A whale of a past

Some landscapes seem made for winter. At the topleft-hand corner of Mayo, on the dark side of Achill, the Mullet peninsula and its islands conjure all the sombre images of living "backside to the wind", in Paul Durcan's resonant phrase. The treelessness, the stubborn curves, the improvised scatter of human settlement, all push the place a thousand miles north of where it actually is. No wonder the great flocks of barnacle geese, settling in for winter on Inishkea, feel comfortable on its sodden, salty tundra.

But then, if you actually prefer winter, as I and many romantics do, the bleakness of the bog road west of Erris, measured out in miles of leaning black poles, can be turned into grandeur by an operatic cloudscape; and the Mullet itself, hushed in November's ochre evenings, takes on a purity like that of a piece of driftwood, worn and irreducible.

Nowhere else in the west is quite so expressive of the Atlantic's assault upon the land. The southern, sandy part of the peninsula, past Elly Bay, was once an island, joined in its turn to Inishkea - now not just one island, but two. This corner of Connacht, with its ancient, obdurate rocks, had "archipelago" written in its destiny, and to experience the Mullet in a very big storm is to see the ocean's plans for further demolition set out in seething assaults of foam.

I understand this better for having read Within The Mullet (bookshops, £12), an impressive addition to Ireland's line of local histories. Like many of the better ones, it is the work of a retired schoolteacher, in this case Rita Nolan of Carne. Most of her story is, properly, the human record, an extraordinary saga of grit, greed and heroism. But it is set within a natural history every bit as distinctive as the people of this remote ocean fringe.

The more we learn about all the early coastal communities of the west, the more "remote" sounds like a Dublin 4 sort of word. Who needed to trudge off eastwards into the bogs, trackless or otherwise, when the western islands and their coastal fringe offered such good living, and busy trade and gossip from the seaways?

How remarkable, for example, that the Erris coast, and Inishkea in particular, should have been charted in detail on early European maps because of the demand for Tyrian purple, the dye in garments worn by the emperors and nobles of Byzantium and made from a small gland in the common dog whelk.

Nolan's main source for this was the research of the French archaeologist, Francoise Henry, who in 1950 found traces of an intensive purple dye industry among remains of 6th- 8th-century habitations on the shore beside the great mound of the Bailey Mor, on Inishkea North.

It seems extraordinary that a dyestuff originating in shellfish of the eastern Mediterranean should have made the commercial reputation of a windswept island in Connacht. But the muricids collected in such vast numbers from the shores of Byzantium were of the same family as our own Nucella lapillus.

The thick, tough shell of this little whelk, not much bigger than a winkle, lets it be rolled about by stormy seas as it seeks to latch on to young mussels and acorn barnacles and drill into their flesh. The purpurin gland is actually a defensive poison and turns purple only on exposure to air. The American nature writer Euell Gibbons once dyed a small piece of cloth by mashing up several hundred dog whelks but found the sun-dried colour disappointingly drab.

Did the Inishkea industry have particular secrets? Tradition, says Rita Nolan, insists the island once had a monopoly of the dye. It also hints at mixtures with mosses, seaweeds, jelly-fish, star-fish and squid. an Connery, in his gear from The Name Of The Rose).

In the following centuries, with purple out of fashion, the Mullet and its islands went through piracy, wicked landlords, recurrent famine and woe (all movingly told) until another unlikely nature-based industry arrived on Inishkea South in the early years of this century.

The brief and troubled fortunes of the Norwegian whaling enterprise, originally documented in James Fairley's Irish Whales And Whaling (Blackstaff, 1981), take on a special interest here for what they tell of the whale species passing by on migration. There were blue and fin whales, sei and right whales, all within 60 miles (the small minke, at that time, were probably beneath notice). In the "best" season, 1909, more than 100 were killed and landed. The painter Paul Henry was one of those repelled by the stench of the whaling station and the sight of the huge island-pigs grunting over their hunks of blubber.

Today, the hope is of a tourist trade, with trips to spot the minke as they mooch round Erris Head. Inishkea itself, evacuated after a fishing disaster in 1927, has been left, at least in winter, to its geese and grey seals, which Rita Nolan believes is for the best.

She is also, as a golfer and conservationist, very proud of the 18hole links created in the sand dunes at Carne. It is the sort of course endorsed by Gordon D'Arcy in the current edition of Badger (journal of the Irish Wildlife Trust) - one in which the designer respects the original dune contours and leaves the hills as unfertilised roughs. In such a setting, says D'Arcy, "golfers are being exposed to a wildflower reserve the likes of which is increasingly hard to find in the countryside at large".

Relieved of ruthless overgrazing and erosion, duneland can astonish with its sudden splendour of flowers. Rita Nolan lists them lovingly, from the masses of early primroses to August's blue drifts of milkwort and harebells. After all those dark storms and tangles of wrack, the Mullet deserves its new touch of gaiety.