Carrying the Songs
The last time I was in Conamara was February 2020, just as the first rumours of Covid began to circulate. Then, I was beginning a project, Afloat, that has taken far longer than expected, because of two years when the sea journeys it involved would have been impossible or unethical. After finally finishing the travel for all but one of the book’s other chapters, I made it back to the West of Ireland last week & set out to finish what was started three years ago. In 2020, I’d been talking to boatbuilders & seafarers, as well as the great chroniclers of Conamara life, Tim & Máiréad Robinson, who’d recently left Ireland for London. I’d done some stormy journeys, including a paddle through South Conamara, ending at Golam Head. This was the exposed sea route known as “the crooked way” that local boats were forced to undertake after the 1960s. This was because a politician, who believed that the age of the lorry had superceded the age of boats, decided not to replace a moving bridge that had, since the 1890s, given safe passage through causeways between the islands.
Here's a slightly surreal photo of the moment when, clinging to the sharp black rock of Leitir Mealláin, I pushed off through an oceanic battering to reach Golam Head. One local seafarer, in noting the blow the closing of the causeways to sea travel had dealt to local communities, described this spot as feeling “like Cape Horn” to past islanders…
During that stay I’d fixed on the boat I wanted to write about – an almost-forgotten vessel that’s the smallest of the Galway Hooker class, as well as being the only hooker to be rowed rather than sailed. It was simply known as the bád iomartha (rowed boat) & used only here. I spent some time in workshops helping out on the building of the closest thing to that boat today (a púcán - essentially a bád iomartha till mast & weather boards are added), & I travelled Conamara looking for every unseaworthy example of this boat I could find on the shoreline…
This was an unusual rowing boat. It was necessary in the South Conamara islands because the rocky shores would shred traditional canvas boats in moments. But it was also far more capacious than them. With the same elegant tumblehome (the curve inwards at the top of the boat’s sides) as the larger Galway hookers, this boat & its two rowers could carry 3 tonnes. Where currach rowers used two small oars each, each person in a bád iomartha carried one eighteen-foot beast of an oar. Yet they ran straight, true & fast, especially in bad weather. In the only record I’ve found of currachs & báid iomartha competing against each other in a race (in 1938), it was a bád iomartha that triumphed.
Life in this area was dependent on this boat. It often carried peat, food, or seaweed, but was most often the ferry boat & social boat of the small islands, linking communities across hundreds of complex miles of ragged shore. These roles make it surprising to me that the simple fact the bád iomartha ever existed is coming so close to being forgotten. All the other classes of the region’s boats have had a huge revival as leisure craft since the 1970s, leaving just this vessel (too heavy & challenging to row to be included in today’s races) to fall through the gaps. Between 1978 and the 1990s, most were sawn in half, extended, & given masts to become one of the two smallest classes of sailing hooker. These things make this boat, I think, an excellent case study for thinking through the dynamics of memory & forgetting, celebration & loss, revival & decline.
Since 2020, the majority of the people I was collaborating with have sadly passed away, most from Covid, leaving the scene of Conamara boatbuilding, sailing, & history-writing sadly depleted. This month, however, I was able to meet up with some of those responsible for its continued resilience, including Pádraig O Sabhain (whose forthcoming book on the boats, in the Irish language, will pay fitting tribute to the boat builders & seafarers who have passed) Joe Reaney, builder of so many of the hookers currently on the water, & John Beag Ó Flatharta, singer & seafarer extraordinaire. The celebration of sailing hookers & currachs by countless artists & poets keeps them in the cultural spotlight, making certain that the boats which once carried the turf still carry the songs & stories of the region. Here’s ‘Turf Boats’ (1990), by Moya Cannon:
Black hooker at anchor
shining sea cattle;
rough trees for masts
rooted in salt water
built not for slaughter
but for life-giving traffic.
Wide ribs of oak,
a human heart filled you
as you sailed out of Carna.
You came into Kilronan,
two sods went flying,
you carried fire to the islands,
lime to Connemara.
Hollow boats at the Claddagh,
hearts that beat in you
lie in granite-walled graveyards
from Leitirmullen to Barna,
finished with hardship,
the unloading of crago,
the moody Atlantic
that entered the marrow,
and bright days off Ceann Boirne,
when wind struck the brown sails
and Ithaca was Carna.
I carried Moya Cannon’s beautiful new Collected Poems with me everywhere I went on this trip & found the places I visited & the boats I saw running through its pages.
Today, the hookers are still owned by individual families, but the rising costs of keeping them (now 5,000 euros just to paint a boat, 9,000 for new sails) mean this is no longer sustainable without assistance. There are many reasons (including possibilities for future ecologically aware trade, travel & tourism) why these irreplaceable vessels, not to mention the skills to use them, deserve our support. The same is true of many North Atlantic small boat traditions & the cultures built on them, as well as the small languages they existed within. But the Galway hookers & currachs that bring Conamara communities together in saints’ days & regattas today are unusually close to the older traditions that birthed the current movements.
This 2023 visit was complicated by having my van, all my camera gear & laptop stolen three weeks ago, but thanks to a few wonderful people’s generosity, I was able to meet up with everyone I wanted to, find places to stay, & take a few photos (without my van, I just couldn’t take my sea kayak). The trip began by taking part in one of the great Atlantic pilgrimages. I headed out to Oilean MhicDara (St MacDara’s Island), where on 16 July every year, the communities of Iorras Aithneach (the Stormy Promontory) gather to celebrate their boats & give thanks for a year’s safety at sea. The winds this year were fierce, which meant mass was held on the mainland instead of at the Saint’s chapel, but I found a boat to take me out & join the pilgrims & picnic-ers.
The most recent anthropological article on this event paints it as a sadly diminished affair, saying that even the organisers “do not seem to be burdened with much factual knowledge” about the saint or the island. This wasn’t my experience at all. Everyone I spoke to was deeply invested in one or another aspect of the region’s life – whether language, boats, community, history, or faith – & being at this event was for most an expression of that investment. Even in this smaller, weather-hit, form (I’d guess there were around a hundred people who made it to the island, rather than the five hundred in other years), I’d never before seen so many traditional boats gathered in one place. Soaked through from the rough crossing, but in a sudden blaze of sunshine, the time on the island was everything I’d hoped it’d be & more.
The visit ended with the Roundstone Regatta a week later. In past years, this would have seen at least half a dozen full size hookers on the water, but most, after the pandemic, are laid up onshore. Nevertheless, watching two of the full size boats (the bád mór), race against several smaller boats (the leath bháid & the gleoiteog), was like seeing the old seaways come alive. The elegance & agility of these craft - especially as they lean towards the waves in tight turns - seems extremely improbable from vessels that are also so practical. That so many people involved, especially in the currach races, were under the age of 25 was also excellent to see.
These photos show the boats arriving in the rain & calm, the first races setting off through the mist, & the weather gradually improving for both sailing & spectating. A couple of photos of preparations for the races are followed by the bád mór An Tonai speeding into Roundstone to take the crown…
As well as writing the Irish chapter of the book while travelling Connemara, I wrote the Lewis chapter over three intense writing days. This is built on five months in the island between January & May last year, exploring places from Ness to Scarp & the boat traditions that made them.
Writing the two chapters in conjunction was a more emotional experience than I’d expected. The life of the traditional boats of Lewis, most famously the Sgoth Niseach (a sail boat that began its history as a rowed boat) is still more precarious than that of the Galway hooker, needing even more care & attention to keep these boats on the water. And there’s so much they stand for that we still need in our world (but that’s a story for another time).
The projects for the next few days are writing the wooden boats of Faroe & skinboats of Greenland, as well as continuing to try & find ways to express why the worldviews of past communities who used these small boats should matter in our present. But rarely have I felt quite so reluctant to head indoors, even for the pleasures of writing time, as after these days & nights on the rocky shores of Conamara, when seabirds & otters were everywhere, & currachs & hookers provided excellent reminders of the poet Norman MacCaig’s view that every time a boat sets out by oar or sail “there’s a meaning, a cargo of centuries…legends afloat”.
