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Unmapped In Ireland: Connemara on Horseback
| Article
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20134 |
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Section : |
LIFE
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| Issue
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2 / 1992 |
2,723 Words |
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Sherry Von Ohlsen
Sherry Von Ohlsen writes from her base in Sparta, New Jersey. |
I am certain that the water, the water of the seas and of lakes and of mist and rain, has all but made the Irish after its image.
-William Butler Yeats
Something remains unmapped in Ireland, in its three hundred by one hundred fifty miles of land, in its 3.6 million people. It's something the traveler on horseback in Connemara is privy to: the marks of time and eternity on the rugged landscape and on what Yeats called "disheveled angels," those picturesque countrymen with rain-beaten faces who appear to be in midconversation with God in this wild place.
It's Sunday. I meet my first disheveled angel, a taxi driver, one Jimmy Slaughtery, en route from Shannon Airport. The butt of a hand-rolled cigarette sticks to his lips as he accelerates to one hundred kilometers down a narrow lane called a highway. I tell him my name, and he proceeds to sing me a verse of "Sherry Baby." I have to admit: The Irish lilt sounded wonderful. We halt abruptly and then wait while a herd of cattle meanders down the road to new pasture. No one blows a horn. Later on, Jimmy complains, "This is my worst year in the last five, due to the recession." we pass three teenage girls hitchhiking to school, a common scene from Shannon to Galway.
Outside my car window, serpentine stone walls with wind holes divide the road from the fields, separating the past from the present. Ruins of castles and cathedrals have trees growing through their broken roofs, and goats as residents. Loosened walls and ruins stand next to thatch-roofed cottages. The land lays open like a book of history waiting to be read. The endless stone was are like the lines of a paragraph; enclosed in them are the marks of a people's struggle for their daily bread.
Willie
On Monday I am introduced to my second disheveled angel, Willie Leahy, a 52-year-old horseman in a weathered Stetson who reads skies and mountains and who has been trailblazing Gaeltacht West Ireland for the last twenty-two years. He will lead our Hoofbeats International trekking group, which consists of twenty-one men and women between the ages of twenty-five and sixty-five. We've come from the United States, Switzerland, and Spain for a rider's view of Connemara along the Coast Trail.
Rough-hewn and patchily shaven, Willie wears a
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