September 19, 2004
Stone Free
What do you see ? A jigsaw pattern of vividly green fields ? Yes, but what else. I see generations of backbreaking work, reclaiming stony land from the Burren and the scrub. A thin band of greenery where animals could be raised, wedged between the unyielding bare limestone of Abbey Hill and the edge of Galway Bay. These fields tell a story of a constant process of husbandry, begun when the very first people in Ireland formed small communities and figured out that harvesting the land, and the animals in it, was the best way to survive and endure. Stones picked year after year, and later used as stone walls to delineate the boundaries and mark ownership; scrub, weeds and trees uprooted to ensure the full yield from the land, and the soil itself fertilised, both by the animals and by men, often by dragging seaweed or rotted manure from shore or shed to be scattered across the fields. There are lots of ways to ponder our existence, but for all the plays, books and speeches that attempt to define and explain the human will to survive, that instinct is etched simply in a stretch of farmland between the rocks and the sea.
Máirtín Ó Caithin’s column in the Galway Advertiser, ‘View from the Hills’ is always worth a read (alas, not online). This week, he examines the art of building stone walls and how the skills required have made a resurgence now that there is a fashion to put a limestone wall as a boundary marker around many new houses (at least in the West). He ends the column with a story;
A man [from Máirtín’s own area] was out in the field lifting stones onto a wall the day before he was due to emigrate to America, sometime in the 1920s or 1930s. Someone passing by asked him why he was bothering himself with stone walls and him going to America – possibly for ever – the following morning. His answer was : Tuige nach ndeanfainn…an áit a thug beatha dom (Sure why wouldn’t I…the place that gave me sustenance).
Posted by Monasette at September 19, 2004 09:02 PM