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A Suspect Terrane
Skirragohiffern, or Sciorradh go hIfreann, a slide down to Hell, is the name of a ravine-torn hillside on the Mayo side of Killary Harbour, directly opposite the little Connemara village of Leenaun, and it is by no means the steepest of the slopes along that northern shore of the fiord, which becomes almost a precipice further west where the narrow waterway squeezes between the huge bulk of the Mweelrea Mountains and the hills of north Connemara to find the Atlantic. Pillars of eternity, at first glance, these majestic features of the landscape, as viewed from the mountain that dominates Leenaun; but to the eyes of geology they are provisional arrangements or over-hasty conclusions soon to be undone by tremendous reconsiderations, while according to fireside tales they are the Devil’s work. Ordnance Survey maps name that summit behind Leenaun as Devilsmother, and some ten miles to the west of it is the pass of Salrock, cleaving the rocky height separating the bay of Little Killary from Killary Harbour, which came into existence through the aforementioned struggles of the Devil with St Roc, as recorded by the travel-writing couple Mr. and Mrs. Hall in the early 1840s:
“The sanctity of the Saint having grievously annoyed the Tempter, he threw a chain over him while asleep; unable to bear the sight of his glance or the mark of the cross, he leapt to the opposite side of the mount, but still held fast the Saint by the chain—the friction produced by the struggle forming this pass, and the victorious Saint having in the morning the felicity of seeing a way for travellers by a much shorter route than any that had previously existed.” Another version of the tale, inserted in a romantic and Oirishizing novella, Noreen Dhass (Pretty Noreen), published anonymously in 1902, has St Patrick himself chaining the ‘Divil’ to a rock in the mouth of the Killary, and the fiend tearing open the pass as he drags the chain after him as far as ‘another big mountain in the County Mayo, below Asleagh, that they call “The Divil’s Mother”.’
But where exactly is this mountain? The boundary between County Galway and County Mayo runs up the middle of Killary Harbour and then inland from its head, and the old six-inch OS maps place Devilsmother about two miles east of Leenaun and just south of the boundary, therefore in Galway and indeed in Connemara, since Connemara is widely understood to include the Joyce Country. But when I was mapping the area in the 1980s I found that that mountain was called Binn Gharbh, rough peak, and that its map name was unfamiliar to the people of Leenaun and the Maam Valley—or, if they knew of it, they seemed anxious to stress that Devilsmother was ‘over in Mayo,’ in agreement with the speaker in Noreen Dhass and as if they were happy to disown it. But I finally got the truth from the late Bina McLoughlin, styled the Queen of Connemara.
I first met Bina when I was nosing around the bottom end of the Leenaun graveyard and she detached herself from a funeral that was going on above me to scramble down the terraced rows of tombs and check out what I, a stranger, was at. (If the afterlife is lived in the western ocean, as Irish mythology suggests, the dead of Leenaun have a fine start to it, for their graveyard falls westwards from the road to the waters of Killary Harbour, which seem to flow riverlike into the sunset. But of course, as Christians expecting resurrection from the east, they set their backs to this view of eternity.) Bina, I learned later on, had been given her title long ago (by another almost folkloric local figure, Dan the Street Singer) for her renditions of Francis Fahy’s mellifluous ballad about a boat:
“Oh! She’s neat, oh she’s sweet, she’s a beauty in ev’ry line! The ‘Queen of Connemara’ is that bounding bark of mine . . .” Bina herself, on the other hand, was ample and earth-rooted; however, she was always majestically adorned with numerous ropes of massive beads, and for her appearances at the great occasions of Connemara—Clifden Pony Show, Maam Cross Fair, the pattern at Mám Éan—she would sport some extravagant ornament on her brow like a tiara; I remember one in the form of a large bow studded with fat pearls.
At that graveyard meeting she gifted me with some amazing placelore concerning various boulders on her farm, a few miles to the south in the Maam Valley, under which were buried sundry personages including Fionn Mac Cumhaill’s mother; St Oliver Plunkett too, she told me, had had many adventures in the locality. So, a few years later when Michael Viney and David Cabot were making a TV film about my mapping career, it seemed a good idea to stage a conversation with the archetypal Connemara woman on her farm. Thus after I had appeared prancing on precipices in the Aran Islands and dragging myself through bramble bushes in the Burren, I came hopping over a Connemara field wall to greet the flamboyantly rubicund Bina, who was surrounded by her fat, woolly, individually named and loved sheep and wore what looked like a Mycenaean gold mask of an alligator among the profusion of jewels on her bosom. And what she had to tell amazed me, on camera. I asked her about the peaks and valleys forming the eastern backdrop to the scene, and she named them: Binn Gharbh, which I already knew; north of it, Gleann na nÉan, the glen of the birds; and north of that again and hardly visible, Magairlí an Deamhain, which she blushingly confirmed meant ‘the Devil’s balls.’
Back at home, I looked more closely at my blurry photocopies of pre-Ordnance Survey maps, and found that some sixteenth-and seventeenth-century maps have ‘Magharladone’ rather indeterminately located south of the Killary; one of them indeed labels the whole massif of the Twelve Pins as ‘Magher ladone als the devyils Balocks xii great hylles or mountains’—an even more impressive symbol of the Devil’s potency. Those old maps are vague and approximate as to details, but William Larkin’s 1819 map of County Galway is more precise, and it has ‘Muggerleendoon’ in the right position, just north of the Galway–Mayo border. Later on I returned to Leenaun to view the heights from all angles in hope of determining the exact application of the name, and found that Magairlí an Deamhain (for which ‘Devilsmother’ is obviously a nineteenth-century euphemism) is a ridge extending northwards across the county border from Binn Gharbh and terminating in two swellings high over the Leenaun–Westport road that an inflamed imagination could indeed see as a pair of giant testicles. I confess I took an unholy pleasure (for the Devil has us all enchained) in informing the Ordnance Survey that they had had the wrong name on the wrong mountain for the last 150 years; and now that the name ‘Magairlí an Deamhain’ has appeared on their recent Discovery Series map of the area (though still attached to the wrong mountain!) I am egotistically peeved that the first modern and correct application of it was not on my own map of Connemara, which had been published by the time of my second audience with the Queen of Connemara.
Killary Harbour (the anglicized name derives from the Irish Caolaire Rua, the latter word meaning ‘reddish’ and the former combining caol, thin, and sáile, salt, into a term for a narrow sea inlet) is so long (nearly ten miles) and narrow (less than half a mile over most of its course) that Leenaun, with its white houses scattered along the curves of the coast road, and the steep mountain slopes immediately behind them, has the air of a middle-European lakeside village rather than an Atlantic seaport. Líonán Cinn Mhara is the original Irish, meaning the reef or shallow at the head of the sea, and the sandbank from which it is named is the product of small rivers that pour into it the swarf from the valleys they have been rasping out of the surrounding hillsides ever since the last Ice Age. The Killary itself is a true fiord, a sea-invaded glacial valley, even if it lacks the towering walls of the Norwegian fiords. It was excavated by a glacier creeping seawards from a vast ice-dome that would have overtopped all the mountains of Mayo and Connemara. Some tributary glaciers coming off Leenaun Hill, south of the village, and especially Mweelrea, a few miles to the north-west, have left corries like empty eye-sockets on the rocky hillsides where they originated. All the most striking features of the scenery, then, have been thrown together during or since the Ice Age that ended about ten thousand years ago. But the main glacier was exploiting a pre-existent set of faults that had weakened a zone now marked by the Erriff river valley (the route followed by the Leenaun–Westport road) and the Killary itself. To help me make head or tail of the profound convulsions and serial reconsolidations of the region, long pre-dating these Ice Age remodellings, I got in touch with a young man who had just finished his Ph.D. on the region and had the latest theories and radiometric rock-datings at his fingertips. Kieran Ryan met me with his car in Leenaun for a tour of the region. To understand the Killary it was necessary, he said, to look at what the geologists call the South Mayo Trough—and here was a preliminary hint of the magnitude of the changes we would be considering, for this so-called ‘trough’ is largely occupied by Connacht’s highest mountain, Mweelrea (2,688 feet), and its colossal sprawling entourage of hills. So we drove round the head of the Killary and along its Mayo shore towards Bundorragha (Bun Dorcha, dark bottom place), a mountain-shadowed hamlet in the mouth of a steep-sided valley coming down from the north. Just before we reached the turning into the valley I remarked on three jagged teeth outlined against the sky on the profile of the mountain ahead of us; Kieran told me these were the outcroppings of strata of volcanic rocks, marking three periods of eruptions separated by age-long compilations of the outwash of huge river systems. And in fact the day was to be dominated by vulcanism, much of Kieran’s work having been directed towards dating these and other such strata. From Bundorragha we drove up the oppressively grand mountain glen past Delphi (too often a rain-soaked and Gothic-gloomy obverse of the classic site of sunstruck oracles it was named after) and the gloomy waters of Doo Lough, black lake, and out into the gentler country beyond. Then we pulled into a little roadside quarry to look at a (to my eyes) nondescript greyish rock exposure, in which Kieran pointed out two bands of a slightly paler grey. These narrow strata, he told me, were composed of tuffs: concretions of volcanic ash that had rained out of the sky and sunk to the bottom of a sea. Presumably these layers were more or less horizontal when they were laid down; now they were rearing up northwards at almost forty-five degrees, while those we had glimpsed near Bundorragha were steeply inclined in the opposite direction. In fact to comprehend the topography one had to subtract the whole Mweelrea massif, which did not exist at the time of these volcanic events.
That time was almost half a billion years ago, in the geological period known as the Ordovician. (Nineteenth-century geologists had a confusing antiquarian custom of naming such periods not after the areas in which their characteristic rocks were first described or are most prevalent, but after the Celtic tribes that inhabited those areas many millions of years later, in this case the Ordovices of North Wales.) This was long before the Atlantic had begun to open up, and the disposition of the continental masses around the globe then was quite different from what it is at the moment and from what it will be at similarly remote periods of the future, for the various plates making up the Earth’s surface crust, on which the continents and ocean beds are carried, are ever shifting to and fro, stirred by slow convection currents in the white-hot rock of the mantle on which the crust rests. There was at that time an ocean comparable to the present-day Atlantic, the Iapetus; it separated Laurentia, which is more or less today’s North America and Greenland, from Baltica and Gondwana, which comprised South America, Africa and most of the rest. Ireland was not yet a whole; what is now the north-western portion of it was a sector of the Laurentian shores of Iapetus, while the south-eastern portion on the other side of Iapetus formed part of Eastern Avalonia, a minor continental fragment close to Baltica. But the Iapetus Ocean was slowly but steadily closing, which meant that the edges of the oceanic plate underlying it, composed of dense rocks, were being forced under the edges of the lighter converging continental plates. As the oceanic material was driven deep into the hot interior of the globe it began to melt, and some of it made its way to the surface again through volcanic vents; thus each of the approaching continental margins was fringed by an arc of volcanic islands. The South Mayo Trough was a small marginal basin of Iapetus, between the Laurentian continent and its offshore chain of volcanos. But this was no Hawaiian paradise; Kieran’s account of it was a vision of Hell. In the various tuff bands he showed me that day, some of them insignificant-looking streaks a couple of inches across and others boldly upstanding reefs a dozen or more yards in thickness, he had been able to identify minute shards of glass formed by the cooling of lava flung high into the atmosphere by violent explosions, bombardments of boulders that had sunk into seabeds of ash, and the traces of nuées ardentes, dense clouds of red-hot dust that come racing down the slopes of volcanos. The intervening strata of sandstone bore signs of having been consolidated out of huge thicknesses of sediments that had slumped and avalanched down submarine slopes, in events that must have caused vast tsunamis. And Laurentia itself, as yet unprotected by the vegetable world that would hardly begin to invest the land for another fifty million years, was a naked wasteland, subject to ferociously erosive weathers that could grind down mountains as fast as the folding and refolding of the rocks, in the oncoming collision of continents, could heave them up.
Some of the volcanic tuffs of south Mayo, I learned, had the chemistry of lava that had forced its way up through light continental-plate rocks; this implied that in places the coastal margin of Laurentia had overrun its preceding island arc, which was thrust down into the mantle. Connemara, it appears, originated as such a place, a broad promontory pierced through by volcanos, far from its present position next to south Mayo. Its ancient Dalradian rocks, its quartzites and schists, are much older than the deposits of the South Mayo Trough; they originated near to the similarly Dalradian rocks of Donegal and Scotland. This promontory of the Laurentian coast was sheered off by a major fault parallel to the coast (like the present-day San Andreas fault in California) along which the opposing micro-continent of Eastern Avalonia was approaching. Forced eastward along the Laurentian margin, Connemara was eventually grafted onto another peninsula that had been built up by the erosion products and volcanic outpourings of Laurentia’s coastal mountains. Such chips off continental masses, which have been shifted, rotated and emplaced in geologically discordant surroundings, are called ‘suspect terranes,’ I learned. Connemara’s rocks, folded, faulted and piled high by the age-long impact, were then worn down by rivers and deposited as alluvial fans in the South Mayo Trough. These deposits have gone through many a remoulding since then, and have now become the thousands of feet of sandstone strata of the Mweelrea Mountains; they are interrupted by welded-tuff bands that Kieran has found to be some 470 million years old, the work of Connemaran volcanos that have been totally deleted from the earth’s surface by erosion.
I had been hoping to hear that the great trench of Killary Harbour marked the site of the suture between Connemara and the south Mayo rocks, in which case the widely accepted definition of Connemara as the land south of the Killary could have claimed a most ancient and natural validation. But reality is always more complex than our concepts of it. To follow the construction of Connemara further, or at least to view the mighty ruins left by ice’s deconstruction of it, we had now to visit the southern shores of the Killary. So we returned to Leenaun—and for me it was as if we were simultaneously fleeing the mountainy gloom and grandeur of today’s Delphi Valley and the Ordovician hell of the South Mayo Trough, our little time capsule of a car ploughing through shallow seas hissing under downpours of volcanic ash. Then we drove down the south side of the fiord towards Rosroe, the small peninsula separating Little Killary from the mouth of the Killary itself. The rocks of the hillsides we passed over on the way were largely mudstones and sandstones, which all looked much of a muchness to me but for the geologist bore the signs of having been deposited in varying situations, the earliest layers on dry land, then some on a continental shelf, then more in deep ocean, and the most recent in shallow inshore waters. It seems that in the final stages of its life the ever-narrower Iapetus Ocean overflowed the Laurentian margin for a while, and erosion of the coastal mountain ranges dumped these sediments into it. This was in the Silurian period (so named from the Silurian Celts of the Welsh borders), 440 to 410 million years ago. And somewhere under that pile, which grew to a thickness of a couple of miles, is the join between Connemara and the Mweelrea rocks of the South Mayo Trough.
By the end of the Silurian period Iapetus had ceased to exist and the two halves of what was to become Ireland had been fused together; the suture, according to a recent study, runs up Galway Bay (crossing the southern tip of Gorumna Island in south Connemara) and thence to Clogher Head in County Louth. Local effects of this cataclysmic unification include the dramatic-looking fault at Salrock, where the older Ordovician rocks of Rosroe have been uplifted and forced southwards over the younger Silurian rocks. A more profound remodelling of the land derives from the bundle of faults running from north of Doo Lough across the Killary to Leenaun and down the Maam Valley to Lough Corrib and Galway city, the land on the east of these faults being displaced southwards by four miles or so relative to that on the west. The ravines of Sciorradh go hIfreann and the broad Maam Valley itself are the much later work of glaciers and rivers attacking the rock-beds sapped by these faults.
All the tremendous landforms I have described had been eaten away by erosion by the middle of the Carboniferous period some 300 million years ago and reduced to a plain, which then was gently and slowly uplifted into a plateau as a result of another remapping of the globe, the drifting apart of the continents that had converged and united in Ordovician times. The continent formed out of Laurentia and Baltica, in which Ireland was embedded, was ripped in two again by this opening of the new-born Atlantic in the Jurassic period, the time of the dinosaurs—a process that continues today and that one day may well be reversed, with America and Europe marching to yet another provisional Armageddon, one or the other preceded by a rank of volcanos. Finally (to compress unimaginable tracts of time into a few words) the plateaux of the West of Ireland and Scotland were uplifted by the spreading mantle currents that were bearing America and Europe apart; and then, a mere million years ago, the Ice Ages came to the Connemara–Mayo plateau and dissected it by glaciation into a number of massifs—the Twelve Pins of Connemara and the Mweelrea, Sheefry, Partry, Maamtrasna and Maumturk ranges.
What appals and exhilarates me in the contemplation of these shiftings of matter—which of course are trivial in scope of space and time when compared to the bursting forth of the universe from next to nothing, the condensation of the galaxies, the stellar explosion that spewed out the dust of which the Earth is made, and all the rest of the cosmic creation-story—is that none of it mattered. Only after the evolution of life and then, billions of years later, that of consciousness, of mentality, was there any thing or person that could care whether the dice fell this way or that. Values arise from purposes, purposes from desires, desires from the ability to imagine what is not, an aptitude that is virtually ours alone, at least in this neck of the universal wood. Reaching the end of our day’s travels across abyssal time and clashing continents, Kieran and I strolled up a side road to inspect what we saw as the sandstones of the Rosroe formation, which, he told me, is a small terrane that originated far away as fans of material washed down from the eroding Laurentian margin to form a peninsula was sheered off by a fault, carried westwards and wedged in between the Connemara terrane and the Mweelrea formation. Immersed strata-deep in our cogitations we passed a brusquely phrased notice forbidding unauthorized entry onto the premises of the salmon farm that seems to have commandeered the western end of the Rosroe peninsula. Soon an angry bellow from a distant figure reminded us that other people, for defiantly non-geological reasons such as profit and privacy, value the most out-of-the-way bits and pieces of the geographical outcome of the ages’ convulsions, and so we abandoned our trespassing. I shall have much to write about the intensity of feelings, the conflicts of interest and the small daily struggles of saints against the father of evil that humanize such phenomena as the Salrock fault, the Rosroe formation and the rest of the stark and stony features, from Killary Harbour to Slyne Head in the extreme south-west, that make up Connemara’s Atlantic face.
