Episode 4 Great Irish Journeys with Martha Kearney

Ireland's beauty has captivated artists and writers for centuries.

It's easy to see why.

I'm Martha Kearney

and I was born in Ireland, but I left when I was a small child.

So, in the course of this series,

I'm hoping to rediscover the land that

I once called home.

My guide is going to be a 19th century Irishman.

He was an artist and surveyor and he made it his life's work to

chronicle the country's landmarks and treasures.

His name was George Victor Du Noyer.

Du Noyer was part of a team which undertook a ground-breaking series

of surveys in Ireland,

mapping its landscape and its geology.

But Du Noyer was also an accomplished artist,

and he was inspired by all that he saw on his travels.

His work is like a memory map of the country as it once was.

Du Noyer spent 35 years travelling around Ireland.

He was drawn to the more remote parts, the islands and peninsulas.

As a surveyor, he went off the beaten track.

There he discovered a spiritual side to the country, a land of symbols,

and he brought them to our attention.

Many are still there, where he found them.

WB Yeats once wrote, "The water - the water of the seas,

"and of lakes and of mist and rain

"has all but made the Irish in its image."

Here on the Dingle Peninsula that couldn't be more true.

Looking at that awesome natural beauty, you can see just why

George Du Noyer decided to come here.

Through the course of this series I think I've come to understand him

pretty well. It was a curious,

restless intelligence he had, trying to find out more about the landscape

and the people of Ireland,

but it was also a solitary life and he seemed

especially drawn to areas like this, which were so sparsely populated.

When Du Noyer arrived here on the Dingle Peninsula

in the south-west of Ireland, he'd travelled to a part of the island

that even his fellow countrymen would have considered remote.

Over the course of his survey, he would discover

everything from apparently lost cities to spiritual havens,

but his primary purpose was to explore the otherworldly

geology of the landscape, and he had plenty to work with.

So tell me, is Dingle of particular interest to geologists?

Well, growing up in a place like this I couldn't but.

This is one of the most exciting places in the world to be

interested in geology, because it's all very visible

and just about everything you've ever heard of

in the making of the earth happened here and you can see it.

It was the meeting place between continents

and being on the edge...being on the edge always is interesting.

So no wonder Du Noyer wanted to come here

as part of his geological survey.

Exactly, and they were making great discoveries here. It was a source of

great argumentation among the great early geologists.

And then we've got this extraordinary formation here, haven't we?

Yeah, it's got a lovely local name, An Searrach.

Searrach, which means the neighing colt,

a young horse rearing out

and the little rock near it, which you only see part of,

is called the mathair, the mother,

and no wonder it attracted Du Noyer.

Much of this geological magic was formed by the erosive

effect of the waves that crashed against Dingle's shores.

When you're here you can't help

but be struck by the vastness of the Atlantic Ocean.

Everywhere you look, you see another stunning panorama.

Du Noyer surveyed this peninsula and left one of his beautiful

sketches to decorate his chart,

and no wonder - it's a fantastic panorama of the ocean.

Just over there is Dunmore Head, the most western point

of the Irish mainland,

and next to it, rising up right out of the ocean,

the desolate but rather magnificent Blasket Islands.

Even by the remote standards of this

part of the world, the Blasket Islands are isolated.

A three-mile boat journey across one of the most turbulent

stretches of water in Ireland.

A mystery surrounds the name Blasket.

Appropriately one suggestion is that

it comes from the Norse word "brasker",

meaning dangerous place.

Right up until 1953, the islands were home to a hardy group

of villagers in a hamlet on Great Blasket, the largest of the six.

Today, the place may be abandoned, but people are still

fascinated by stories of a life lived at Ireland's very edge.

They come, as I have today, to a heritage centre

on the mainland to discover more about island life.

Du Noyer visited the islands in 1856.

What would it have been like for him in the middle of the 19th century?

The Blaskets in the middle of the 19th century

would be a village that's just one village -

no name for the village - all thatched roofs,

little cabins, barely maybe one room cabins.

It's a wonderful feeling

when you go there, when see the ruins of the houses that

you can imagine how did these people survive?

But it's really the survival of the human spirit that

is, I suppose, really to be seen there, to be felt there.

The islanders lived a perilous existence,

often cut off from the mainland.

They survived by catching fish and sea birds

and eked out a living from the windswept fields.

But this wasn't just a geographical outpost, it was a cultural one.

In what must have felt like a village on the edge

of the world, an important part of Irish culture -

one increasingly under threat in more easily reached places - survived.

You reach a point where

havens of Irish-speaking communities

are few and far between, and so when all of these other

Irish communities on the mainland of Ireland were being eroded,

people began to look to places like the Blasket Islands

as a haven of all things Irish,

a last bastion of a Gaelic world which had vanished.

So that in many ways if the real Ireland

is seen to reside in the west,

then the real, real Ireland is even further away, at another remove, is

on the islands off of the west.

And from an Anglophone perspective you can see

a discourse of ethnography beginning to creep in,

in terms of a discourse of primitivism,

of traditional culture, of a pre-modern, pre-capitalist society

but from a Gaelic perspective,

or a different perspective, we see a very sophisticated culture,

but it's expressed in a different language.

And so you find from the late 19th century and into the 20th century,

Celtic scholars from around the world, when they're looking for a place

which exemplifies Ireland's Gaelic past, they go to the Blasket Islands.

It was their very isolation that helped the islanders

maintain their Gaelic culture and it wasn't just the language.

The islanders drew on an ancient tradition of storytelling

and folklore to produce a remarkable body of literature that would

captivate Ireland and the rest of the world.

Of all the books really, three books have become world famous

and they are The Islandman, written by a guy called Tomas O'Crohan,

Twenty Years A-Growing, written by a guy called Maurice O'Sullivan,

and a book simply called Peig, written by Peig Sayers,

and these were all written in Gaelic or Irish.

They were published in the late 1920s and early '30s and, subsequently,

they have been translated into different

languages all over the world, become classics.

Tell us what these books are about.

Mainly they are about living on the Blasket.

In the case of Tomas O'Crohan, he would have been the older

of the generation of people that we're talking about.

He arrived on to the scene,

just five years after the great Irish famine where one million

people would have died, so he would've heard horror stories about the famine.

The one Twenty Years A-Growing is a book about a young

person growing up on the island.

Many of the old sayings,

the traditional sayings in the Irish language,

he gets from his grandfather.

His grandfather acts as a conduit, right down through the ages.

The Irish language that you find at the end of the Dingle peninsula

is one of the most evocative styles

of the Irish language you'll find anywhere.

These people had it in buckets as it were,

and George Thomson, who is a Cambridge professor, who came

to be fascinated by the people on the Blaskets,

he compared it to the Homeric tradition of Greece, that this

was originally an oral tradition which remained oral

until Tomas O'Crohan in the 1930s began to write it down.

Here is a life that is now gone, sadly,

but it's a life that was lived by these people, in a very simple

but very evocative way

and that is really what makes the Blaskets what they are.

It was here in Dingle Harbour where that way of life finally came to an end.

Now, the catalyst was the very sad story of Sean O'Cearna, my own name.

He contracted meningitis but the storm at sea was so bad,

he couldn't get to the shore to get treatment.

The islanders asked to be evacuated

and on November 17th, they came up

the slipway and we have a wonderful photograph showing that very moment.

In the final chapter of his memoir, Tomas O'Crohan wrote,

"I've done my best to set down the character of the people about me,

"so that some record of us might live after us,

"for the like of us will never be again."

Splendidly isolated as the islands were, there were also

parts of the mainland that had remained untouched for centuries.

That didn't deter Victorian adventurer George Victor Du Noyer.

By going there,

he wandered as far from his remit as he did from the beaten track.

His day job was, of course, the geological survey, but in fact

he could go wherever his curiosity took him and that meant this rather

gifted amateur was able to make some unique archaeological discoveries.

It was while trekking up a remote hillside,

that Du Noyer stumbled upon a stone fort perched precariously on a cliff edge.

As his travels continued, he came across several more.

Speculation about the purpose of these curiosities

and who built them continues to this day.

But it was Du Noyer's discovery

which first put them on the archaeological map.

-Hi, there.

-Hi, there, Martha.

-Good to see you.

-We're braving the wind and the rain.

-I know.

It's a little bit challenging today.

But it's worth it for this view, isn't it?

I know, it's absolutely magnificent.

We're looking across over Dingle Bay. To our south

we have the Iveragh peninsula, which is known as the Ring of Kerry.

-And this is fantastic, isn't it?

-Yes, we have a wonderful view here of Dunbeg Promontory Fort.

And what kind of purpose would they serve?

Well, because they seem to have been built and used at different dates,

in different places, they may have served several different purposes

depending on who built them and when, so you have maybe dwelling places,

perhaps look-outs, because Dingle Bay

would have been very important as a way of getting around the place.

People travelled by boat,

travelling through the interior wouldn't have been so easy.

And how significant do you think Du Noyer's discovery of this place was?

Well, Du Noyer was the first person actually to describe this monument,

and we're so lucky that we have his drawings of it because quite

an amount of the whole area has collapsed into the sea...

You can see that there now, a huge landslide.

Yes, unfortunately, early this year, some more of it fell in again,

so without his drawings

we wouldn't have known that so much of it was once there.

And this wasn't the last of Du Noyer's ground-breaking finds.

Another, seen here on his illustrated map, was a collection

of beehive-shaped buildings scattered across the cliff side.

Never one to underplay his discoveries, he described them -

rather fancifully - as an ancient Irish city.

So what would you call these kind of constructions?

Well, these are basically house sites but in the Irish language

they're called "Clochan," cloch being one of the words for stone,

so I suppose the structure of stone.

And looking at the hillside there's certainly plenty of stones around

here, so I guess it's a very easy form of building material.

Absolutely. People built out of stone and the stone fortunately survives.

Other parts of the country, of course, there were houses built

in the early medieval period, but they might have been built out of timber, out of sods,

a combination of these things and, of course, they're going to just

slide back into the ground again eventually and leave no trace.

As so often in this part of the world, it's the remoteness

of the monuments that have ensured their survival.

Even today reaching them is tricky, as I'm discovering.

Mind your head.

And this was the hut that Du Noyer himself sketched.

Yes, we have a drawing of it here

and what we are looking at over here are these two doorways.

He's obviously rather proud that he discovered this so-called

-ancient Irish city.

-And he was the first to describe these particular monuments.

-Really?

If there were so many of these constructions,

why do you think that was?

It was only a particular type of person that could afford to

go wandering around the countryside

and this would've been very much an out of the way place back then.

The beehive dwellings may not have been a lost city as Du Noyer

suggested, but their sheer numbers and purpose still remain a mystery.

Why are there so many archaeological remains in the Dingle Peninsula?

The place is absolutely covered with them.

You can't really cross a field, practically, without

coming across some of them, and the interesting thing is that there's

no tradition about any of them, we don't know anything about them.

There's churches, there's beehive huts, stones decorated with crosses

and so on, but there's absolutely no tradition about who they are.

I think myself that the pilgrimage is what explains why there are so many

monuments on the Dingle Peninsula, and let me just say to you that

there is... The most famous travelogue of the earlier medieval period

is what's known as the Navigatio Brendani,

which is the tale of St Brendan who then goes up the coast of Ireland

and up to Scotland, the Faroes and Iceland and Greenland.

So, the whole tradition of the Navigatio Brendani

starts at the end of the Dingle Peninsula and I think myself that

what you have in the Navigatio Brendani

is really a reflection of the pilgrimage that would've been going on over 1,000 years ago,

and these were people who were coming on pilgrimage by boat.

They weren't coming by land, they were going by boat.

So, I think there was a whole maritime pilgrimage going up

the West Coast of Ireland and I've been slightly laughed at

for suggesting that these beehive huts were in fact Ireland's first

B&Bs because I think they were there really as pilgrim hostels.

The idea of the beehive lodgings as pilgrim stop-offs may never be proven,

but in other sites further north,

the influence of pilgrims is more clearly evident.

One of those locations is the Fermanagh Lakelands.

Strung across them are more than 150 islands.

In medieval times, pilgrims could row out to one of the many

monastic communities who lived there,

but others had beaten them to it.

It's an extraordinary thing that you look at the arrival of Christianity

to Ireland in the 5th century.

It arrived at a time when the Roman Empire was collapsing,

Christianity was going into decline elsewhere

and the Irish became the first people

in the Latin West who voluntarily embraced Christianity,

and it's very noticeable that many of the early ecclesiastical foundations

in Ireland were in the places that were least populous,

the places that were most remote, most extreme.

We have this idea - it's not just an Irish idea as well,

not just a European one, but a Christian idea -

of removing oneself from civilisation,

but it's also there in the Irish imagination,

in the Irish folk traditions with the idea of the other world.

The point at which that you find a space in a very particular geographical

location in Ireland, where you can make contact with the other world.

The monks left this part of the world a long time ago, but you can

still get glimpses of their way of life through the ruins of churches and monasteries,

and in fact that's what brought Du Noyer here,

his love of archaeology -

he regarded himself as a keen antiquarian -

and he made a discovery that

still draws thousands of visitors right up to the present day.

Du Noyer discovered a strangely carved figure

in an ancient graveyard which, despite being in a Christian location,

seems at first glance to be more closely linked to Pagan traditions.

-So, here it is.

-Right.

-That is such a kind of powerful, stark image, isn't it?

-It is.

It was Du Noyer who came in 1841

and he spoke to a local man

at the time who said that he remembered

a stone being inserted in between the two faces here

and he thought it was a cross, but it still leaves plenty of mystery

because these are very strange faces in a Christian context.

The early Christian artists, they weren't interested in portraying

figures as idealised men and women.

You know, they were looking in an abstract way, non-realistic,

so that creates a very powerful figure here.

Why do you think this part of the world has attracted religious

and spiritual communities?

When these monasteries were first founded, Fermanagh, in Ulster,

bordered the other side of the lake, was in Connacht.

It was easy to get the land donated in order to set the monasteries up,

because the chieftains quite liked to have monks

in a sort of buffer zone between

the warfare that would've existed between Ulster and Connacht.

Whatever the origin of the Boa Island statue, it has a unique,

almost primal power which is certainly enhanced by the beautiful

landscape of Lough Erne.

You can really see why this became a place of worship so long ago,

and White Island, where we're about to visit,

was once home to a community of monks.

The only residents now are a group of rather striking statues,

and I've been told that one of them

serves as a warning against lust and the temptation of women,

something that I'd have thought was quite easy to

avoid in such a remote place.

Du Noyer was certainly tempted - at least by the opportunity

of discovering another place unknown to his peers.

It was called White Island by the time he visited it,

but its original name is now lost along with any record

of the monks that lived on it.

All that's left are the ruins of an early Christian church

and the stone figures.

In Du Noyer's day, you could see much more detail on all the carving,

particularly in the capitals here

and, intriguingly, there was a statue to the side of the arch,

a very explicit statue of a rather grotesque woman figure,

but she's been moved indoors.

Eight statues keep watch from the walls of the ruined church -

a line-up of monks and other ecclesiastical figures

with one startling exception.

This statue here, this is the one that I really like,

is what's known as a Sheela na Gig and these are very explicit statues

of women of a female form that you do get in some church buildings.

and it always strikes me as extraordinary the way that you have these women

really displaying their genitalia in the middle of a church.

Well, people have left a number of pennies along here,

so I'm going to put mine on the statue of lust.

Removing oneself from temptation and spending time in prayer

is not something that's locked away in Ireland's past.

Du Noyer sketched an island that has been visited by thousands of pilgrims

from the beginnings of Christianity right up to the present day.

Station Island has inspired poets from WB Yeats to Seamus Heaney,

and it's certainly in the most extraordinary natural setting,

but on a grey day like this, it all looks rather foreboding.

In fact, that's part of the idea,

because this is a place where you come to do penance.

I can remember members of my own family telling me

about coming here to an all-night vigil in order to

pray for good luck in their exams.

"Black water. White waves. Furrows snow-capped.

"A magpie flew from the basilica and staggered in the granite airy space

"I was staring into, on my knees," so wrote Seamus Heaney,

describing the pilgrim experience on the island.

What's the history of Station Island, which we're about to see?

Well, Station Island originally, Martha, was started off as being...

well, legend has it that St Patrick visited here in his time in Ireland,

and that he would've been in retreat here

and that he would've had this vision of heaven and hell and purgatory,

and this started off as being an important place,

a spiritual place where the next world and this world are somewhat closer.

It's an island to start off with, so it's this idea of being

removed from the world and I think this is doubly emphasised

here at Lough Derg, because it's this very remote location itself and

then this also resonates because of this idea of these Celtic pilgrimages

where the saints went out into these barren, isolated places to

contemplate the divine and it's very much within that tradition.

These buildings are the contemporary version of the early pilgrim hostel.

The island has certainly changed since Du Noyer sketched it,

but pilgrims still kneel here to pray, as they have done for centuries.

And it feels somehow fitting that one of the last stops

on my Irish journey is here where past and present meet.

While sometimes Du Noyer's art reveals aspects of Ireland

that have long since vanished, his images have also allowed me

to see an older Ireland that has survived.

People involved in the surveying projects

of the mid-19th Century, the impact of that

kind of view of Ireland was huge in terms of the later view of Irish history

and also in terms of the permutations of a political sense of

nationalism into a kind of cultural nationalism in the late 1890s.

That all fed directly into that kind of project.

So, on the one hand you could see it as consolidating Britishness,

you know, a kind of British view on Irish soil, on the other hand you can

see it as a marker of distinctiveness,

this is a very different country, it's a very different language,

it's a very different archaeology and history, it's a very different place.

What Du Noyer understood as an artist

and what his work as a surveyor documented

is that above all else this country is one whose story is

embedded in the landscape, everywhere you look.

Du Noyer's unfailingly keen eye has left us a window

through which we can glimpse his time,

but also a distillation of the real essence of Ireland.