This is where the bog is sinister, or as O’Donnell writes,
“subjugating” its inhabitants; where,
“Only low-lifed things could live in there; fat,
bulbous lazy frogs that come out of soft,lifeless, spongy spawn, and go out
again in slimy, clammy death.”
Ward's Harbour Aill na Caillí
Below the last rise out of the bog there are two old harbours
with crumbling walls, one of which is protected by a
slim, 19th century sea-wall that stretches now without purpose into
Cloonile Bay.
In the early 1990s a man
called Paddy Power bought up the whole village and 65 acres of land and began
to market the ruined village as the oldest village in Ireland. After court
fights with his neighbours over access to commonage, and with his solicitors
over difficulties in registering titles, Power sold the village to an anonymous
buyer in 2008. One house in the village, Peter Ward’s, has been restored as
holiday home but the remainder remain derelict. (Turtle Bunbury writes movingly
of encounters with the last villagers Tony Ward and Mikey Conneely and I
reference the link below).
The Donkeys of Aill na Caillí
The first harbour you encounter as you climb a gate
and follow a donkey path is Ward’s Harbour, its low walls crumbling back into
the sea.
O'Donnell's Quay Aill na Caillí
In the once main harbour a
short distance westwards a dilapidated blue-hulled hulk of a schooner called
the Manissa of Cork, lies forlorn, like tidal flotsam trapped within the
crumbling walls of the old quayside, just about protected from the sea’s
complete destruction by the slim 1820s breakwater. Paddy Power and his daughter
had used the schooner as their home when he owned the village and the battered
hulk was included in the 2008 sale. At
the neck of the breakwater is the ruin of a house that used belong to a Stephen
O’Donnell.
O'Donnell's House Aillenacally
In Peadar O'Donnell’s later 1933
drama Wrack he intones an ancient history and the memory of the destructive winter gales of the fecund storm goddess Cailleach Bhéarra, bringing both pleasure and pain to mankind, when he has his character Fanny Brien lament,
“The thick thighs of the waves crushed the life out
of our men, for I saw it.”
In the case of Aill na
Caillí, the Cailleach, the Xenia Onatopp of mythology, the goddess of the winter storms has done just that: to
man and stone.
References:
Gobekli Tepe:
Aillenacally
– Aill na Caillí:
http://www.turtlebunbury.com/published/published_features/pub_feats_aileenacally.html
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