Setting Foot on the Shores of Connemara Read Online Free Page A

the quayside for somedays with a fender sagging loose and the canopy hanging on by one bolt. A couple of tourists in the pub were also in two minds as to whether to leave or not, but Joe persuaded them to stay, saying that he would be back for them in the morning. Eventually we set off down to the quay, and as we looked out into rain and prancing waves Joe surprised me by saying, ‘That’s the last they’ll see of me!’ It seemed that the weather was breaking up and that if we had waited for them to make up their minds it would have been too late to cross before dark. The only other passenger was a pretty little American girl besotted with the rugged Joe. It was to be a wildly exciting crossing. Once we had left the shelter of the island nothing was visible in the mist but huge waves chasing up from behind us. I watched how Joe negotiated our way through the seas: holding to his course through the smaller waves, keeping a lookout over his shoulder for swells breaking at the top, and when one of the regular successions of three big seas came, steering away from the first, letting the second lift us stern first – they were much bigger than the boat – and pivoting on its top to head down the other side and face into the third. The only time he faltered was when the girl started to caress his knee; a mass of water exploded into the boat, and he pushed her aside with an oath. After an hour or so the Cliffs of Moher loomed up out of the gloom, and soon we were running into the little cove of Doolin through a narrow gap between a rocky peninsula and an islet smothered in breakers. We spent that evening listening to the famous local folk-musicians in the pub, and when we came out a gale was howling. Two rather drunk youngsters drove us down through lashing rain to see how the boat was faring; it was swooping to and fro agitatedly, and a violent sea was threatening to break over the quay and swamp it. Outside the feeble circle of light from my torch I could see nothing but huge white-topped swells rushing past. Joe put on a lifejacket, clambered down and sprawled on the nose of the lurching boat hanging tyres over its bows. With the lads larking about among mooring-ropes in the darkness, I was really frightened that my adventure would end in tragedy, but I pulled them back from the edge, and with much shouting and hauling and tying and untying of ropes we got the boat turned around and moored bows outwards, and nobody was drowned. I slept that night in a caravan that seemed about to takeoff from the foreshore, and woke to sunshine and the roar of toppling breakers. Then I hitched a lift to Shannon, and flew to the cloistral calm of London.
    My task now was to make good my analogy of the ‘well-formed concept’ and to objectify it as a map. Because I knew little about normal cartographical procedures, the problems of conveying information intelligibly were not to be solved by ready-to-hand techniques; rather they appeared as opportunities for expressing my feelings about the islands. In choosing line-weights and typefaces I had in mind not so much legibility as the Aran landscape, the beauty of which lies in its crystalline delicacy of detail always on the point of dissolution into vast luminous spaces. The commercially available mechanical tints seemed inadequate symbols for beautifully shelving beaches and the ever-changing interpenetrations of rock and water, and I preferred to let my pen run on for hours in minute lyrical effusions of dots and twirls. All around the coast, a fiction, the high-water mark, posed a similar problem; rather than indicate it by a line I relived with my pen the hourly give-and-take of land and sea. Drawing the cliffs was a strange experience; as I reconstructed them from my sketches I found myself becoming dizzy over these half-inch abysses; no doubt it would have been easier to search out aerial photographs, but my instinct was to keep as close as possible to my experience of them. I had tended