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

to think of my approach as consisting in the closest possible identification with the object, but that, I now came to believe , is not quite the case. While I was exploring the islands my dreams expressed the process in sexual metaphor; my distinctness from the object was preserved, but at a limit beyond which lay a threat of self-loss. Now in the act of drawing my aim was to achieve the same intimacy of physical contact with the emergent image as I had reached with the reality. – But all this is to formalize in retrospect a practice that was tentative and instinctual, and indeed to fill up with ideals the blanks on the resultant map.
    In the basic geographic act of mapping I find three conjunctions : that of the place mapped with the one who maps it; that of the mapper with the map itself; and finally that of the map with the mapped – this last a confrontation that tests the worth of the first and second. I returned to Aran in the spring with the first printed copies of the map, which have been on sale here since. Itis too early to say much about the outcome. In a superficial way the map has been a success with tourists; in fact I sometimes wonder if in many minds I have merely substituted concept for reality. Last year when I met visitors they were usually lost and making a difficult acquaintance with the island, whereas this year I pass group after group huddled over the map with their backs to the view. As for myself, I have become a minor object of touristic interest, perhaps the only one not marked on the map. As I sit at my desk writing this, I hear the driver of a passing jaunting-car pointing out our house to his ‘load’ of tourists: ‘The man who made them maps lives there!’ Individual visitors have told me the map has enhanced their appreciation of the islands, which is gratifying , but more important to me is the generous response of the islanders, who have examined it minutely and with no trace of a wish to find fault. I know that the map has been ‘read’ to old men by their sons or grandsons, and I am always relieved to hear that one or other of the fishermen has confirmed my naming of rocks and inlets he has known all his life. Finally, I know that many copies have been sent off to ‘the exiles’ in Britain, Australia and the USA, and this makes me both proud and sad.

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Setting Foot on the Shores of Connemara
THE TANGLED TIGHTROPE
    For some years I have spent a few weeks of each spring and autumn walking the southern coast of Connemara. It is a strange region. Granite, harsh-edged, glittering, shows its teeth everywhere in the heathery wastes and ridged potato fields, and even between the houses of the shapeless villages. The peaty, acidic soil is burdened with countless boulders left by glaciers that came down from the mountains immediately to the north during the last Ice Age. The land has been scrubbed raw, by the ice, by the Atlantic gales, by poverty.
    South Connemara was very sparsely peopled in early times, judging by the fewness of its archaeological sites. To the merchants of mediaeval Galway it was a lair of pirates, of the ‘Ferocious O’Flaherties’. Some of those dispossessed of better lands by the Cromwellians in 1650 or hunted out of Ulster by the Orangemen in 1795 settled in this unenviable quarter. By the nineteenth century a teeming and periodically starving population was crowded into a narrow coastal strip, fishing, gathering molluscs on the shore, growing potatoes in tiny plots of black waterlogged soil which they fertilized with seaweed, and cutting turf, the only fuel this treeless land affords, from the vast bogs that made the interior almost impassable and otherwise sterile. The sea’s deeply penetrating inlets were their lanes of communication and bore the trade they depended on, the export of turf to the stony and fuelless Aran Islands, the Burren in County Clare, and to Galway city. By the beginning of this century the bogland near the coast had been stripped to