I take it unto myself to tell you all about this place I now call home, this emerald isle, this great Erin, Hibernia and all of its glory. Some part of that is explaining what is different here, what strange and exotic natures rule and how a corn fed, red blooded American such as myself deals with these changes. I try not to just think of the obvious things to get under the surface of culture and find what exists at the heart of a people, a place, a spirit that defines Ireland and the Irish as I have come to know them.
One thing that I think defines the Irish is how they find themselves tied to nature and the land around them. As a yank, I see our colonization of the states as a process of hammering the land to fit our needs, of pulling its resources up form the crust, of harnessing rivers and bringing the world to heel. I don’t mean this is an exactly celebratory way, but for better or-more honestly-worse I conceptualize our ‘settling’ of our continent as a process of lacing it over with asphalt and power lines until one must journey many hundred of miles, with full intent and drive, in order to feel overwhelmed by nature once more.
Although man has inhabited Ireland for around nine thousand years, since roughly the end of the last ice age, they have not yet bulldozed and dynamited their humble island into commercialized homogeny. They have instead worked it out, quite by accident or perhaps simply not desiring another way, to live within their land, hand in hand with their earth and content in many ways to find harmony with it.
Take the roads oft traveled, I have noticed, or rather, not noticed, that when driving through the country that often the only road you are able to see is the one you’re riding on. Even then it’s often not possible to see past the next bend of the tarmac, giving you an experience of being isolated from the industrialized world, alone in your car on fifty meters of pavement surrounded by the vast expanse of green space on all sides. The Irish word for road is ‘Bóthar’ which when broken into segments translates into Bó for cow and thar for path with the story going that the land was mapped by herdsmen whose cattle were naturally able to find the easiest way to traverse the geography. Over time the routes pioneered by steers were formalized and paved over as cars became more common.
Thus, when driving, you will find yourself diving through hollows in the woods or keeping to the ridgeline as valleys stretch out beside you for miles and miles. You get a sense of exactly what’s around you even if it’s simply field after field, a patchwork of grass dotted with sheep and etched with the grey stone walls which are ubiquitous. These walls are, to me, more impressive than a castle or monolith, as they defy my conventional American notions of land management.
The American west was settled by means of barbed wire (invented in Dekalb Illinois) as it was a cheap and efficient means of fencing in herds of heifers and helping to end the process of cattle rustling and the range wars over land rights. The Irish accomplished this same feat utilizing loose stones and vegetation. The walls stand about three or four feet high, in vast networks over whole regions, cobbled together using no mortar or means aside from gravity and engineering. I have tried many times to puzzle out how this was achieved, staring intently at the craftsmanship trying to prize out some order, some method to the madness but all I can see is a mass of free standing, unhewn stones assembled in accordance with the nature of Celtic gods of chaos and trickery.
In their own way, the walls are symbols of the people’s presence on the Island and their reverence and understanding of nature’s unconquerable permanence. They are simultaneously a natural extension of the earth and a means of domesticating it. Largely unchanged since the first surveyors carved fiefdoms and lordships from the settlements and holdings of free farmers the walls dictate who owns what just as reliably as the hedges do. Hedges, of course, being dense and inhospitable barriers of shrubbery groomed and contained until their thickness approaches the properties of a thatched roof. They line the roads and keep animals on their parcel, throughout the year they are maintained by councils and individuals in just another example of the people living hand in hand with nature, neither commanding the other fully but both bending to suit the other.
Finally, I must bring up something mythic and vital, a lifeblood and building block of the Irish way of life. For within the color pallet of this Island there are the greens of the fields and forests, the grey skies and stones, the white and black clouds, the white and black Guinness pints, red hair and blue eyes, and all the colors of the vibrant rainbows which cross the sky with welcoming frequency. There is one color which gets overlooked more often than not, as valuable as gold, as sought after as diamonds, two things, both brown, are to me inseparable from life in Ireland. One if the cup of tea, and the other is the bog.
Cups of tea need no explanation (although I may rhapsodize on this later) but I imagine bogs are an alien concept to most of my U.S. readers. First off, no, they are not where Irish cranberries come from, they are where turf comes from. Turf being a piece of dried organic matter burned for heat during the winter, you may remember it from a past column on the art of building a fire using it, I actually have that article brought up to me quite often over here. It’s not surprising because turf is a way of life, and my new family in the west of Ireland, the heart of bog country, often lives their life around it.
My father-in-law, along with his brothers, have designed and built turf processing machines for decades, these mammoth contraptions are one part tank, one part dump truck, and one part cement mixer as they take raw peat pulled from the earth by a backhoe and churn it into long lines of uniform bricks. These machines have been exported all the way from Minnesota to Mozambique and work tirelessly for years providing the local people with fuel and warmth. Much of the area gets its electricity from a turf fire plant which consumes it on an industrial scale, and as a commodity around the neighborhood, turf is traded and exchanged among the locals when the weather demands it.
The Bog itself is something of an oddity, amidst the green hills and fields the bog is a strange stretch of land, low scrub brush growing in shades of grey and brown motley it is as alien as the Burren, the renowned tracts of limestone pushed up from the seafloor eons ago, said to be among the rarest land on earth it has more in common with the surface of the moon than other earthly biomes. While the bog seems uniform from afar once you get up close you will see that massive pits are dug out and deposited into rows where those aforementioned bricks bake in the sun over weeks on end. First, as those lines of uniform construction, the turf stands out as an undeniably man made invention, dominating the landscape and tricking the eye just like an orchard of evenly spaced trees.
Work, however, is not done on the turf as first it must be turned over, allowing for an even drying from its dripping, wet, initial stage. If the weather has been good, then after it’s evenly cured the turf can be ‘footed’ or stacked into piles and allowed to air out even further. This process is all done by hand and I’ve only recently found myself employed at it. There is no set way of footing turf, so I am told, but there is method and art to it which I am assured I’ll get the hang of eventually. Watching native Irish do it is a wonder to behold as stooped and steady they are able to arrange the turf in neatly balanced piles in a matter of seconds. Surely half the skill is feeling out the density and dynamics of an individual sod and carefully determining where it should sit on the pile, while the other half is doing so with any square meter section in an orderly and efficient manner.
Struggling with these two aspects, I again appreciate the skill and art involved in making those mortar-less walls many ages ago. Basil demonstrates for me the ‘old way’ of doing it as he effortlessly constructs a pyramid of turf which resembles the poles of a teepee, Evan (my brother in law) says he got good at it when his legs got long enough to span the rows, now he lays out long arched lines of peat in orderly ‘furroughs’ at a pace which seems inhuman. My handiwork is uneven and slow, crude and haphazard, prone to tumbling over if you walk too close to it. They say I’ll get it in time, and that any bit helps, but I am not so sure. As we leave from footing the bog now looks Martian, I have thought before that a landscape of footed turf looks like row after row of ancient temples, it is mountains and a geography wholly unfamiliar to myself, again, half the hand of man and half the force of nature.
Later the turf will be tossed into a great hopper on the back of another machine and driven to barns where great piles are amassed over the years and slowly picked away at over winters. In 25 years they say the pits fill back in, that left to their own devices the people have grazed from the bogs and let them replenish, a renewable source of energy as old as the runes and free as the birds. In the states we say that chopping wood warms you twice, but here you work for the turf and when the howling winds of a winter storm blow in you can settle yourself in front of a turf fire, a bit of your homeland burning steadily away, and with a hot whiskey in your free hand appreciate how you worked for the turf, and now the turf works for you.
