Connemara: Land of Druids and Hermit Saints
By Kate Hennessy, guide for Irish Byways “Pilgrimages to the Otherworld”
Published in the Turtle River Press, 2006
Visit www.irishbyways.com to learn more about Kate’s quiet and sacred pilgrimages

I sit in the village of Roundstone, Ireland, at a window overlooking the bay and watch a rainbow span the masts of the local traditional boats, the Galway hookers, moored in the harbor. Roundstone is a fishing village, though lately it is more of a growing Dublin outpost of houses that lie empty for most of the year. Roundstone is a good place to come in winter if you have a novel to write and want no distractions.

After years of traveling the world, I find myself living in Connemara in the West of Ireland, the region in which Roundstone lies. Within Connemara are two mountain ranges, the Twelve Bens and the Maumturks, and a lake-spattered countryside of bog, rock and the ubiquitous Connemara sheep – long-wooled, black-faced and ragged – grazing where you cannot image there would be anything to eat. The Atlantic Ocean borders the west and south, and the rocky, intricate coastline contains a treasure of small, hidden beaches hardly visited even at the height of summer. And above it all is the sky under which you stand mesmerized by the play of shadows and light, by the stories the clouds seem to tell, by the colors of the sunrises, and by the rare night sky full of stars.

Connemara is one of the wettest regions in one of the wettest countries; the weather is a presence that must be reckoned with. It directs and frames all your activities, but you cannot let it defeat you. It rained every day for three months during the first spring I lived here on the island of Inish Nee in a three-hundred year old cottage so close to the sea, the spring tide lapped against our bedroom wall.

There is also the wind to reckon with, and I sometimes find myself spending my days in a permanent huddle against it and no longer able to remember the last time I stood up straight. The wind and lashing rain can scour from your bones your most comforting thoughts. You can easily find yourself sitting far too long in a pub with a pint of Guinness in your hand, longing for a rest from the sound of the wind, longing for a day in the sun. Longing for a landscape that isn’t quite so barren with nothing but rock, bog and a handful of oak and blackthorn that grow short, scrubby and wind-torn. I travel home regularly to Vermont, where my roots lie, to soak in the trees and the riotous, jungle-like green in order to store it away for the winter, like canned tomatoes and frozen blackberries.

So, why be here? Because you can wander the hills, raths and caves, and the druids and hermit saints will speak to you. Because you are cradled by the ever-changing sky with its rain and rainbows and its blessed light that turns the Twelve Bens golden and wise and the surface of the sea into jewels for the seals and the dolphins to play in. Because of the wind that blows in from the sea and across the gorse and heather in their quiet riot of yellow and purple that fill the August landscape. Because of the long summer evenings when even at midnight the highest clouds still retain a glow of the sun, and we all sit quietly—the robin on the wire, the badger in the hedge, the cow in the pasture – to listen to a peace that settles into our bones.

Here the seasons hardly seem to whisper of their passing. It is cool and wet in winter, and warm and wet in summer, and the sheep, no matter what, graze unceasingly in the shadow of standing stones or on the sidhe, the fairy mounds, where, I am sure, they pass secrets of the Otherworld.

Connemara has become, for me, a land of the Otherworld and a land of pilgrimages. Wander around Ome Island and find a tiny holy well with recent offerings placed in the rocks surrounding it. Walk up a ridge in the Maumturks to find a statue of Saint Patrick standing at the pass and feel the presence of worship and supplication, and who’s to know whether it is Christian or pre-Christian, and does it matter? Wander into the stone circle outside cong where the Battle of Moytura was waged and won by the Tuatha de Danaan, the fairy folk, against the Formorians, their demonish overlords of the sea, and wonder at the mystery, for even now we don’t understand what these stone structures mean. Or head into the Roundstone Bog, a protected landscape where only the sheep and calleach dubh, the black cormorant, and other wild creatures are allowed to live, and breathe in the thick Connemara air, as the locals call it, feeling this breath of the Divine.

Connemara is changing with a vengeance, though; developers are carving up the land for investment homes that might only be lived in for two weeks out of the year. I’m afraid that Ireland won’t be able to remember and hold onto this sacred landscape. At the moment, there seems to be no end to the development, and a highway is now being built near the Hill of Tara, the cultural heart of Ireland.

Can the Otherworld be paved over? How deep runs the integrity of the land? How strong are the sovereign goddesses of Ireland – Mabh of Connaught, Aine of Munster, Brigit of Leinster, Macha of Ulster and, of course, Eriu, after whom Ireland is named in a covenant between her and the sons of Mil, a covenant that still lies unbroken? What will Eriu endure until we come to our senses and return to watching the hare, that guide to the Otherworld, on the hill silhouetted against the evening sky, ears up and listening to the earth as it whispers of its beauty?

Connemara is also, unsurprisingly, a popular tourist destination. Its major town, Clifden, has bet its very existence on a continued draw of tourists from Dublin, Belfast, France, Germany and the US. If you didn’t notice the arrival of daffodils and skylarks, there are the growing numbers of bus tours on the road bringing in the spring. It’s difficult to watch this, of course; I want to protect the land from this constant stream of visitors. But now I find myself inviting people to come because there is something true and good to be found here for each of us.

The beauty runs deep, and if you don’t race thoughtlessly through it, the land can and will ask something of you. Maybe just to stop and look and see it as best as you can. Maybe to help you reconnect to the landscape you come from, as it does for me with Vermont. Or, maybe to lead you, like the saints and monks who lived on their remote rocky islands off the coast, to feel, in the profound amount of silence and solitude that Connemara offers, closer to the Divine.