Although this month’s theme is “Great Deserts” – and indeed I was torn between lemon meringue and sticky toffee pudding – you will understand that in Ireland, we have a slight problem in meeting the one fairly unavoidable characteristic of your average desert: near zero rainfall.
Comparing Aghagallon to the Atacama and Kilkenny to the Great Karoo is a fairly fruitless exercise, to be honest, but there is at least one department in which Ireland can lay a diluted claim to desert status, albeit in the oddest of fashions. For if you have never been to Mayo, then you have never seen the nothingness which miles and miles of bog and mountain; mountain, stream and bog produce.
Scott may have been describing the Antarctic when he said “Dear God, this is a desolate place” but then, he had never tried walking across Mayo on a wet February afternoon with the sky darkening, the rain attacking you from all angles – and your stomach thinking your throat’s cut. From where I sit in my comfortable office on the north coast, with this link to the outside world and a dry roof over my head and tea in the pot, it is but a very short mindwalk to the wastelands of Mayo (and Galway) of only 150 years ago.
Should you ever cross the sea to Ireland (to borrow a phrase), you might well find yourself driving – or being driven – through the western province: Connacht. Now Connacht is a strange place, far removed in field and feeling from the other three provinces, with their neat market towns, prosperous farms and settled communities.
In the seventeenth century, one of Cromwell’s generals reported on Connacht as follows: Not enough water to drown a man; nor enough wood to burn him; nor enough earth to bury him. Smooth talking PR, eh? Would have made a great lobbyist, doncha think? In the nineteenth century, the Great Hunger cleared the land as effectively as the bubonic plague and in the twentieth century, the German novelist Heinrich Boell quoted the phrase: “Mayo, God help us” in his classic “Irish Diary” (1954).
And if one of the quintessential features of a desert is the absence of life, particularly human life, then large chunks of Mayo are a desert as surely as Death Valley or the Gobi. For “sand” read “rain”, and you’re there. Damn All Squared.
Get a decent map of Ireland and look at counties Galway and Mayo – not a lot to see, you would think and yet, that is its very attraction. Find the town of Ballina and trace the road westwards through Crossmolina as you do a Horace Greely and plough on remorselessly towards the sea. Look north and south of the road and what do you see: nothing. Here and there are mountaintops and forests and streams but most of what you see is nothing but sticky black peat, covered by brown sedge, tussocks and treacherous bog, which swallows everything laid upon it, from human remains to human roads. If you are familiar with the dark and evil world of Grendel in “Beowulf” (wonderfully translated by our own Seamus Heaney), then you will have the bog. A world in which fiends are about their business after dark and all manner of dark shadowings are waiting to enfold you in their dark embrace.
And think on this: every broken down cottage which you pass, every wavy line of overturned turf (former “lazy beds” for the failed potato crop of 1845-47), every roofless outhouse represents the desert of the human spirit where many a man and his family toiled for years to create any sort of living, only to be defeated by disease and disaster. There is nothing magnificent or virtuous in this desolation. It is as cruel as the Jericho Road. It mocked the poor who tried to eke a living from it as surely as those last eleven miles taunted Captain Scott. And the rain and the mildew did as effectively for families as the alleged cruelties of their landlords. If the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse had come riding by, then the Rain would have been their ostler.
And yet it is witness to the power of the human spirit that some of those who survived also lived to write about it, and mock it, and remember it when they arrived in their new land. They remembered the awful emptiness and they determined that their children should never suffer the fate of their parents. They built – often in a climate as inhospitable as that of their home –and when nature came calling with floods and droughts, they stared it grimly in the face and determined that nature should not win. So they built again, and again, and again. No matter how many times the wind tore and the rain twisted, they fought back. Perhaps it is the unspoken legacy of the pioneers which rings like a distant bell in the souls of so many visitors to our desolation. For they also have half-remembered tales form their grandparents of tough times – and even tougher people.
And by a curious twist of fate, it is very often this very lack of humanity which makes the wilder parts of Galway and Mayo so beloved of our true travellers. It is a curious question, but it is also a great shibboleth when I ask our prospective clients: Would you like to see nothing?” And you would be surprised by the percentage who answer “Yes.” For Mayo and Galway are probably one of the last places in twenty first century Ireland where human habitation is put in its proper place – not in control but subservient to the forces of nature, who appear to be gathering to extract their revenge, as surely as man has extracted peat for fuel for centuries. You can delay the inevitable – but not for long.
And it is perhaps no coincidence that two of the most hospitable establishments in Ireland – Bervie House on Achill and Renvyle House on the Atlantic coast – are in the midst of this bleakness, this emptiness of the land but fullness of the spirit. Two oases of warmth and friendship, offering the sustenance of genuine hospitality to the weary and rest and repose to the exhausted. What a contrast to the loneliness and bleakness of the heart which modern Dublin, that cosmopolitan strumpet, offers to so many – the bed factories and the tourist traps; the flaws in the mascara of the failte.
To say that Ireland is the home of irony is an understatement. It bewilders our guests that irony is as natural to an Irishman (even if he proudly proclaims his British heritage) as breathing. Ireland is the cradle, homestead, workstation and gated community of irony – and it is the height of irony that the bogs of Connacht, the dampest deserts on earth, are now a place of liberation.
To meander through Mayo is to return – literally – to your roots and to create time and space for yourself. You don’t have to forego the products of civilisation – we do have hot baths and very good dining rooms – but you can live without the cellphone and wi-fi. And if you can’t manage that, then I humbly suggest that nowhere on earth will ever be far enough away from wherever your heart truly lies so you could save yourself a lot of time, cash and effort by doing it all on a DVD.
But to walk off the main road – what am I saying?, the only road – and to climb away into perfect silence, to escape the famine of reflection which plagues Homo Occidentalis and feed on the peace of meditation – that is to find the beauty of the desert which T E Lawrence found, almost a century ago. In “Seven Pillars of Wisdom”, he recalls how Ibn Saud took him into the desert and said: “Isn’t this magnificent?” “What is magnificent?” asked Lawrence, still thinking as a British officer, “There is nothing at all but sand and rock.”
“Precisely” said Ibn Saud: “Isn’t it wonderful?”
When there is nothing at all but bog and hill, isn’t it wonderful that we can undo the divorce of body and spirit which threatens to ruin us all.
