The Frayed Atlantic Edge, page 23
Human commerce is also dependent, dangerously, on the deep. Lifestyles rely on the rugged few who work the rim of the ocean shelf from rig or ship. They take daily risks on a scale beyond any land work: more trawlermen-per-million die today than miners-per-million ever lost their lives while digging coal. Meals on tables a thousand miles away and fuel lighting streets in city centres began in labour on the Porcupine Bank. The biggest revelations I confronted when travelling coasts from Mayo to Clare were the immense repercussions – political and ecological – of our economic reliance on a world about which we know little.
Because the sea can seem so alien, and because politicians in Dublin and Brussels have little conception of the life of seafarers, Irish coastal communities now face crises on a scale that echoes war or famine. Conflicts over Ireland’s seas are fierce: they embody the dangers a national, land-focused politics poses to local, oceanic ways of life. As I visited islands off Mayo and Galway, I found myself inducted into tensions that reveal the place (or absence) of coastlines in modern culture.
I also saw countless illustrations of the interconnection of land and water. Just as the refuse of the onshore world – plastics and human effluent – spills, everywhere, into ocean, the contents of Ireland’s watery hinterland creep ashore on enormous scales. Sand, salt and kelp blow miles inland, just as salmon and eels course through Ireland’s wet interior. After rough spells, quays and beaches are littered with ocean death. Old ropes encrusted with goose barnacles – black-necked and lemon-lipped – sit beside remnants of gutted angler fish. Their sweet fleshy cores were now on fishmongers’ slabs while discarded carapaces lay, goggle-eyed, beside my sleeping bag. On my first night beside the Connacht sea I landed after dusk on a long beach and settled near a log at the strand-line. Amid the rich smells of the shore, only morning light revealed the log to be a stubby, rough-skinned porpoise. Life and death converge on the intertidal zones. Never have I seen so many drowned animals: several hares, and a limp black lamb in a Mayo geo. Nor have I witnessed before so many storm-dashed seabirds: shearwaters, guillemots and (magnificent even in decay) a gannet.
Irish poets have found this rich wreckage of the edge-zone evocative of a heartless sea, empty of mourning and incapable of burial. Sinead Morrissey’s ‘Restoration’ cycle begins on a stark Mayo shoreline:
Once I saw a washed up dolphin
That stank the length of Achill Sound,
Lying on the edge of Ireland.
The Easter wind ripping it clear
Of all its history1
The result is a sea that looked ‘wide and emptied of love’. Yet the fact that shores make us deal with death on scales to which we’re unaccustomed occurs only because of the unrivalled panoply of life they sustain. The strand-line mingling of mammal, bird, fish, crustacean, mollusc, sea star, jelly, insect, plant, lichen and mould is a unique explosion of biodiversity.
Early maps of Ireland have little to say of the under-ocean world but are striking for their revelations at these shifting edges. Across decades, they reveal shorelines in natural ebb and flow, and show human interventions in the course of rivers. Since coasts and rivers were the most common form of political boundary and a place of unparalleled resources as well as the most frequent artery of travel, these maps shower them with attention. Inland spaces are often textureless, with few distinctions but those between valued and the valueless. Agricultural land, in many such maps, stretches surprisingly far up hillsides, but mountains themselves are mere lumps in profile: unshaped, uncounted and unloved. The coast, more than the land, is thronged with description, recording in words the things that resisted drawing. I was surprised how many annotations seemed inspired by wonder and sensory curiosity rather than pursuit of wealth or even safe navigation. In Donegal, I’d passed the sea cave called McSwine’s Gun, described on a 1685 map as a ‘place where the water howls’; in Sligo I paddled under coastal scarps ‘where yearlie limbereth a Falcon esteemed the Hardiest in Ireland’; further south, ‘whyt stones’ are ‘pointed lyke diamonds’. These annotated shorelines surely seemed like alien worlds to those in Dublin or London where such descriptions were read.
In the seventeenth century, engraving replaced drawing as the mapper’s favoured mode. The result was deadening: conventional symbols for forts and harbours replaced the local quirks that sketches could preserve or emphasise. Written glosses disappeared, as did, more slowly, illustrated insets. This was also the moment when roads became focal points of Irish maps: cartography’s focus was drifting landwards. Today, our most familiar landscapes in paper or pixel are grids of roads, rail or underground tunnels. Our dashboards are adorned with moving maps that take the perspective of the thoroughfare. As the geographer Robert Harbison puts it:
On the kind of maps most people use, one feature is exaggerated at the expense of everything else, the system of roads. And yet these are seen simply as objective maps, rather than as plottings tailored to a civilisation whose relationship to the natural world is utterly and perhaps fatally mediated by cars.2
The first mapping projects of the modern era were symptomatic of the shift from shore to land. One of the most significant was concocted at the onset of the nineteenth century by the Dublin Society for Improving Husbandry, Manufacturing and Other Useful Arts and Sciences. The survey was organised by river basin, each of its units defined by waterways. But the society’s first task was to analyse the wetlands, taking levels of large bogs that could be drained and farmed. Later, the scheme’s contributors – Anglo-Irish men of means – sought routes round rivers and loughs by which railways would join the east coast to the west. Each step of this process consolidated the sense that water was barrier, not conduit; these maps both recorded and aided the drying-out of Irish life. Major mapping breakthroughs of the age of sail were now co-opted by cartographers of the land in their quest for mathematical precision, and accurate journey times, over artistic fluency and the evocation of the essence of a place. Contour lines, for instance, had been developed by surveyors who dropped weighted cords from boats to plot the relief of the ocean floor, but now mapped hills and valleys instead.
The Irish Ordnance Survey was instrumental in these changes. An arm of imperial bureaucracy, its aim was to measure the resources acquired by London in the Act of Union (1801). The imperial nature of that Union had been intensified by familiar anti-Irish prejudice: the prime minister, Pitt the Younger, envisaged a place for Irish Catholics in the new politics, but George III used royal veto to maintain a Protestant Parliament. The same prejudice compromised cartography. The chair of the committee tasked with devising the Ordnance Survey, Thomas Spring Rice, hoped to train a cadre of Irish map-makers. But Wellington considered the Irish ‘too backward’ for the task, so Ireland was mapped by the British army. Military surveyors – Royal Engineers, sappers and miners – became the visible face of occupation. From 1825 to 1846 Ireland was scrutinised with an intensity and precision never before devoted to a nation.
The Irish Ordnance Survey mirrored on land the Admiralty’s Hydrographic Office, established in 1795. Coasts were mapped before the land because oceans were the key medium of imperial travel and areas seaward of the shore the front line of colonial reconnaissance. The Hydrographic Office surveyed British and Irish coasts while despatching gun-toting brigs and corvettes to describe the vast imperial arenas of Atlantic and Pacific. One such vessel was HMS Beagle from which Charles Darwin collected the specimens on which he built a career. At least to begin with, it was not that surveyors and men of science followed the flag, but that the sea roads along which empire spread had been plotted by ships of science.
Early Admiralty maps of Ireland are as full of coastal points of interest as the maps that preceded them: curiosity and colonisation worked hand in hand. Archaeological sites are noted and insets contain topographic sketches to help sailors identify and interpret points of interest on the foreshore. But as on land, the era of high imperialism saw mapping conventions formalised and the purpose of sea charts streamlined. As efficient navigation became the single goal, the coast was leached of information.
For the last century and a half, all official mapping has treated the strand-line as a barrier. In maps where the land is rich with detail (such as current Ordnance Survey sheets) the sea is a waste; in those that delineate the sea’s features, the land is void. All that crosses the tideline – all interaction of communities with the sea – has become unrepresentable. The situation is both consequence and cause of our society’s breach between land knowledge and sea knowledge. Our maps make us chronically sea-blind but even more drastically shore-blind.
I’d never before been aware of this breach in the ways I was on the coasts of Connacht. I was struck now by the strangeness of my own interaction with maps. Before each leg, I sat long hours with Admiralty charts, identifying sea threats and noting tidal streams in my waterproof notebooks. These notes, not the charts, accompanied me to sea. On the waves, I filtered bays, villages, hills and estuaries through Ordnance Survey land maps carried with me. Like the maps themselves, my study of land and sea was split. Each took place in a different time and space, making use of a different resource. Yet actual planning and travelling meant subverting the split resource: I read sea maps from land and land maps at sea (never the reverse) as I followed the seams where the two conjoin.
On maps, that seam is thin and appears objective: no thicker than the intertidal zone. But in practice it’s wide: the subjective shore zone extends everywhere the influences of land and sea intermingle. The most prolific and profound mapper of Connacht’s coasts, Tim Robinson, insists on the need ‘to short-circuit the polarities of objectivity and subjectivity’.3 By thinking of mapping as more than a quest for objective accuracy the map-maker can ‘keep faith with reality’, revealing the ways that wide coastal zones have been sources of wealth and poverty, tragedy and pleasure over centuries. In repopulating the subjective shoreline, Robinson shows, modern maps can begin to undermine the imperial divisions of the nineteenth century. The charts and sheets used today are still sustained by the imperial logic that laid their foundations: British servicemen had little access to local place-lore and a remit to process Irish terrain for English eyes. In this conversion, sound was prioritised over meaning: places were renamed in crude attempts at phonetic translation. This sapped land of its history. In an interview, Robinson described how the military plotted a spot they called ‘Illaunanaur’:
The surveyors had obviously thought that the first part of it was ‘oileán’, island, when in fact it should have been the Irish ‘gleann’, glen. But apart from making it an island when it was a glen, the rest of the name ‘-anaur’ meant absolutely nothing in English phonetics. But in the Irish the name means ‘the glen of tears’ – it’s exactly the biblical phrase ‘this vale of tears’, ‘Gleann na nDeor’. And the story I heard from the local people, was that, in the days leading up to the famine when there was a lot of emigration from the islands, those emigrating would get a fishing boat to take them over to Connemara and they’d walk thirty miles … into Galway, where they’d wait for one of the famine ships heading for America. These ships used to sail out past the Aran Islands and very frequently had to wait in the shelter of the islands while a gale blew itself out. So they would be stationary just a few hundred yards offshore from this place, Gleann na nDeor, and people would come down to that little glen where they could wave to their loved ones but not talk to them. So the name had immense resonances and told you an immense amount about the personal griefs behind the statistics of the famine. That was very typical of what was lost in the project of anglicisation.
This contested shoreline, differently named and known by local, national and transnational interests, has been reclaimed in hosts of maps and texts that challenge official renderings of its meaning. Along the Connacht and Munster coasts there are now many ‘deep mapping’ projects in which communities collate the resources of place-lore to geographically reconstruct their many histories.4 Every one of these is a project of ‘counter-mapping’, made in tension with official maps and aiming to rewrite the perceived meanings of the land. The availability of resources created by this process, many of which aim to erode the split between land and sea, made kayaking here an experience different from anywhere else. But the tensions that make the counter-maps necessary were everywhere evident.
South of Donegal, Ireland sweeps far to the west towards the isles and peninsulas of County Mayo. This gave me three days of shelter from prevailing sou’westerlies before the westward voyage left me as far out in Atlantic seas as the Irish or British Isles extend. I was further west than St Kilda and in waters no less exposed. This is Erris (Iar Ros, ‘the Western Promontory’), labelled by Praeger ‘the wildest, loneliest stretch of country to be found in Ireland’. Perhaps the land itself is wild and lonely, but the intensity of its atmosphere is conceived in a far wilder and lonelier place: on a sea where towering rollers swell and boom against torn and broken rock. This is ‘one of the most treacherous parts of the western seaboard … a graveyard for lost vessels’.
I was joined now by my partner, Llinos, whose presence leavened the loneliness of the previous days and supplied a marked change of tone for the next week of my journey, with gregarious evenings in Irish pubs rather than cold nights on the foreshore. But each day we faced down a windswept ocean that deserved all its ill repute. As we entered open sea beyond the top edge of Mayo, thick ranks of saw-toothed swell rushed northwards and the only other life was black guillemots skipping the serrations. Cliffs fell abruptly to the sea, but the elements were still as interleaved as in an estuary. Towering peninsulas stuttered into lumps where chunks of skerry were birthed like bergs from the cliffs. These squared blocks, of vast age and thickset weight, are like nothing else in Britain. Keen tides run the channels between them, in white-cold frenzies that would be deadly should we drift off course. The melding of swell with tide, as we slid and climbed on waves, made the contoured seas frantic with movement and confusion and seemed to make the land leap and tumble. When we failed to meet the largest waves head-on, our balance and control were sorely tested. The most mind-blowing sights, however, were further offshore, where yet more lumpen rocks rose over writhing seas. Not since Mingulay and Pabbay five months earlier had I seen rock forms equal in grandeur to those where we turned from kayaking west to south: the Stags of Broadhaven are five jagged heaps, surreally precipitous and frighteningly exposed.
We reached the Stags with tides running south and swell driving north. This stirred a vortex of sea like a mile-wide whirlpool round the rocks. Although this was as bruising a day as I’ve ever experienced, Llinos was in her wild-eyed element as she strafed standing waves while seals rolled by. The creatures surfaced repeatedly: lithe, glistening and curious at the novelty of small boats in roaring seas (figure 9.1). Their wide eyes and flared nostrils carried a sense of urgency that made their presence anything but soothing. All was white, in a thousand shades, round paddles, boats, seals and jagged stone. Once we reached the Stags, I ploughed into the rocks, seeking respite, and scrambled up the cliff while Llinos threw herself through yet more torrents. I remember breathing far more heavily than the level of exercise merited, my chest tight with nervous energy. Hanging from the cliff edge, coursing with fear, I photographed her play amid the chaos (figure 9.2) before I lurched, anxiously, back onto water and resumed the frenzied twirl of paddles. That day my kayak felt more like the Birlinn of Clanranald than ever before: wrestling with the wind, sluiced by the waves and creaking with the effort, it ploughed into a world where lines between human, sea, boat and animal felt meaningless. Whenever the paths of our two kayaks crossed, our grins were unfeasibly wide. Glee and wonderment at the scale of the elements was amplified by the fact this was the first time on this journey I hadn’t faced a rough sea alone. We didn’t eat all day: not once were we secure enough to countenance taking hands from paddles. This was a magical interlude, on seas fierce enough that I might have stayed onshore if alone, and when Llinos returned to Birmingham four days later, I was entirely re-energised for the ocean trials to come.
Tales of loss and rescue abound in Erris so that archives of local news are stores of sea story. Before turning south at the Stags we’d passed long lines of sea caves that I later found in newspaper stories. In October 1997, a German retiree, Will Ernst von Below, had taken eleven-year-old Emma Murphy and her parents, Tony and Carmel, along this coast in his little currach. Heavy swell, three metres high, soon pressed them against the coastline until they were trapped in one of these caves and capsized. When the boat didn’t return to harbour local fishermen and the coastguard embarked on a challenging rescue and two hours later somehow heard whistles from deep in a tideline tunnel. As dark fell, sharp gusts moved in off the ocean. The rescuers shone torches into the cave the sound had issued from and silvery patches, sown into life vests, reflected back. The local diving club were summoned to assist: Josie Barrett and Michael Heffernan dived inside, but each was disoriented in the violent sea. Barrett was recovered, exhausted, from the waves. Only when professional Garda divers were dropped in by helicopter were the Murphys reached in their subterranean huddle. But even the rescuers were now trapped in the swirling chaos of the passageway, their safety line too short to see them out. Only acts of astonishing seamanship by one of the divers, Ciaran Doyle, and two of the coastguards, Pat and Martin O’Donnell, saved the Murphys’ lives. Pat made one tragic return to the cave to recover two bodies: the currach owner, Below, and the local diver, Heffernan. Awards for bravery were small recompense for a night of risk, terror and tragedy. To live on this coastline is to be accustomed to death and to be ready to improvise in the face of unique conditions, knowing fine margins and small errors separate seafarers from death.
