In Ellen’s bar in Maugherow, a thatched-roof public house of unimpeachable shebeen pedigree dating back to 1610, a friendly weather-browned farmer with the tractor parked outside asked where we’d been living before we made the planning application to build a house in the locality.
‘Dromahair,’ I said.
‘A wet auld hoor of a place,’ he said, and saluted the wisdom of a move to the sunnier precincts of Maugherow.
Dromahair and Maugherow are an equidistant twenty kilometres or thereabouts from Sligo town: one to the north and on the coast; the other an inland riverside village geographically within Leitrim. Could their respective climates be so notably different?
Where we lived, on the outskirts of Dromahair, the Bonet River bordered the meadow field in front of our house. After unusually heavy and prolonged rain the Bonet sometimes burst its banks and flooded the field. The soil was understandably spongy and vaporous, home to abundant yellow flaggers, alder trees and green rush, and frequently veiled in pallid ground-hugging mists.
The gamekeeper’s cottage itself came with six acres of native woodland thick with bluebells. Saplings sprung into full-scale trees from the soggy leaf mulch and in the summer months the oak, beech, hazel, holly and birch leaf canopies exhaled a near constant nimbus of moisture. Likewise, wispy tails of cloud clung to the wooded hillsides when skies elsewhere were clear.
Situated in the thick of this moisture-rich forestation, Dromahair village was entered by a rustic arched stone bridge on the Leitrim side and screened at the Sligo end by a shaded avenue of lime trees. Modelled on a village in Somerset, with improvements made in the early 1800s by absentee landlords, the Fox-Lane family, Dromahair had grown into a substantial farming and conservative merchant class enclave. We had spent fourteen years there and would happily have gone on living in our tree-surrounded cottage had we not craved more houseroom.
The general wisdom when renovating an old property is that for the first three months you lose ground; more work than originally supposed becomes unavoidable. So having thought long and hard, we finally opted for a new build on a green-field site. And what ultimately weighted our decision in favour of the move was the prospect of living closer to the sea.
We had originally settled on Dromahair after we found we couldn’t afford to buy a house in Sligo. Even on our lowly budget, we were adamant we wanted either a townhouse or somewhere in the countryside – not the halfway compromise of the suburbs. We had in fact looked at several places in the Maugherow area that were beyond our means, so when we secured a site in the locality friends said that after the circling we’d finally landed.
Ancestry was not a prime consideration, but visible from land and sea and the field we successfully bid for, the nearby Knocklane hill had a placename derived from the family name, O’Laoíghén. Several families with the Leyden surname continued to live in Maugherow. None were related. But my father’s people were stonemasons from Streamstown on the opposite shores of Ballisodare Bay, and I had an unshakeable conviction that my clan origins were historically rooted in Maugherow. I was a salmon following the river to the sea.
*
Maugherow gets its placename from the Irish Machair Eabha, the Plain of Eve. Eabha was said to be a leech-woman with Cesair, a Queen of the first invaders of Ireland or, alternatively, a Pagan Goddess. In the Christianised version, Cesair arrived with a retinue of fifty women and three men, having escaped the biblical Flood. The darkly fated Eabha drowned after she fell asleep on a beach at Drumcliffe Bay.
Approached by a narrow straight bog road like a causeway, the location of our intended new home in the townland of Ballyconnell, in the parish of Maugherow, felt like it belonged to an island: the stark intensity of the light, the wind-raked bleached out colours, the colossal dome of sky and existentially spare horizon. The Planter’s beech of Dromahair was here replaced by the native ‘sceach’: the lone hawthorn bush, stunted and leaf-deprived, its tortured branches leaning away from the prevailing wind. The figure of the upright, sober-suited, comfortably situated merchant replaced by the coatless drunk, wandering the roads in hard, unforgiving sea-light; or in theatrical terms, if Dromahair was Chekhovian, Maugherow was pure Beckett.
I’m exaggerating the contrasts perhaps. But from the first, as the digger broke ground to begin work on the foundations, I noticed how the sudden weather-fronts that swept in from the sea divided in two as the rainclouds banked up against Benbulbin to the north and Ballisodare Bay to the south, to leave Ballyconnell in sunshine. So while it bucketed inland, here it was dry.
The footings were barely in place on the headland when a woman said to me – ‘So you’re building a house where that village disappeared.’
‘What village?’ I asked, alarmed by a further mention of mysteriously animated cataracts of sand.
Turning to a first-hand account in retired County Librarian John C. McTernan’s two-volume history, In Sligo Long Ago, a correspondent in an 1841 edition of the Sligo Champion relates how ‘800 rich and fertile acres’ of the Lissadell estate had become nothing more than a sandbank in consequence of the western winds which drifted the sands to such a height that ‘most of the miserable occupiers can only enter their cheerless dwellings by the chimneys’.
On the Nicholson and Walker estates in the parish of Killaspugbrone at Strandhill, where today the coastguard helicopter operates from the tiny regional airport, this bizarre state of flux and coastal reconfiguration resulted in over 400 acres being inundated by the blowing sands and the tenant farmers in the area were forced to retreat to higher ground on Knocknarea.
More worryingly, one of the areas worst hit by the blowing sands was Ballintemple, a townland that slopes down to the sea between Raghly Harbour and the neighbouring hill at Knocklane. Lewis’s Topographical Dictionary from 1837 tells how the blowing sands drifted northwards from what had been a village on Knocklane to cover an area of roughly four square miles, the sands having ‘already covered a great tract of good land and about one hundred and fifty cabins …’ It wasn’t exactly where the block-work had started on our one-and-a-half storey house, but close enough to make me read on.
With the blowing sands on the move at Streedagh and Mullaghmore, the chief landholder in the district, Lord Palmerston, began an experimental sewing of a hardy grass (arundo arenaria) simply called ‘bent’. Trial and error proved that when planted in staggered rows the bent trapped the sand and arrested the blowing movement and stabilised the dunes. By 1881, further planting of bent by neighbouring landlords such as Samuel Barrett at Cullenamore, Messrs Barber and Yeats at Lower Rosses, and the Gore-Booths at Drumcliffe, meant that the Times correspondent Thomas C. Foster, as he progressed across the sloblands at Johnsport towards Knocklane, could report that ‘there are now no sands to be seen but the richest grass, with herds of cattle and sheep grazing …’, the bent having not only ‘checked but completely reversed the progress of the sands.’
This planting of the bent also explained what I saw as a local idiosyncrasy: naming a perfectly straight road running from Ballintemple to Raghly Harbour the ‘Bent Road’. It was the road used by the carters that transported the bent for planting: a piece of information winkled from local fisherman Mickey McLoughlin who said, ‘You should ask my father-in-law about the bent. He was probably there at the setting of it.’
This personal rediscovery of the village that disappeared under today’s undulating grassy sand dunes made me aware how relocation to the coast would require a complete overhaul of my sense of place. Not least the fact that the bracing, tangy smell I’d always thought of as the ocean’s healthy ‘ozone-smell’ was nothing of the sort. What gave the sea its distinctive bouquet was a chemical called dimethyl sulphide produced by the bacteria in sea organisms. Ozone, as found in the upper reaches of the earth’s atmosphere, was a compound of oxygen toxic to human life.
As the peaked rafters of the house were made ready for slating, I began to develop a keener ear for the modulated sounds of the sea depending on whether the tide was on the way in or out. The Sligo Harbour Tide Table published the heights and times of low and high water over the course of the year, but that flimsy booklet gave no sense of the scale and importance of this elemental drama that unfolded along the twice-washed tidal shoreline: a tireless flux of obliteration and accumulation, endurance and collapse, concealment and exposure.
On other days the deep mindful breathing sounds of the incoming and retreating tides were replaced by the titanic, storm-driven roar of boundless seawater slamming into the immoveable breakwater reef and limestone shelved inlets to send colossal plumes of white sea-spray into the air, a sight to rival Old Faithful in Yellowstone Park as the entire headland vibrated under this rhythmic grinding onslaught.
An unnerving truth began to dawn on me that life close to the sea is an act of faith. You have to believe the waves will come thus far and no further. That the sea will contract or swell to its neap or spring tide limits and may encroach upon the land during especially severe weather, but it will not unaccountably roll up to your door or rise to the level of the chimney pots. In short, you have to cling to the belief that an unenforceable agreement will never get broken.
Seasoned foragers of the foreshore will of course tell you to ‘never turn your back on the tide.’ And others will go so far as to say ‘never turn your back on the sea’, full stop. And on days when there is a massive sea-swell the hollows in the deep cold roiling Atlantic saltwater between the wave peaks and wave troughs can make the stomach lurch regardless of how sure-footed you feel on dry land. Every crashing breaker sends another soaring curtain of white spume skywards, prompting the plasterers working on the house to wonder, not altogether jokingly, if we ought to keep life jackets handy in the upstairs bedrooms.
Some of the most spectacular waves occur after a storm out at sea when conditions inland are relatively calm. And one evening, as I walked the cliffs wondering where the coastal path I’d discovered might lead, I got a terse reminder that only inlanders make the mistake of romanticising a coastal community’s relationship with the harsh, unforgiving and treacherous nature of the sea.
This particular evening the sea was in one of its sweeter moods, hushed and dead-calm; the western horizon a restful shade of deckchair pink and maritime-grey. Yet I found the fisherman son of Beezie McGowan hauling his boat ashore and, I noted, he was not just dragging it up the shingle bank above the tideline, he wanted it safely away from the shore. As an inlander, when I looked out to sea, I said, I could spot nothing to suggest severe weather on the way. And hoping to be initiated into one of the more arcane hand-me-down secrets of fisherfolk’s coastal weather lore I asked how did he know there was a storm coming?
‘www.atlanticwavewatch.com,’ he said.
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The very rawness of the coast seems to invite artists to give life on the edge a go. And the creative clustering here had already earned this part of north Sligo the nickname ‘Ballyconnell 4’; it was also known, less charitably, as ‘Cape Paranoia’. Dermot Healy and Leland Bardwell had an established presence. But at the self-build expos and showcases where I found myself bamboozled by advocates for eco-friendly house construction from bales of straw with a mud and lime-wash render, and equally zealous champions of timber-frame construction, nothing contemporary written by my habituated near-hand colleagues influenced my thinking as deeply as a book read in childhood.
Conscious of the ferocious squalls, the driving rain, the hurricane force storms huffing and puffing against the house taking shape on the headland, I recalled the story of the Three Little Pigs, and the wisdom of the little pig who chose to build a house of brick, an object lesson in the security afforded by solid masonry.
That said, when it came to energy conservation, I wanted the build to be so well insulated that if a mouse farted behind a skirting board it would bring the air temperature in the house up by two degrees. Yet with any deviation from methods and materials used since God knows when, work on the house stopped and the builders stood perplexed and stymied. If it weren’t for the Polish, Latvians and Estonians I could expect little more than a pitying shake of the head from the Irish construction workers at the waywardness and impossibility of building anything as exotic as a curved wall. I never knew so many decisions had to be made before a decision could be made.
With the passage of time an alien lingo began to spew from my mouth: footings, damp course, radon barrier, vapour membrane, heat exchanger, geothermal and ground source heat pump, wood pellet boiler, solar and photo-electric panels. To avoid being ignored in the builders’ providers, I had to assume the stance of a man who knew stuff about things.
The bustle and commerce in these crowded yards, crammed with hardware shipped from China, resembled the great fair days of the past. Only it was bagged cement, Wavin pipes, rolls of insulation, and sheets of plasterboard stacked in trailers, not heifers and bullocks. And instead of farmers slapping hands to seal a bargain, vaguely persecuted counter-staff stood over tills coughing up sheaves of dockets in triplicate, marked unpaid and shoved into box-files and ledgers – the whole system a web of extended credit and VAT rebates.
Across the country young tradespeople had the status of superstars. They were in such urgent demand from Rathlin to Ringaskiddy they could take or leave any job and ask practically any price. Racing off in modified cars early on Fridays the roofers, plasterers, plumbers, electricians and blocklayers lay down their tool-belts and buckled up their seat-belts for rip-roaring weekends burning doughnuts into the crossroads of home towns, blowing money even faster in the bars and nightclubs than it was earned on site. Every filling station, Centra, Spar, Gala, Londis and SuperValu supermarket sported a breakfast counter and coffee machine. Mondays began late, if at all, hungover and unsteady of nerve: a nation of dashboard diners in white vans, with the breakfast roll in a squishy paper bag, the red-top, and the miracle cure bottle of Lucozade Sport.
In the wider world, the banks and mortgage brokers were frantically touting buy-to-let, one hundred percent loan schemes – unsecured and astronomically high loans with correspondingly vast monthly repayments supposedly covered by the windfall potential of the rental income. ‘It’s a win-win situation,’ they said, ‘where the house washes its own face.’ But it was apparent that the cranes were disappearing from the Dublin skyline. There was a slump coming, even if the banks were saying they were fully funded and the politicians promised a ‘soft landing’.
On the road to Dublin to visit IKEA and an Ideal Homes expo for ideas on kitchens and interiors, I spotted a housing estate going up in a field better suited to homing Whooper swans. The attempt to construct so-called floating foundations had resulted in a gigantic sump in the centre of the development – cement trucks were queuing up to empty vast amounts of liquid concrete into the gaping maw. I looked at the fortune in resources being poured into a near bottomless wet hole in a swamp, and with sickening clarity grasped the direction in which Ireland’s building boom was headed. The historic sands were shifting again under my very feet, and too late I understood the mother of all shit-storms was coming and we were all wearing white suits.
*
The 100th anniversary commemorations of the 1916 Rising have come and gone, and eight years have passed since we completed the build and moved to the coast. We have weathered through the boom and the bust, the bouncing along the bottom, the promise of ‘green shoots’, the premature call to keep the Hiberno-centric recovery going, the heartening signs of public protest and a fight back against the ruthless, near total privatisation of the public sphere in the guise of austerity economics. Like learning to dance at Lanigan’s Ball, we have seen the developers step out and NAMA step in, NAMA step out and the developers step in again.
It is by no means easy in our changed circumstances to keep from buckling under the debt we have heaped on ourselves. But that said, I am more conscious than ever of how we habitually think of the environment, the built environment and the natural environment in terms of conservation, or climate change, or economic outlook, and fail to grasp how the spaces we occupy over the course of our day – the places where we work, live, eat, sleep, exercise, engage with our families, expend our leisure time, holiday and worship, the stations of our lives – actually generate unique personal environments: self-sustaining habitats that form our individual climate of being.
Ever since I financed my time in art college through a commission from the murals in schools scheme, I have earned my living as a practitioner in one field of the arts or another. I have been a part-time art teacher, written plays and performed on stage, worked on the Hazelwood Sculpture trail, won a Francis McManus Radio short story award, published novels and a memoir, edited the literary journal Force 10, written a libretto for a short contemporary opera, and co-written the screenplay for a feature film that earned an IFTA best actress nomination. The challenge of building a home on the Atlantic coast, along with the creation of a garden capable of withstanding the most barbaric weather off the sea, slotted naturally into this pattern of a life dedicated to creative endeavour. It has been one of the most rewarding projects I have ever undertaken, the challenge being to enclose a space never enclosed before. Yes, the project took over my life. But it was essentially another phase in an ongoing creative continuum.
The ocean is so vast it has often been taken as a metaphor for the potential of the individual’s destiny, and life here on the coast as we settle into our new home, and a new climate of being, has prompted a rich appreciation of the benefits of change and of personal reinvention. After fourteen years inland within earshot of a purling river and its salmon-spawning beds, it is a welcome and energising opportunity to adapt to the demands and rewards of life where the land ends and the Atlantic begins.
One day we are radiance-drenched, the piercing blue skies populated by pell-mell lark song and Philip Larkin’s ‘high-builded cloud moving at summer’s pace’: a fresh lobster and crab-landing day. The next day we can hardly stand upright in the eyeball-bruising brunt of a caustic hurricane-force sea-blown gale that whitens the windowpanes with salt. Under restored blue skies the turbulent sea continues for days to boom and smash into the fossil-stamped limestone cliffs off the Serpent Rock; or the heaped-up rounded stones of the shingle-banks crack and roll like bones in a giant ossuary under the slap and backwash of an immense Atlantic fetch; or the boundaries between the land, the sea and the sky disappear altogether, with only the impossibly slender legs of the seabirds wading an otherworldly tidal margin for demarcation. Life inclines to the spectacular here in this ‘theatre of the void’ which nourishes contemplation, but also makes one realise you can either shrink or grow before the sea.