Tales of a travel addict: Our Berber Cousins

The mountain villages of Las Alpujarras near Granada are a warren of tiny flat-roofed stone houses built by Moorish Berbers in the 16th century following their expulsion from Granada. The houses are typical of Berber architecture in north Africa. Though the Spanish have been squatting in them for centuries, they still haven't mastered their clay-roof construction. In fact, the only man guaranteed to make an Alpujarran roof watertight is Donegal native, Conor Clifford – a mountain guide, with a profitable side-line as a roofer.

For me, this hints at further proof of Bob Quinn’s contention that the Irish and north Africans are connected at a deep level. Quinn wondered why the sails of a Connemara púcán can be seen on Arab dhows on the Nile, leading him to reflect on the relations between maritime people along the Atlantic shore from Ireland to north Africa. The journey by sea along the coast was far safer and quicker than traversing the central swamps and forests of Ireland for millennia.

In his Atlantean books and films, Quinn dared suggest that Ireland might owe as much to Islam as to Europe. The Arabic resonances in seannós cadences was an obvious starting point, but then in Morocco he found a stone carving of a figure surrounded by a wavy serpentine line, with a series of overlapping, concentric half-circles. It reminded him of the entrance stone to Newgrange. He noticed the same snake-line motif throughout Ireland and up along the coast of Brittany, Galicia, Portugal and the Berber regions of north Africa. He then stumbled upon a circular cluster of stones between Tangier and Rabat that was dominated by a tall phallus stone identical to one at Punchestown and similar to one documented at New Grange in 1699. Either Neolithic man in the Boyne and north Africa simultaneously developed the classic passage tomb in the form we know it today or they were in contact.

Turning to linguistics he quotes Roman Jakobson’s delicious insight that while the archaeologist’s data is like a motion picture without sound, the linguists have sound without film, and he finds that: the Oman Arabic word for hope is Mwinenh, while in Irish it’s muinín; Gyarra (cut) in Irish is gearradh; Kh’ala (port) in Irish is caladh; Sikina (knife) in Irish is scian; Shkupa (brush in Maltese Arabic) is scuab in Irish. Berber has strong affinities with Irish that are not shared by other Indo-European languages.

Michael Viney reported here last year on new DNA evidence linking the people of Ireland and north Africa, further strengthening Quinn's Atlantean theory. Maybe it's time to ditch the meaningless term Celtic in favour of something like "People of the Atlantic seaways", as Quinn suggests. He believes that coastal people should regard themselves as a unified cultural archipelago with more in common than the centralised powers that control them.

Whether Conor Clifford has Berber DNA in him or not, I cannot say; all the Alpujarran villagers really care about is that he hurries up and fixes their roofs.