The Lyric Feature returns to the airwaves on the 5th of October and the first three progammes have a decidedly Midwestern edge to them.
First up, the poet Moya Cannon takes us to A Corner of the Burren (5th October) to a place she discovered through her reading of Tim Robinson's maps, the triangle formed by Corcomroe Abbey, St. Colman's Well, Ought-mama and the 'Seven Churches’. After that Connie Gets a Rewrite (12th October) brings us to Limerick City where historian Sharon Slater tells the story of Constance "Connie" Smith, a star who burned brightly, but all to briefly, during the golden age of Hollywood cinema and is now set to get an exultant third act with a new immersive show by Limerick playwrights Ann Blake and Joanne Ryan.
Then there's The Musician that is Me (12th of October), which celebrates the influence of the US-born composer Jane O’Leary who settled in Galway some fifty years ago and has been the driving force behind contemporary music in the West of Ireland since then. In recognition of her contribution to Irish music, Jane is a recipient of a lifetime achievement award from the National Concert Hall this October.
Below, Moya Cannon tells us how she discovered a corner of the Burren that has been a source of inspiration for poetry, for many years...
Look well now, can you see the big ash-tree that’s above it?
- W.B. Yeats, ‘The Cat and the Moon’
This programme visits the Valley of Oughtmama, a corner of the Burren to which I was first introduced many years ago by Tim Robinson’s map. It is a place which has enchanted me since. Tim has described the limestone of the Aran Islands and the Burren as ‘a most tender and memorious stone’ and indeed the Burren seems to forget nothing. Its fossils give us tangible evidence of the marine life of a tropical sea south of the equator when the limestone was laid down three hundred million years ago. In this beautiful valley, located on the north-eastern edge of the Burren, we have consid-erable archaeological evidence of human habitation from the neolithic period, the bronze age, the early Christian and the mediaeval periods.
The limestone karst is, of course, famed for its flora, combining both arctic/alpine flora and mediterranean species. To view this valley through several different lenses I have interviewed the Burren enthusiast, Mary Angela Keane, who, as a hotelier in Lisdoonvarna, met many eminent naturalists, including her great friend, Tim Robinson; the botanist, Cilian Roden, who lives on the edge of the Burren; the Argentinian art historian, Silvina Martin, UCD, whose PhD focuses on this area; Brendan Dunford of Burrenbeo who has done pioneering work in studying the history of farming in the Burren and in supporting farmers whose traditional rotational grazing methods safeguard the very special flora of this area, and Michael John Connolly, who has spent his life farming part of the valley of Oughtmama, is familiar with every rock, bush and hollow of it and who recalls for us the traditional pattern at St Colman’s Well.
The pilgrimage to the well may have been a survival from pre-Christian times. More concrete evidence of pre-Christian human presence in this area is a cluster of monuments on the top of Turlough Hill, which overlooks the valley. These include a large neolithic burial cairn, surrounded by more than one hundred and fifty bronze-age hut sites, and, nearby, a huge, mysterious bronze age hilltop enclosure. The enclosure’s many entrances suggest that it was not built for defence and its situation at the edge of the Burren and the magnificent views from it suggest that it may have been a meeting place for many tribes. Below Turlough Hill is the hollow at the end of the valley in which are nestled ‘The Seven Churches’. Substantial ruins of three tenth, eleventh or twelfth century churches, built on the site of St. Colman’s sixth century hermitage, survive among brambles, nettles and hedges. St. Colman’s Well, dramatically overhung by an ash tree and a thorn tree, is situated a little further up the valley. It is encircled by a drystone wall and neat, foot-polished, stone steps lead down into it. From a spring beside it, Sruthan na Naomh, the Saints’ Stream, runs down towards the ecclesiastical settlement. A kilometre and a half to the north soar the high walls of the ruined twelfth century Cistercian abbey of Corcomroe, known originally as 'Sancta Maria de Petra Fertili’, ’St Mary of the Fertile Rock’ where W.B. Yeats set one of his plays, ‘The Dreaming of the Bones’.
My first encounter with the Burren was in a children’s book, one of the Patricia Lynch books which my mother encouraged us to read. In the story, the child protagonists travelled through a country which sounded perfectly magical, a country of white hills. I was twenty-two and working in Inis Oirr, the smallest of the Aran Islands, before I first saw that magical country and then it was from a distance. On a sunny, blustery day, across the sea to the east from Inis Oirr, there was often an exhilarating dappling of dark grey on bright grey, as shadows of clouds rushed across the rounded westernmost hills of the Burren. So, although I had seen the Burren from across the sound, had heard something of its folklore and had read a little about its unique flora, I did not set foot on its hills until 1984, shortly after I had come to live in Galway city. In Inis Oirr I had come across Tim Robinson’s map of the Aran Islands. His map of the Burren had now been published. One Saturday, a year or so after my arrival, I hitch-hiked down to an area which looked interesting, the triangle formed by Corcomroe abbey, St. Colman’s Well, Oughtmama, and the neighbouring ‘Seven Churches’. That was over forty years ago and I have been returning to it since, as it continues to give and give. Several of the poems in my first collection ‘Oar’ were set there as are a number from my most recent book.
Holy Well
Water returns, hard and bright,
out of the faulted hills.
Rain that flowed
down through the limestone’s pores
until dark streams hit bedrock
now finds a way back,
past the roots of the ash,
to a hillside pen
of stones and statues.
Images of old fertilities
testify to nothing more, perhaps,
than the necessary miracle
of water trapped and stored
in a valley where water is fugitive.
A chipped and tilted Mary
grows green among rags and sticks.
Her trade dwindles —
bad chests, rheumatic pains,
the supplications, mostly,
and the confidences of old age.
Yet sometimes, swimming out in waters
that were blessed in the hill’s labyrinthine heart,
the eel flashes past.
(From the collection 'Oar', published in 1990 by Carcanet)
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