Connemara – Donal Kelly

Posted on February 5, 2018 April 12, 2018

Over Loch Fee: Finding Connemara

From up on Garraun you can see out along Renvyle peninsula. Glasilaun, Lettergesh, Mullaghloss, and Tullycross somewhere hidden. Names known since I’ve known names.

Distilled summers of wave on wave, collapsing in rushes, scrambling down grassy slopes. The sea so broad and wide below you can’t take it all in. Or in the other direction, up the bogs, soft soft, following rivers, to the Black lake or the Garden lake over Kylemore or Shanabheag in Currywongan where John Joyce has bees. And winter nights sunk in the soft brokenspringed bed with gales whistling eerie tunes on the thick lumpy gable and the ceaseless roar of the ocean behind and below and inside.

And Mweelrae rising behind Letterettrin, looming over Killary harbour. The Atlantic never far away. Sea salt in the veins of air. I watch a tiny distant car trace along the far side of the lake on the potholed road.

Down there Wilde coined a ‘savage beauty’. A literary tourist’s phrase, now a tag painted so often it crumbles under the layers, like any respectable cliche for its marketibility. A pair of rooks, or ravens, circle overhead, black raggedtipped wings against the tumble of clouds.

Out there on the tip of Rosroe Wittgenstein soaked up harassed solitude, grappling with logic and language games. Only hardy sheep and stubborn buckled trees and acid loving mosses and the creases in a grandmother’s hands.

Right below, Lough Fee, and then a river across the hop skip gap to Lough Muck, all part of the Culfin fisheries. Uncle Jackie won his World Masters fly fishing championship down there with a stump of a brownie from one of those banks. Which bank, I wonder?

Following, chasing, alone up here. What am I chasing? I cannot be what I was. I cannot sieve a soul or reburn a boyhood or strip away layers to uncover some mythical burning core. I am the old roar of ocean and a tumble of fresh cloud.

I stop to sit and look south at Inagh. Cumulus humilis and light leaking across the Bens and Maamturks.

A ewe passes with two following lambs. I take another picture.

I can perhaps, chip away on the latest layer, chisel the texture, scrape some grit into the detail, smudge tone in the shadows.

Already I am hungry and clambering back down to the shore of Fee.

Loch Fee, Connemara, Conamara, Galway, Ireland, Donal Kelly Photography

Posted on January 19, 2018 February 6, 2018

Cashel Hill: Finding Connemara

I’m hunched down under a little umbrella, my back against a rock face on the mountainside, and through drumming hail sunlight beams from under a turreted and tendrilled bank of Atlantic cloud.

Cold. Fresh. Soft. The loft-frozen pellets hop and bounce down the rock face. Pile into little lines and bumps and begin to whiten the ruddy earth. Bounce and hop but then suddenly seem to turn weightless, replaced by scattering petals of snow. Colder still. And then traditional rain joins in, heavy and steady and wet and I crouch deeper under the little flapping shelter.

Fickle winter weather, and a churning mess of cloudmass from the west in slow waves. I came up from the church car park, up the steep pitch of narrow road to the old graveyard. There the exposed hillside tombstones rest on a much older formation, old enough to be the area’s namesake. This is Cashel, from the Gaeilge An Caiseal, a name for a ringfort. These would have been built in the bronze age, which goes back some 3000 years. But this ringfort now sits under the high Cashel graveyard. Clumps of unmarked stumps mingle with rectangular marble and granite slabs and plastic flowers and crosses and bordered beds of gravel.

I notice a tall narrow headstone with a different style

Coleman Nee
Ireland
PVT 103 Infantry
World War I
May 9 1894
January 26 1970

A full run of 20th Century carnage: in a weathered Connemara hillside graveyard built in a weathered 3000 year old fort, lies a Nee who fought in the American army, probably on some blood and mud dug trench in France in the Great war, during which Ireland itself kicked off an uprising against British rule.

3000 years of cloudchurn and yet so quiet and unperturbed. A herd of small sheep with red and blue markings line up behind a gate watching me in hope of feed. An abandoned big house half submerged in a copse of leafless trees. A line of electricity poles lead from its gable back down the hill, the wires long gone: must have been in use after electricity arrived here in the 1950s. Here is a land with abandonment sewn into its definition. More goings than comings. As basic as the acidic soil where the roots of civilising crops are loathe to tunnel. Leave it to the mosses and grasses and layers of sodden peat. Here lies ties to centuries of roaming and fighting and big thick lines being drawn and redrawn on history maps. And yet just a flock of sheep chewing and staring at a gate under Cashel hill.

Higher up, I think about turning back, but the sun pops out again, and I clamber to the summit. It’s not high, just a little over 300m, but is unobscured and panoramic. Straight east huddle the basket of Bens and south of them over the Inagh valley and Recess, the broad Maamturks, and then beyond that Maam, Derroura, Oughterard, and the Corrib. Lakes pocket the bog. Dense conifer plantations in dark green patches. The higher peaks are dusted white, and over them all a canopy of shifting clouds spilling hail, rain, snow. You can make out distant blades of Cloosh wind mills spinning a little more west, and as you spin further that way, the flatter fragmented bogs and scattered houses of gaelic south connemara, from Carna down to Lettermore, Gorumna, and Carraroe and then on towards Galway, hidden now by cloud or slope or both.

Still turning, now facing into the sun as it approaches the Atlantic lid somewhere over the Aran Islands. Just below, the sea negotiates a series of complex bays and inlets. There’s something Escher-like about the one and the other. Perhaps the bog is the bay and the bay the bog? The ocean is boundary, limit, barrier, but yet passage, potential, murky and laden. Further north, the other lonely sisterpeak of Errisbeg over Roundstone, and past that the clouds sitting thicker and opaque. Another band rolling in.

The wind is howling again and flecks of new hail begin to patter, even while light still pours. There’s no scrap of shelter here, so I don’t wait beyond trying to stick something of the place into a digital sensor. Snappity snap. Then I flee back down towards the sheltered slopes and crouch under another rock face when the soup gets thick. The umbrella buckles. A dial cover is missing from the camera. Losses. I track back down by the graveyard and its layers of stones and story and down the hill to the car across from the church. Its wipers have been acting up, but they twitch into life now first time, and I pull out onto the road for home.

Why climb a hill at all? There might be a point. There might not. Is it not all self serving in the end, and the self not a thing at all?

“We’ll climb that hill, no matter how high, when we get up to it.”

Atlantic photos, Cashel, Cashel Hill, Connemara, Conamara, Galway, Ireland, Donal Kelly Photography

Posted on January 8, 2018 January 9, 2018

Photoessay: 100 Paces of Roadside Rubbish

It’s early January, and 2018 is still shiny and new and cold, and I pull in 5 miles from Clifden to get a photo of some mounds of gravel that have been piled up by the N59.

I’m hoping to get something that is Connemara but not cliché, something that I can’t visualise, something I’m not even looking for. I’m trying to see in a new way, you know, just another new-year go at giving life a kick up the rump to see if a gear takes. Feels like the clutch has been stuck all the way in, melting and grinding away, for a long stretch.

I snap the mounds, and then wait for a van to pass to record that too, diligent accumulator of slices of reality. The morning was bright but the afternoon is dull, and hovering around 0 Celsius.

100 paces of rubbish, N59, Connemara, Ireland, Donal Kelly photography

On the way back to the car I see a plastic bottle, half submerged in the mossy earth. Here on the bend there is some flat space on each side of the road. On the other side are the mounds of gravel. On this one a marshy shoulder leading into a rising ridge of stone, where a car can’t pull in. But it can certainly roll down a window, bzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz, and fling out a snot of rubbish, and roll it back up, bzzzzzzzzzzzzzz, without skipping a pistonbeat.

The ground and its ecosystems are normally very keen on the discards of the passings of lumbering creatures. It rots them into its bosom, breaks them down, savours any organic compounds to build and rebuild itself. Nothing is wasted, so nothing is waste. A thriving economy of basic materials.

But these materials, these plastics, these metal foils, these quick-bought quick-used quick-discarded spoils, they do not melt back into the ground. They resist, their long chains of compounds too tough and too toxic.

Instead, they slowly sink down into the soil, unusable obstacles to be grown over and around.

Good old polyethylene terephthalate: cooked from the soups of oil sucked/fracked from the guts of the planet.

I walk from the car along the roadside as far as a broken branch from which hangs a fast food meal bag. 100 paces or so.

How much junk would you find along 100 paces or so of the N59, thrown from the windows of passing cars?

I start to look more carefully, to see what I can see. And every time I look, I find more. More cartons and bottles, more fast food wrappers, tins and glass, car parts and coffee cup lids, gloves, clothes hangers, sun cream bottles, a pregnancy test box, and a set of spectacles left balanced on a bottle stuck into the gravel.

These are the marks of our passings.

From a distance, there is nothing here but bog and a ridge cut into the bank, under the loom of the twelve Bens, and the N59 snaking along over Ballynahinch lake.

But up close, if you look, are layers of rottable and unrottable rubbish, flung from our day trips, commutes, visits, and shopping errands. We do not see, when the window buzzes down, that we are not merely silently cleaning out car kingdoms into eager emptiness, but are instead adding to mounds of junk that line our passings. On one hand we might sell to strangers the beauty of the wild and rugged landscape, while the other is tossing wrappers out into it, where it will lie for centuries to come.

Posted on October 17, 2017 October 17, 2017

Photoessay: Inishbofin on a windy day, September ’17

inishbofin island atlantic ocean Donal Kelly photography

September. Wave stripping wind. A drive back to Cleggan. Missed the early ferry. Was stuck behind buses thought about overtaking, but nope, pulled the plug on aiming for the early ferry and had coffee in Clifden. Made ferry 2. Bang, bang, bang into the waves once it left the harbour.

inishnofin,island life, ireland, atlantic ocean, Donal Kelly photography

Posted on August 30, 2017 September 21, 2017

Photo Essay: Bringing the bog back home

Windmills on the hills slowly rotate in the August breeze. John Sullivan, eighty-plus, with a healthy shock of hair, hops onto the stuttering old Massey Ferguson, his back injured and twisted from years of hard work on the land. But he is still nimble, like the tractor; chipped and scraped, scarred and weathered, but with engine alert and the wheels turning.

The year after winter started with a good dry spell, but little turf was cut, and the weather broke again, and a lot of the plots weren’t cut until after. But there was time, and even in the wetter spots enough weeks and drying to cut, turn, foot, stack, and now bring out and haul home, for the final shed-stacking and eventual burning, the sods and clods and dust.

It is nearing the end of summer, and time for that final part- bringing the turf home. It is right now built into three-feet-high stacks, and is in good condition, though patches of the ground are yet soft and wet. It will be brought from the soft inner bogland using the Massey, with its extra wheels and light weight able to navigate the unsteady ground. A heavier tractor with narrower wheels would soon sink into the earth.

The turf is then brought to a tipping point where it can be loaded into a trailer on the road, which is then driven home.

donal kelly photography Last Day of the Bog Connemara 2017

Posted on July 1, 2017 February 1, 2023

Solstice on Skye Road

To watch from a distance
the world settle in for its night
from a bank high up under the Skye Road
where I can make out
comforting lights in windows
cars in their driveways
and the beam of a lighthouse all
blink, blink, wait…
blink, blink, wait…

Somebody below is driving carefully along the low road.
below, below, billow, bellow
Wind rocks solstice grass,
on a bank high over solstice ocean
orange lights flicker over Ballyconneely,
drizzle drapes the blue tent
as colour slowly drains from the sky
in that long solstice goodbye.

Goodbye
good buy
good boy

The year’s a turning,
and two thousand seventeen,
is flying by, flying, flung:
I search for the lighthouse blips again
and ask for a calm
to seep into my gaps
Blink, blink, wait…
Dimmer now, hiding under mist.

Bofin, to Omey to Claddaghduff,
Cleggan, around the mess of edge to Clifden,
the flat bogs out to Erris Hill,
and down to Roundstone:
dreamy unreachable comfort
of lights coming on in faraway windows
like rainbow held at its distance

If I approach
it will break
as waves where they meet shore
so I will stay here and watch
from a bank high up under the Skye Road
as the dark settles.

Donal Kelly, June 2017

Posted on February 4, 2014 November 30, 2015

Short Story: Mrs Deacy and The Flood

“It’s the wrath of God!” cackled wiry old Mrs Deacy with a smack of her stiff walking stick on the linoleum. “Settle down please, Mrs Deacy,” said Frank McDonagh. “It’s the same spring tide as every year, just coincident with a severe low pressure weather system.” Mrs Deacy persisted. “It’s the Good Lord’s way of showing us our moral corruption and lazy decrepitude.” “Settle down, Mrs Deacy” pleaded Frank McDonagh again. Rush Levins piped up. “Global warming, sure the Earth is fecked”. “Headlong to an amoral hell” said Mrs Deacy. Rush Levins was getting excited too. “The rest of them will get roasted and we’ll just get more water, more wind, and more winter!” There’d be no stopping them now. The hasty call for volunteers to survey the flood damage could go on for hours, at least until Seamus Kerins would inevitably lose his righteous temper and shake them into submission with the furrowing of his fiery eyebrows. I looked across at Tom and gestured my head towards the back door of the island’s tiny primary school. He nodded. Leaving the theorists to their rival interpretations, we each sidled carefully out of our seats, kept our heads down, held our breaths, and edged across the classroom. “Hey! Ye’re to blame!” cackled old Mrs Deacy after us from back in the classroom as we gingerly opened the door, which was eagerly caught by the blowing gale and slammed squarely back into the frame behind us as we fled across the yard. There was a dawn of untold damage to explore.

Down on the beach, the beach was no longer. Most of the sand had been hauled off, surely to somewhere warmer and more deserving and flecked with bronze bikinied girls on sunbeds reading modern novels. It had been replaced with a wild mess of greybluegreen stones and layers of dishevelled yellowbrown wrack. The small dunes that had for all our summers run up to the grass under the fences on the banks were missing, presumed dead, gobbled up by the hungry waves. “The worst flooding since 1949,” the newspaper had said. “Class!” was what Tom said, and we appended further impressed exclamations as we zigzagged up and down the blitzed shore towards Roche’s point with the wind and surfsound in our ears. “Mad!… Nuts!… Unreal!… Deadly!… Insano!” Sections of the beach road had been ripped up. The steel rails at the end of the road were torn from their bases. The benches past the car park were buckled. Cullitys’ field was filled from wall to broken wall with a pool of orphaned seawater. What power! What fury! The two empty holiday homes close to the point had been properly vandalized by the ferocious surge, despite the sandbags piled up against the doors: much worse than even our most ambitious graffiti.

As the storm damage investigation committee from the school finally began to gather behind us along the remains of the beach, we hopped out closer to where the tide had recently retreated. Big rollers still crashed out beyond the point: there would be another high tide again in the evening. Tom spotted the strange shape first, and darted off towards it. It looked like a giant lumpy football encased in a hundred years worth of winkles and seaweed. “What is it?” I gasped as I caught up with him. “Must be treasure!” he gushed. “From one of them Spanish ships that sank hundreds of years ago!” “Maybe gold!” We began to rip the seaweed away and hack at the barnacles. They were stubborn: Tom picked up a rock to belt them with. “Hey! Hey!” Old Mrs Deacy was advancing across the rocks, waving her stick. “Get away from that ye devils! Get back! That’s a symbol of God’s wrath for agents of immorality like ye!” We retreated the other way. “Leave us alone you old bag!” shouted Tom back at her. “We found it first!” I yelled. Old Mrs Deacy reached our treasure and swung her stick at it as she straightened up to issue another croaking judgement. With a magnificent mid-sentence pop, she exploded into an enthralling billow of sand, seaweed, crinkly flesh, and jellyfish.

Donal Kelly, February 2014

Week Four of the Creative Writing Class, with the homework being to write a short piece beginning with dialogue in a crowd. I wanted to include something from the flooding that has beset Ireland lately and had a sudden image of a group in a school on an island having a madcap meeting about what should be done. Then I figured the sea would wash something up, maybe treasure, or something mysterious, or alien, or from the future, or from a science fiction novel. Mrs Deacy was originally supposed to just be in the meeting but she has a set on the two young fellas, and followed them on the beach. She saved their lives- an act of heroic sacrifice! It could be a lot longer but I wanted to fit it on a single page when printing- challenge being to include the whole story within that limit.

Posted on August 4, 2012 December 2, 2015

Poem: Rainy Day in Renvyle

low clouds and rain in Maam valley Connemara

Rainy Day in Renvyle

Rain sweeps across the wide open,
Clouds rolling in from the west,
Tears from the sky set in motion
Blown by a wind that won’t rest.

Ceaseless the changes chase over,
The shelterless landscape at speed.
Soft underfoot grows the clover.
Soft as a heart full of need.

It’s hard to stand tall in this weather.
it’s hard to stand still in this land.
But deep as the bonds of a brother,
Run roots from the ground where we stand.

The flesh of a bog keeps things fresher,
But we can’t sink in history’s grip
Traditions give way to new efforts,
Old lessons will easily slip.

Rain sweeps across the Atlantic,
The tide rises high on the coast
The beauty of sloped Connemara,
Slips into your sight like a ghost.

A sense of a place that seems empty,
Or savage, desolate, bleak.
Is rich to the eye that knows plenty,
We find what we set out to seek.