Capturing the coastline

Life on the edge


Áine Ryan

“IT looks for all the world like a ship rising out of the ocean – one of the many fantastical geomorphological creations cut from the cliffs of north Mayo. Located just below Benwee Head (272m/892ft), this particular prow of exposed bedrock tells a story of tectonic tumult, long before the inner border of the Atlantic rim was carpeted in blanket bog.”
Journalist and writer Lorna Siggins paints a dramatic word-picture about one of the many spectacular vistas along the Co Mayo coastline in Valerie O’Sullivan’s new photographic book, ‘Ireland’s Atlantic Shore: People and Places from Mizen to Malin’.
In her essay, ‘Fishers of Men – Stephen McHale’, Siggins writes: “McHale works from the tiny Belderrig harbour – the ‘big red mouth’ or Béal Deirg – to the west of the Céide Fields. The horseshoe shaped inlet was sculpted by the relentless erosion of wind and waves, and there was a time not so many generations back when the sea took a constant toll, even as hide currachs were replaced by canvas cloth hulls.”  This vignette encapsulates the raw dynamism between the ocean and the communities and individuals who have eked out livelihoods on the Atlantic coastline’s rocky outcrops and shingled shores for thousands of years.

Maritime web
IN this beautifully presented book, O’Sullivan’s photographs reveal ‘the intriguing convergence of land and sea and the diversity of its people’. O’Sullivan seamlessly brings us on a voyage from a distant time when hermit monks and fortress dwellers lived in the many forbidden rocks across this country’s seven Atlantic hemmed counties to such contemporary dwellers as Maureen Sweeney, former postmistress at Blacksod Post Office and her son Vincent, the present lighthouse keeper at Blacksod; Dominick Keogh, a Kilmovee stonemason; Gerard Murphy, Returning Officer on Dursey Island; and ‘Johnaí Dubh’ Clochartaigh from Connemara, a professional seaweed harvester.
Clochartaigh’s only equipment is his knife and pitchfork, as well as ropes and, of course, his currach tied to the pier. He explains, in another piece by Lorna Siggins: “I start with the low tide, and I don’t stop till the sea is behind me.’ During the six-hour cycle he makes several climíní, which are towed by the boat ashore and later collected for the nearby factory, Arramara Teo Cill ChiarΡin.
This seaweed is then exported to far-flung places that Mr Clochartaigh would never dream of visiting. Interestingly, there are 501 different species of seaweed along the 4,900 mile coastline, 19 of which have commercial use and 16 of which are exploited for such alginates as gelling agents for ice-cream and dental impressions.
Up the coast, in Enniscrone, Co Sligo, the versatile sea vegetable is used at Kilcullen’s Edwardian Seaweed Baths. There Christine Kilcullen adds freshly cut seaweed to a bath of hot, steamy Atlantic seawater. With its high mineral and vitamin content, the amber iodine releases rich healing powers and gives relief from rheumatism and arthritis.

Land and sea
WITH her sensitive lens, photographer Valerie O’Sullivan, brings a new angle to the question asked by poet Seamus Heaney in ‘Lovers on Aran’. “Did sea define the land or land the sea?”  In this book her focus may be often panoramic but the effect is an intimate one. The blurb on the flyleaf says: “Through her lens, Ireland is a place of shared moments, optimism and the otherworldly beauty that people have flocked here to discover over the years.”
This is an Ireland that over the millennia was a sea highway for many waves of spirituality and mysticism. Writing of the Skellig Islands, Mark Patrick Hederman, the Abbott of Glenstal, quotes Psalm 61: “On a rock too high for me to reach’.
“These Skelligs Islands are places where Celtic spirituality becomes most manifest, bare rocks where so many have communicated with God…. You land on the great Skellig in a cove facing east where a monastery was in existence, 600ft above sea level, from the sixth century. The island is only about four acres in all but these make up such varieties and extravagances of shape and contrast that they assume archetypal proportions: a mirror of the Celtic psyche measuring contortions of extremism within a tiny span.”

‘Ireland’s Atlantic Shore: People and Places from Mizen to Malin’, by Valerie O’Sullivan, is published by Collins Press. Price €24.99.