The lonesome murmur of the sea was to be heard on the shore, lapping and chuckling in the rough stony places and running in and out of the irregular clefts. The musical sound of the wave was breaking slowly and evenly on Tra Mhoir, pools of smooth white foam moving in the mouth of the tide, a lot brighter than the strand.
The poets of long ago who wrote love songs thought there was nothing on earth brighter . . . The imagery suited them when praising a young woman - "is gile a piob is a braid na cur na toinne ar tra" (her neck and her throat are brighter than the foam of the wave on the strand). That imagery pleases the women, and no wonder, because there's nothing under the sun brighter than it."
You wouldn't expect to stumble on such rich images in an account of searching for bait, but then you wouldn't want to expect too little of the late Seamas Mac an Iomaire. His classic life of a shore dweller, Cladaigh Chonamara, has been given its first English translation by author and environmentalist Padraic de Bhaldraithe.
Born on the Connemara island of Mainis, near Carna, over a century ago, Mac an Iomaire became a teacher of the Irish language through his membership of the Irish Volunteers. He was employed by the Gaelic League and began writing for a monthly Irish language journal, An Stoc.
In 1926 he emigrated to the US, where he taught Irish in the New York Gaelic Society before joining a railway company. He fell ill with tuberculosis and it was while in hospital that he wrote the basis for the classic, which was published by An Gum in 1938. He also wrote Conamara Man, which was published posthumously in the US in 1969, under the name Seamus Ridge. As his faithful translator explains in his accompanying text, the urban life most of us now lead, even in so-called rural areas, doesn't allow for the likes of him any more. Seamas learned the skills associated with the people around him, who depended on the sea and the seashore for their livelihood. He absorbed a rich heritage of language, songs, storytelling and folklore.
As a landscape writer, he combined the bog and rock of sea and the shore - "immealbhord Chonamara". Although observing harsh poverty, his interpretation helps to "bury . . . the myth that the people of Ireland were a race of thalassophobes incapable of observing their natural surroundings". Instead, says de Bhaldraithe, he gives the reader an insight into a resourceful people who had developed a maritime economy which was strong enough to keep the community intact through the Famine.
There is another dimension to his method of observation, de Bhaldraithe notes. "Science in its relentless search for `objectivity' has desiccated our emotional response to nature and all the facts in the world won't substitute for a rooted sense of the value of nature which encompasses us."
De Bhaldraithe is well qualified to comment. Born and reared in Dublin, he had his first taste of Connemara on summer holidays with his Irish-speaking parents. Having graduated in zoology from UCD, he continued postgraduate work in marine zoology and oceanography at NUI Galway, and in the Centre Nationale pour l'Exploration des Oceans in Brest, France.
He taught biology at second and third levels, worked in the developing mariculture industry in the 1970s, and has worked latterly as a post-primary school inspector. He is the author of several books, including a biography of the circumnavigator, Conor O'Brien. A founder member of the Galway Hooker Association, he dedicates this book, very appropriately, to Leo Hallissey's Connemara Environmental Education Centre in Letterfrack.
The Shores of Connemara by Seamas Mac an Iomaire, translated and annotated by Padraic de Bhaldraithe is published by Tir Eolas at £9.99.
