By RÁ Costello:
It is a Tuesday in December. The rain drifting off the Irish Sea washes Dublin in a briny, opaque silence and as I cross Dawson Street, a cyclist plummets past me, like a gannet headed towards the Liffey. I am on my way back again, to the glass case where the Gleninsheen gorget sits, glowing in the dust-heavy air of the national museum. A broad, oxbow-shaped collar made of gold. Hammered into being during the Bronze age, I have been visiting it for as long as I can remember. In Irish, you would say that I am 'gafa leis.’ That something in its form has snagged on my mind. I could not tell you what in it catches me. Except that it was pulled from the rock of my home county. That it is a tangible piece of a landscape I struggle to name.
Our family home sits on a lip of rock, one of a string of houses perched on the faces of a long line of small mountains which plunge in swollen ripples of limestone into the toss of the Atlantic. ‘Folt fionn na farraige’ the white-crested mane of the ocean.
Arthur Conan Doyle said that limestone landscapes are hollow places, secretive, and this is the kind of landscape where things that do not belong manage to endure. Along the edges of this coast, from Ballyvaughan down through Gleninagh and Murrough to Fanore and Craggagh, up the valleys into Fermoyle and Caher. The Irish language held on. A tongue to itself in an area you could walk across in a day. Enduring in the small community that lived in these pockets of watery rock, where glaciers have stripped the soil away and left the grey limestone ribs of the land exposed.
As you leave the soft fields of Galway, the first hills of this karst landscape begin to rise suddenly, at Boston – a place whose name is, perhaps, the Anglicised sounding of the Irish Bos Toinne, ‘the palm of the wave’ – named for the scalped shoreline nearby which legend says was stripped clean by a great tsunami. These first hills mark the boundary of the Burren, their peaks picked out against the sky by the lattice of dry-stone walls that run across their peaks.
These stones and fields and crested hills had names once. Not the English names we use now. Names all of their own, with stories to explain them, stories built over centuries as each generation placed their layer on what had been laid down before. These are names hardly anyone knows now. Stories people do not even know they have forgotten. There were once Irish names for the gentians that flower in the warm shadow of a limestone pavement here. Not Irish versions of English names but Irish names which had never heard how English named their flower. And did not care. There was a name for the local practice of wintering cows on the mountain and summering them by the sea. A name for the lakes that bloom, like mercury rising from the low fields, in bad weather. These places had names that told you their history and their nature – cluain, inse, léana. The water meadows, the low-lying grassy places.
National surveys record widespread use of Irish here in the 1930s, yet, two generations later, as I was speaking my first words of Irish, the language had already faded from the landscape of my home. I can count my summers on the rocks of these mountains, but the distancing lens of translation means the knowledge wrapped in its Irish names, is now mostly lost to me. And yet I find I can’t give up on it. I spend time trying to hunt down scraps of what time has worn off our maps. ‘Sa tóir ar’ I would say in Irish. ‘Sa tóir ar’ - to pursue. Derived of, or maybe simply adjacent to, the middle Irish ‘tóraidhe,’ - a bandit, the pursued. The root from which Tory island off Ireland’s far North-West coast gets its name – the famous home of outlaw pirates, pursued across the sea. The name given to the bands of guerrilla fighters who opposed Cromwell's armies during the seventeenth-century invasion of Ireland, and, by a process of crude association, the political label given to those sympathetic to the Catholic Duke of York at the end of Charles II's reign – The Tories. This is what I am pursuing, I think - these shapeshifting insights that come from the intimacy of knowing a language beyond its constituent parts. The magic of familiarity which can, by a process of consubstantiation, turn a word from a label for those outside the law to the name for those who sought to eradicate the language the outlaws spoke.
Language and landscape go together here. They hide each other. I find a field that has no English name. But it has an Irish one. Scribbled on the neat, lined pages of a child’s copybook in the national folklore collection is a list of places near the author’s home. Recorded in that golden window when Irish had not yet begun to fade off the landscape. The child’s name attaches her to a house where her family still live. I retrace the directions in her description.
It is late August. Marsh thistles worry my ankles as I cross the wall and into the long grass of a sloping field. Water seeps through my runners as a dun cow and her white calf watch me balefully. A month earlier and I would have been up to my waist in feileastram, the tall canary yellow Iris that grows in wet places around here. Talamh feagacha this kind of land – rushey. Wet footed, I crouch down – listening – because, in Irish, this field is called ‘Poll a’ ceoil.’ The hole of music. And as I squat there, in the silence between cars passing on the narrow road nearby - I hear it. The rushing softness of water hurrying through some hidden path in a trickle of excited notes. Poll a’ ceoil.
Irish is not made for outsiders – the names it gives things are designed for those who are part of its landscape – internal references made of layers of locality that make them useless for a person who wants a precise co-ordinate, invaluable for those who seek a place. The language will exclude you if you let it but, in its strange acts of micro-identification it gives away the secrets of a landscape that run beneath the surface. Makes it difficult not to inhabit the place you describe.
The Irish poet Biddy Jenkinson refuses to translate her work into English, offering the refusal as a small and deliberate challenge to those who “think everything can be harvested without loss.” So much is lost in harvesting this place as a map of English names. And yet the landscape is sometimes difficult to listen to. There is so much I cannot recover. More silences in the landscape than I will ever fully fill. I look at these hills now and they confront me with a language and a landscape I am clinging on to but know I can never quite claw back. Waving goodbye to the cows, and the field, I clamber back over the stone wall to my bike. Back North-East is Gleninsheen. Ghleann insín, the valley of the small, grassy grazing places. They seem like such small victories, but in each name is a history, a landscape recovered.
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Róisín Costello is a bilingual writer and academic who lives and works between Dublin and County Clare, Ireland. Róisín writes about the connections between language and landscape, and how to recover feminist understandings of place. Her writing is forthcoming in The Hopper and has been shortlisted for the Bodley Head/ Financial Times essay competition.
