Setting Foot On The Shores Of Connemara (2012) - Plot & Excerpts
This fact, which I heard from the last man to leave this now deserted coastal hamlet in the south west of Connemara, would seem to lead one immediately and deeply into the lives of his vanished neighbours and their forebears. Nevertheless the generalities of historical geography are needed for its full appreciation. Fishing and mollusc-collecting in Cuan na mBéirtrí Buí, the bay of the yellow oyster-bank, sailing to Roundstone and farther shores of Galway Bay with turf cut from their commonage, feeding the patchwork of tiny pastures and potato plots around their cottages with seaweed shorn off the rocks, the villagers were as dependent as the heron on the complexities of creek and reef, sandbar and mudbank, neep-tide and spring-tide. I am told that when an unusually high tide would wash into the cottage nearest the landing stage, the woman of the house would just pick up the glowing sods of the turf fire and put them in the iron pot hanging on the hook above the hearth until the waters turned and trickled out under the door again.
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