where there are storms and rain many weeks of the year. The people who inhabited these rocks lived in a dangerous intimacy with
nature. Their greatest virtue was strength and determination, for hard labour was all that kept life going and the fear of physical
failure, eviction, emigration or the workhouse, hung over them every hour, every minute of their lives.
Any soil you see
in the fields has been manufactured by the people over long centuries. They’d gather seaweed from the shore and just like the
Aran islanders they'd mix it with sand and manure, spreading it on the rocks until it in time it became arable soil that needed constant
replenishment because of the never ending erosion of wind and weather.
They had few comforts but their principal one was intellectual:
songs, stories, poetry and an endless commentary on people and places they knew or had heard of. There was a peasant woman who
lived around Rossaveal in the early 1900s who was a passionate collector of folk songs. Her daughter said that if she heard
someone had a song she didn’t know, or even a verse of a song she hadn’t got, she’d head off walking the roads, often as far as fifteen
miles, to get the song or the verse.
Since the 12th century successive waves of Anglo-Norman, then English
and Scottish colonists, had poured into Ireland. In their rapaciousness they were not simply content to steal the rich grasslands
but they stole those western rocks as well, and absurd as it may seem, they proceeded to charge the natives rent so that they might
perch on their own limestone.
The area around Rossaveal used to be part of the estates belonging to the Blakes of Tully, notorious
rack-renting landlords. Finally, in retaliation for their tyranny, the local priest wrote out a curse against them. It's
a religious curse called Salm na Mallacth, the Anathema.
He put it in an envelope and sealed it. He then put that
envelope in another and sealed that, and so on until there were seven sealed envelopes in all. He gave it to a young lad and
told him to hand it to Mr. Blake in Tully House with instructions to put as much distance between himself and Mr. Blake as soon as
he had handed over the envelope. While the recipient of this moral bombshell was busy opening the seven envelopes the lad made
his getaway. Soon after misfortune began to rain down on the heads of the Blakes. First they lost their house, which is
now a ruin, then a fourteen-year-old Blake boy committed suicide and soon after other Blakes began to die and the last of them ended
up in the lunatic asylum in Ballinasloe. The irony is that the unfortunate tenants, for years afterwards, were still paying
their rent to the demented Mr. Blake in Ballinasloe Asylum.
