The Stones of Connemara

“Look out over this landscape,” commands Lolly. “As far as your eye can see. Imagine this place teeming with people. Cows and sheep. Pubs, churches, farms, stone cottages. Everywhere you look, there is activity, industry, life. It is one of the most densely populated places in Ireland.”

I look dutifully over the fields of Connemara, in western County Galway. Because by this, day 10 of our tour, I do anything Lolly tells me to. There is a vast sweep of emerald green sloping from the mountains down to the sea. The odd cow ambles about. But the most striking thing about this landscape is how empty it is. The only feature, besides the velvet green, are the walls --- crumbling stone walls, two-to-three feet high, crisscrossing the land in a huge web, intersecting often, forming squares that measure what --- a half acre each, maybe?

These were the crofts of 19th century Ireland, Lolly explains; small plots of land on which tenant farmers eked out an existence. It was a hard life. The crofters had their square of land, their cottage, their large families of children (who mostly didn’t make it to adulthood), perhaps a cow; maybe a couple of sheep. One more thing they had: English landlords who, through careless neglect or unspeakable greed or perhaps some of both, killed them by the millions.

Lolly is a force of nature. An historian, BBC television personality, and fierce promoter of all things Irish, she has guided us through a rich mélange of history, art, geography, literature, politics, music, food, industry and economics. We have visited museums and monasteries, castles and craigs, vibrant cities and sleepy villages. Lolly taught us the fine art of drafting Guinness and sipping Irish whiskey --- usually in a pub entertained by locals who all seem to play some instrument and gather to jam each night.

We’ve seen artists cut crystal and dogs herd sheep. Once, when a cruise ship clogged our entrance to Dingle, Lolly pulled off a spontaneous Irish coffee stop at the South Pole Inn, a pub up the road that honors a native son who explored the Antarctic with Shackleton. The day of Sinead O’Connor’s funeral, the coach’s soundtrack was a soulful memorial to the singer, who is deeply grieved by her country men and women.

An endless and irrepressible font of bawdy jokes, soaring poetry, and cringe-worthy limericks (we are all compelled to participate in a contest, and judged for both our literary effort and our dramatic delivery) Lolly tells story after story ---long, legendary and quintessentially Irish --- meaning, she says “They take forever to tell, and everybody dies. That’s the way we like ‘em.”

Lolly is “great craic”— Irish for great fun. She has waited for the wild, windswept western coast to tell this particular story.

In 1840, life in agrarian western Ireland was already in distress. The land was rich enough. But the landholdings were small, not enough to sustain a soaring population. Taxes owed the British, payable in the form of crops, were crushing, and the farmers became ever more dependent on the nutrient-rich potato. When families were large, and crofts were small, a half-acre of potatoes could feed a family for a year.

Then one day, the farmers started pulling up potatoes covered with a black rot. Within a year, the crop failure was total, and people started dying by the thousands. Others, with little choice, opted to take their chances on the “coffin ships” leaving from Galway and Cork and Dublin—so named because half the passengers died before reaching the new world. In less than seven years, Ireland lost 20 percent of its population—over a million to starvation and over a million to emigration.

I always wondered, vaguely, why a country would allow itself to be so dependent on one crop. One explanation is the deadly dynamic between the small farm size and the number of mouths to feed.

But Lolly has another explanation, delivered with fire. “The Irish farmers,” she says, “successfully raised beef, chickens, cows, grain and other crops, thank you very much. But they didn’t get to keep them. The English took everything. The great famine was not a failure of the potato crop,” she says, steel in her voice. “It was a failure of the English.”

Two days later, we find ourselves at Doo Lough, “Black Lake”, in County Mayo, tracing the steps of the Irish Trail

of Tears. On a freezing night in March of 1849, a caravan of starving men, women and children set out on foot from their village at Louisburgh to present themselves for “inspection” – a requirement imposed by the English for remaining on the relief rolls. The caravan made it to Delphi Lodge, 15 miles away, where the English were staying. But for reasons unclear, the English wouldn’t meet and the inspection didn’t happen. On the return trip, many of the Irish men, women and children died of starvation and exposure. Most accounts put the number somewhere above 20.

There’s a poignant footnote to this story. Hearing of the plight of the Irish farmers, the American Choctaw Indians, who had endured their own Trail of Tears 14 years before, raised about $170—which they didn’t have and couldn’t afford --- and sent it to County Mayo. There has been an unlikely bond ever since between this native American tribe and the farmers of Ireland. Two years ago, when the Choctaw reservation was suffering greatly from Covid, County Mayo sent money.

As our coach heads north toward our next stop on Clew Bay, I look over this land, so beautiful, so bloody. I know you can’t visit a place for two weeks and characterize it. But the paradoxes here hit me. This empty land; the ghostly stones the only reminder of a vibrant past. For a thousand years, these people have suffered warring kings, conquering invaders, English oppression, civil war and one failed rebellion after another—a seemingly endless quest to determine what their own lives should be. The Troubles—in which so much blood was spilled over religion and politics—were recent enough that most of us can remember. Many Irish people today mourn a loved one killed in the Troubles.

And yet, the Irish people are outgoing, friendly, and gregarious. They love to talk, laugh, drink, sing, play music, tell stories. Their psyche seems soulful, creative, fun-loving—but also dark and fatalistic; like they expect the world to turn on them.

They seem to genuinely like Americans, and want to spend time with us. Asked where I am from by one man walking his dog on the streets of Kinsale,

I cop to being from San Francisco. San Francisco!, he cries, delighted. We love you Yanks! It’s the English we hate! He launches into informed questions about our life, our society, our culture. I am ashamed I know so little about his.

I come away not sure what to make of this land that so defies categorization. And I think about that Proust quote. This is why we travel. Not to see new things, but to grow new eyes.