Whenever I want to film images of unspoilt open landscapes, travel to Connemara." So writes Eamon de Buitlear, and few people know half as much as he does about this island and its natural resources. There are those who tell you that in July and August, Clifden and Roundstone are crammed to an inordinate extent (by Dub liners in particular).
Why shouldn't they be crammed?
They are at the heart of wonderful country, and the people who live there all the year round get some benefit from the invasion shops, hotels and guest houses, garages, pubs and so on, and the money spreads around. But if you don't like too much life around you, there are villages and hamlets with out too much modernity, with out the worst of the modern building which a German travel writer so sorrowfully recorded recently, and advised all to stick to the mountains.
Look to the mountains, indeed, with the cloud shadows moving across them, and their setting among thousands of little bog lakes. And the sea nosing in between the tongues of land along Galway Bay. Connemara has also much for the specialist not just the fisherman, either.
Michael Gibbons, archaeologist, will have surprised some regular visitors to Clifden when he wrote recently of the tracks of Neolithic man to be found just up the road from that town. It's not just east of the Shannon that archaeology discovers memorials of one sort and another.
He tells us that Neolithic man cleared the woods and cultivated the land and many of their farmsteads, cooking places and megalithic tombs (over 35) dot the hills and bogs of the Sky Road. Cleggan and Renvyle." This quotation comes, as does the remark of Eamon de Builtear, from a magazine type publication Colourful Connemara, which is a masterpiece of compression.
In some 96 pages, of which about 30 are advertisements (local and useful), it gives, apart from text, excellent colour pictures of scenery and, for which much praise, excellent photographs and other colour pictures of the wild flowers of Connemara of the spring, the summer, of the seashore and of the boglands.
There are brilliant colour illustrations of the birds of the National Park as well as the coastal area of the fish the crustaceans of the animals.
And, most remarkable, much of these pages alternating information in English, French, German, Italian, Spanish.
Published by Lorna Roberts, illustrations by Linda Roberts, Gerard and Justin King. Price £5.95. Published by Barr an Bhaile Publications Ballyconneely, Connemara.