Mayo, Ireland: Ordinary Heritage, Preserved in a Bog

Yeats mosaic Sligo, Ireland

This June, I had the opportunity to spend nearly three weeks in Ireland – see my previous post on Dublin – always a welcome experience. And because my parents were coming over and meeting us for the trip’s second half, we couldn’t resist returning to County Mayo (in Irish Mhaigh Eo, meaning “plain of the yew trees“), home to ancestors on both my mother and father’s sides of the family.

We stayed in the lovely town of Westport and put together a plan to explore areas we hadn’t on our previous visit 15 years ago, like beautiful Achill Island, the National Museum of Ireland – Country Life in Castlebar, and Céide Fields ancient site. After a few days in Mayo, we would head up to Sligo and Donegal to finish out the trip. Put together, our experiences in Mayo and Sligo prompted me to think more philosophically about this unique stretch of land and my connection to it.

Beach at Achill Island on a gorgeous day.
Land of the Blanket Bog

County Mayo — particularly the western part of the county — is covered extensively in blanket bog. This means the ground is layered with partially decayed vegetation called peat, which has historically been harvested and burned as a source of heat. Mayo’s landscape is not very useful to people trying to survive, and poor topsoil for farming has made this a site of struggle for thousands of years. But the bogland does have some good qualities. For one, peatlands act as carbon sinks, which makes them useful in slowing climate change (however, peat extraction — on the decline but still ongoing in Ireland — counteracts this with large emissions). Squishy to walk on and covered in golden-hued flora, the bogland is also an astounding historical archive: archeologists have found evidence in the bog of early civilizations, even well-preserved human bodies, which tell the story of this land as far back as 5,000 years.

Bogland in Ballycroy National Park, County Mayo
Bogland in Ballycroy National Park, County Mayo

The bogland, it turns out, holds onto things. It holds within it a staggering history, but one which documents simple lives — what those in our contemporary society, lovers of conquest and great wealth and great wars and intellectual innovation — might call mundane. It’s a history of pastures divided up by stacking stones, of basic thatched-roof dwellings, of hard labor on harsh land. It’s a history of small, eccentric traditions. It’s not extraordinary in any way, really, aside from its perseverance.

A poetic description on a signpost in Ballycroy National Park, Mayo
A poetic description on a signpost in Ballycroy National Park, Mayo

What have we found in the bogs? Stone ruins, animal fossils, tools, books, jewelry, the bodies of young men (human sacrifices dating to the Iron Age — the most exciting bogland happenings you’ll ever hear of), and butter. That’s right — great heaping, towering portions of butter, looking fluffy as marshmallow creme, pulled out of bogs throughout Ireland. Turns out, the Irish have always been good at dairy.

This verse from Seamus Heaney’s poem “Belderg” comes as close as any text to capturing the awesomeness of the bogland:

When he stripped off blanket bog The soft-piled centuries
Fell open like a glib; There were the first plough-marks, The stone-age fields, the tomb Corbelled, turfed and chambered, Floored with dry turf-coomb.
A landscape fossilized, Its stone wall patternings Repeated before our eyes In the stone walls of Mayo.

My Unshakeable Mayo Roots

I know how annoying it is when Americans prattle on about their “Irish heritage” — and yet I too can’t help but give in to the desire to feel connected to my ancestors. My great-grandmother came from a town in Mayo called Crossmolina, a tidy-but-drab burg about which nothing much has ever been said. As far as my parents know, further back most of our ancestors on both sides in fact from this same hardscrabble land — Crossmolina and the more cosmopolitan nearby Ballina. I’m a full three generations removed (and even then only connected by the single thread of my great-grandmother), but I do feel a connection to this land. Is it real, or am I fooling myself? Is there any way to really know?

My great uncle, Father Eugene Devitt, with unidentified relatives in Crossmolina, County Mayo.
My great-uncle, Father Eugene Devitt, with unidentified relatives in Crossmolina, County Mayo.

This feeling of connection could be due to associations from fragmented stories half-told; to daydreams of Ireland conjured in my mind before I even set foot on the island itself. Maybe it stems from those old color slides I’ve seen, taken by my great-uncle the priest (always addressed properly as “Father Devitt,” never “Uncle Gene”), who visited in the 1960s and was invited in for tea by unidentified relatives whom he later photographed, unsmiling, standing in a pasture beside a donkey. (My mother says not to assume they were unhappy; it was rather more likely they were self-conscious about their teeth.)

But in a more metaphysical sense, could it also be the bog itself, that meticulous preservationist, soaking memories and identities into its spongy surface? Holding them intact like great gobs of butter and ginger-haired bogmen, revealing a whiff of them each time a farmer cuts away a new shaft of peat? I wonder too if my grandmother, who never had the chance to visit her own mother’s homeland, might have felt an even stronger pull of some nebulous connection, from a people who shared a similar perspective, perhaps, or gait or countenance or manner, or in fact a similar approach to life and family, work and community.

Céide Fields neolithic site in north Mayo, bogland which contains the oldest and most extensive field systems in the world.
Céide Fields neolithic site in north Mayo, bogland which contains the oldest and most extensive field systems in the world.
Yeats & the Lure of the Land

Does the land merely preserve the physical — that which can be seen or analyzed? Poets certainly don’t seem to think so, particularly Irish ones, who write about the land like an oracle, keeper of secrets and holder of grudges. Sligo, where I recently spent a few days, is considered the adopted home of the poet W.B. Yeats — a fact of which one is constantly reminded via statues, murals and the tourist-attraction grave of the man himself. Yeats wrote famously of the strong pull he felt toward the Sligo landscape, including the Lake Isle of Innisfree, which to any clear-eyed observer most closely resembles a mound overgrown with brush, inelegantly plunked into modest Lough Gill. “I will arise and go now,” he wrote, off to his personal utopia, a slice of his soul there preserved.

Downtown Crossmolina, County Mayo, Ireland.
Downtown Crossmolina on a Sunday, County Mayo, Ireland.
My Own Ordinary Innisfree

I forgive Yeats his hyperbole, because I get where he’s coming from. Crossmolina, after all, is my Innisfree, my own mediocre island with an otherworldly pull. On our way to (the magnificent and extremely well-run) Céide Fields, my parents, my husband and I stopped in Crossmolina for lunch, walking to the cemetery to look at the gravestones and try to somehow understand by osmosis who our relatives were and if there might be any left. It was our second visit to the sleepy town; 15 years earlier my parents and I had met with a genealogy specialist who said something about great-grandmother Mary Munley who was actually Munnelly, and about some spinster sisters named Quinn who might share some of our genes and donated a statue to the church when they died.

A closed-down Crossmolina business, possibly owned by some relations of mine.
A closed-down Crossmolina business, possibly owned by some relations of mine.

Suffice it to say the findings would remain sparse unless we ponied up some more Euros. But we didn’t, because that’s not what it’s about. People conduct genealogy tests to reveal connections to extraordinary people who did interesting and glamorous things. But in County Mayo, in the bogland, we know what our ancestors did (bog finds detail the more ancient past, while recent civilization is captured in the comprehensive and truly immersive National Museum of Ireland – Country Life). They toiled on the land, farming and raising animals; perhaps someone owned a pub, was a grocer, a tradesmen, or a member of the clergy. They were (mostly) faithful Catholics, attending mass and community gatherings and weddings and funerals, putting on a fine Sunday lunch on occasion for the parish priest. They were ordinary.

A view of Croagh Patrick through a heavy fog, Crossmolina.
A view of Croagh Patrick, Mayo’s mountain pilgrimage site, through a heavy fog in Crossmolina.
I Will Arise and Go Now

And here I am, a woman from a small, Midwestern American town who has always strived to be different, assured that my circumstances didn’t suit me, that I was destined for more excitement, more glamor, a somehow more interesting life.

But the bogland preserves; it records. And here in Mayo, the land tells me otherwise.

So walking along the road to the cemetery in Crossmolina, catching fat raindrops on my nose and running my fingers along stone walls, I think about who I came from, and how they’re in me more than I may think. I can smell it in the ozone, on the contentment that rises in me despite the fact that I’m spending a rainy morning in a cemetery in a boring-ass town with a handful of pubs, a few churches and a library, in a county where it rains cold stinging pellets 280 days per year.

I guess what it is, as it was with Yeats and his god-forsaken overgrown oasis, is a sense of belonging. It’s a feeling of nothing less than identity, I suppose, corny as that sounds: the call of “I will arise and go now,” beckoning from the bog.