I’m off to Ireland for a week of music in the bars of Miltown Malbay in County Clare, and maybe a break from all the things that trouble me in England. So it seemed only fair to give you all the chance to visit Ireland too, by way of this piece which is from the preface to a memoir I’m writing called ‘The Eel Trap’.
“The memory of walking down the gritty track to Feste’s little harbour no longer feels like the pure dead past. In the last few years I have had the strange sensation that it coexists with the present, as if walking down to Feste’s house will not lie still where it belongs. I can look down on that track alongside the drystone wall and the heathery slope above the sea loch, and see myself, walking down from the bog road, my flared jeans flapping round my ankles, past Loch Muc and then Loch Fee, the one with an island and a boathouse. I want to take the boat and go out to the island, but the oars are chained up. The rhododendrons on the island speak of empire as clearly as if the union jack flew there, and this of all places on this coast reeks of the private property on which the British set such store. The rest of this part of North Conamara lies as open to all comers as it does to the wind and weather and even sometimes sunshine, in my recollections, and the peat stacks witness to history and class as surely as the rhododendrons.
The track to Rossroe over the hill and down to the first loch gives a view of straggly headlands and sea lochs trailed with lines of windblown sea-foam way out to Inishark. At the side of the track where it drops down towards the stream, through the sycamore trees of habitation, there’s a house left empty by emigration, the spinning wheel still by the hearth, the letters from the children gone to ‘the village far west’ still behind the plates on the dresser. Only the postal orders from America have been removed. I tiptoe respectfully out, aware that the house, never locked, has been left untouched for the family if ever they come home again. In my imagination it is the old family home in the emigration song ‘Kilkelly’, a song strung together as from the letters home still on the dresser, and I think of it now if ever I sing that song of slow loss, love and resignation. I come out of the woods to the shore at the head of the loch where there are groups of barrels, ropes, netting and other fishing stuff, all with that dried sandy saltfish smell, each group tied umbilically to a curach riding restlessly at the end of a rope out in the loch. Those curach still ride there now, swinging with the wind and slapping the waves, and the boys over from Mayo are still laying slabs all week and still playing music in the Zebra at the weekend, though I know they have also retired and gone back home to Blacksod Bay where they belong now. As I see the curachs, light on the sea, sliding with every breeze, or shiny as beetle-backs upside down around the shore, it’s like the excitement of catching the sound of a fiddler playing reels in some bar along the street.
I first saw curachs around Baile na nGall when I was a boy, out west of Dingle, and the first time I came over from the loch road to Little Killary and saw the curachs I was as excited as if I knew that coming here might change my life. Easy to say that now, from my vantage point,looking down at my young self crunching down that stony track with my rucksack on my back to the little hamlet of Rosroe.
Curachs are now only found in the far West, in places like Rosroe. They are of a class of boats that seem likely to be ancient, though any enterprising man with no money and the need for a boat might have invented them at any time. We are apt to think that earlier peoples lacked tools and skills, and that a simple boat of branches and cowhide may have been all that they could make. But you could also see a curach as being as delicate as a feather on the water, blown by the breeze, made harmoniously and economically from what grew and flourished on little farmsteads near the coast.
Curachs and coracles were certainly more widespread once than they are now. They may have been the boats that took St Brendan to the New World, or the monks of the Dark Ages to live as anchorites in Iceland or out on the Skellig Rocks. They were also the boats of fishermen who had limited access to tools and materials, who could build a seaworthy 18-foot curach using little more than a saw, a hammer and a screwdriver. They were symbolic both of the ancient culture of the place and of isolation and poverty. They spoke to me of the last days of a way of life, a way of living that preserved its songs and knowledge and skills, and a sense of belonging, being a part of a place where the place-names recorded the history of the people clearly in their own language, the language of the Tuatha de Danaan and the Fir Bolg, a language that held shadows of the end of the ice age in its nuances. Or maybe they were relics of a backward way of life, priest-ridden, not included in the progress being made elsewhere, where men went to work in offices and women in flowery cotton housecoats exulted in their white-goods.
At Rosroe I would stay at the hostel in the old Coastguard Station on the pier, among the cottages where everyone was one of Feste’s relatives. His was the moving spirit of the place, and his house was the one where people came and went, though there wasn’t much in the room other than a few chairs and a turf fire and a Bastable to make the bread in. Feste and Faheen played the squeezebox a bit with their stubby fisherman’s fingers, and several of the boys were working at the salmon fishing. Feste was proud that he had never been tempted to emigrate, and had raised a family and made a living with the fishing and a bit of land, with a few sheep and patches of potatoes. He built curachs for everyone who wanted one along that length of coast. It was said that he had built a hundred, all of a type unique to this part of north Conamara.
One summer evening I got my first trip in a curach with Feste. It sat on the water as lightly as an eggshell, with a hull more like a basket than a boat. One side of the loch was bordered by a rocky shore and a low jumble of stone, grass and heather running out towards the island, but a mile away the other side rose steeply from the water to the top of Ben Mweelrea. The shore was punctuated by a rowan or two and the hillside patched with bracken and feggy grass, and sheep like maggots gnawing the living mountain. We slid sideways over the seaweed beds to where Feste had a trammel net stretched out among the weed to catch bait-fish for the lobster pots, and he coaxed the curach with the long tapering oars, the handholds overlapping, using them to let it slide, spinning it or stopping it, catching the trammel and pulling it aboard.
A trammel net is a deadly snare made of three walls of net, a fine diamond mesh hanging loose between two curtains of large square meshes. The seaweeds were a forest buoyed up towards the light, not the dank masses you see limp upon the shore; a swaying forest with fish and periwinkles and starfish. I had never looked down into the sea like this before, and never seen such a net. Most nets only catch fish that can get their heads far enough into the meshes for their gills to fasten, but this kind of net entrammels fish of every size. There were bream and wrasse and , and dogfish twisted and writhed tight in pockets of net. The curach was, as I had suspected, like no other kind of boat, and I knew I had to have one, and to live by the sea where I could use it. Most boats sit in the water but this one sat on it, displacing maybe an inch of water, sliding over the floats of the trammel net.
The next day I was out with Feste and the boys on his big wooden boat, lifting pots for lobsters and crawfish out towards the islands of Inishark and Inishbofin. To the north were the desolate sands of the Mayo coast where bones from the famine times were embedded in the dunes. Sometimes a shaft of sunlight lit the sands, pointing to the bones like the rainbow to the crock of gold. In the famine times the people walked along this route, hardly more than skeletons, to ask some official of the British Empire for ‘relief’ or food, but he refused to meet them (one local told me he was playing golf) and so they walked back hungry, dying on the way, not important enough for the dead to be counted..
But that was long ago, and now the sea was glittering and dolphins were leaping below the dark slopes of Ben Mweelrea on the far shore, and there were lobster pots to lift.
Feste was making a new curach at that time, and he showed me the pieces he had shaped for the high-angled prow, and the double-gunwaled frame of the boat. He showed me the barrel round which he moulded the steamed oak ribs, and how he clenched the copper nails. And he used an old envelope, just as my father might have done, to sketch a few details and to jot the essential measurements. I still have it somewhere. My life changed course at that point, and I have used and worked in curachs for two important parts of my life. I still have one in the yard outside my window here, miles from where it was last afloat in Conamara. And yet I never found time to send Feste a photograph to let him know that I was fishing for langoustines in Loch Duich in a curach just like his. I heard of his death announced in Irish on Raidió na Gaeltachta, the sadness at his death mixed uncomfortably with a pride at having understood the Irish of the announcement.
Everyone who knows about curachs says that the best ones are the curachs of County Kerry, where the name is not curach but naomhóg. They are larger and more shapely, they curve in more complex directions, and above all they are associated with the Blasket islanders, who used them to take everything from coffins and cattle to barley meal and porter across the fierce channel between the mainland at Dunquin and the island where they lived until the 1950s. They have, between their ribs, nothing but a thin skin of tarred canvas. They are painted green and red inside, with ‘grown’ wooden knees as braces between the thwarts and the gunwales, curved braces for each oarsman’s feet, and other tokens of skilled carpentry missing from all the other curachs of the west coast. To build one all I needed was to go to see the curachs on the pier at Dunquin with a tape measure and a notebook. And a rare level of enthusiasm, maybe, powered perhaps by another sort of relationship, with people no longer alive.
When I knew Feste he was very much alive, and ‘a great gas’, as they used to say before the word ‘craic’ became a thing. The islanders of the Blaskets were mostly dead by the time I was around. A few old people lurked in places ashore like Dunquin and Ballyferriter, and some were living in old folk’s homes in Springfield Massachusetts, which is where the youth all emigrated, still with their bright Irish. But if you wanted to know about life in the Blaskets you had to read their books. Because by a kind of accident many of them had written about their lives, in exercise books like the ones they had used in the village school on the island, where they were forced to use the compulsory English of the British empire. On the Blaskets the men had fished and farmed, mended shoes and sewn their children’s clothes; they had sewn nets and made boats and lobster pots. There were singers and musicians; there was even a poet and a king. And they wrote their stories at night, sitting at the table in the kitchens of houses that they had built themselves, just as I do. They were the elders of a tribe to which I could not belong, and yet I felt that they, like my father and men like Feste, had more to teach me than the school masters and vicars who thought they were the elders of my tribe. And though many of them had lived a hundred years before, they had written about how they had lived their lives, and I could sit, metaphorically, across the hearth from them and hear their stories and absorb their view of life. They were deeply embedded in an ancient peasant culture, but they knew enough of the outside world, through talking to the visitors who came to learn their language, to know they were extraordinary.
It has also to be said, though, that almost all the stories were of the activities of the men, fishing, digging turf, going to Dingle to market and for the singing and porter drinking of such days. The women are seen sometimes going to pick shellfish, or going to Dingle for provisions, and one or two were renowned singers and storytellers. It might be easy to conclude that they were living in a man’s world. It might or it might not be true, and the only insight I have into this was provided by a night in Newport in South Wales when we used to play Irish music in a pub on certain nights. We played in a back room, but this evening we were constantly interrupted by men asking us to play in the main bar and not to be ‘playing in a cupboard’. When we came out there were a quantity of Irish traveller men in one end of the bar, all mad for the music and wanting to sing the Fields of Athenry, and all to some extent in drink. We played for a while and began to notice a fairly colourful group of robust looking women at the other end of the bar. As the evening wore on one or other of these women might come down the bar and have a word with one of the men if she thought he was behaving badly, and he would meekly stop doing whatever he’d been doing. Only then did we realise they were wives and girlfriends, sitting together at the other end of the bar from their menfolk. These travellers may have a way of living more like that of the Irish peasants of a hundred years ago, where the world of the men and the world of the women were very separate. And so it may have been natural for the Blasket writers, being men, to have written about the lives of the men and not those of the women. So Tomas o’Crohan, the writer of The Islandman, writes of his mother and his sisters when he is growing up, of the old woman in the house next door, the school teacher and the young woman he wanted to marry before another was arranged for him, but hardly mentions her although she bore him 10 children, though he writes powerfully of his energy as a young married man working hard at the fishing and the farming to provide for his growing family. Maybe the worlds were as separate on the island as they were in that Newport pub.
The Irish spoken in these islands was made famous by academics who came there to learn to speak it, and who reawakened and reinforced the islanders’ pride in their language and culture. One of these, the Norwegian academic and pole-vaulter Carl Marstrander, delighted them by pole-vaulting over their houses using the long oars of their curachs. He enjoyed being there so much that he didn’t bother to take his place in the Norwegian team for the 1908 Olympics because being in the Blaskets was so much more fun. People like Marstrander from Norway and Robin Flower from Oxford encouraged the islanders to write about their lives, conscious that their like would never be again. I ended up reading most of these books; I was carried away enough, at the age of twenty one, to dramatise ‘The Islandman’ for the Irish national radio station, in four episodes, starring the actor who was also Fergal Keane’s dad, with specially composed music. Eventually I was able, laboriously, to read the whole book in the original Irish.
If I had been an academic, all this enthusiasm would have been understandable. I would have selected a subject for my researches – vernacular boat building, say, or patterns of emigration from the west of Ireland. I might have published articles and books on related subjects, or lectured at some university. My brother spends most of his time in the Bronze Age, and no-one thinks that odd, because he is an archaeologist. But I was not an academic. I was just a boy looking for a way to live, not sure if the things we called progress would take me anywhere I wanted to be. And walking down the track to Feste’s place was doubtless to find something I wanted to find. In the lives of people like Feste I thought I saw a connection with place and community but also with the natural world in which they grew their potatoes and fished the lobsters and the salmon. Martin, who fished for crabs using a curach out of the harbour there, had a flute in his old van at all times in case there were a few tunes to be had on the pier, and this was music of the place and of the people. And Feste, as well as doing such interesting things, was also a warm and funny sociable man who I remember with more of love than mere liking.
When I left Rosroe the last time with my curach drawings on the envelope in my pocket it was sure that I was going to build one, and that I was going to use it on the sea, and catch fish, and learn about the tides and the sea creatures. Eventually it would lead to me building four of them and to making my living fishing for an extraordinary and mysterious fish, the freshwater eel. I never saw Feste again but he is still there on the quayside when my mind walks me back down that gritty track again.
YES, hoping to be at the Harp. Maybe see you there?
Dust your button box and have a great time Richard!