Leaving An Lionán behind I meandered through Connemara, heading toward Leitir Fraic (Letterfrack). But, not having any place to get to quickly I turned off towards Rosroe Pier. You don’t just happen upon Rosroe, you have to GO there. It’s a deliberate act of volition. And more than worth it. I had heard of it because the philosopher Wittgenstein used to stay here when writing some of his most important work. It is another reminder that Ireland, and its western coast have never been on the periphery of Europe, but always central to its cultural, intellectual and political movements - think the modernism of the Yeats brothers, the significance of the Easter Rising in subsequent anti-colonial liberation struggles.
The West being what it is - slipping into the Atlantic, I failed to take any photos at Rosroe Pier due to hail and my feelings of tenderness towards my new Leica.
So, off I went and stopped off in Roundstone for lunch. A very “British” kind of town, like others you see in the West of Ireland, those places that were garrisoned or literally made by settlers, its hidden qualities are more complex. Never more so than in the way the Yorkshireman Tim Robinson became a touchstone for the place and for the West in particular. If you haven’t checked out his Connemara series of books and his cartography, then do. I am off to the Aran Islands soon and will take a Tim Robinson with me.
The light was perhaps too bright, but I was taken with the images offered on the pier. I am drawn to piers and harbours. My mother’s family were fishermen and I was brought up on stories of boats, harbours, storms, and rhythms of the sea. I am always captivated by the mix of man’s efforts to control nature and natures constant reminder of our temporiness. It confronts us with very different temporal orders - our short-lived horizons and the sea’s stretched out time. The lobster pots are a good example of this. Their constructed nature is slowly encased in nature, the two entangled, where the boundary between one and the other blurs. Similarly the ropes and the crab pots, the working of the sea and sun slowly transforming the human artefacts into decaying and yet beautiful form.