An Irishwoman's Diary

Twelve billion litres of water. Francis Fahy won't have known that when he wrote the immortal lyrics of Galway Bay, but that's the estimated capacity of the great basin. "Almost unimaginable," says the estimator, Prof Noel Wilkins of NUI, Galway, who knows more than a thing or two about the environment of the Atlantic seaboard.

Fahy's sunset is on a 24 kilometre-long area, which is between 16 and 20 kilometres wide. To the north, it drops into the Corrib and Galway city, while in the south it drops down to Kinvara and the plain of Gort. As the land falls, the seabed rises, so land and sea begin a "second merging", Prof Wilkins tells us.

Known in ancient Ireland as Hynes's country, after U∅ Fiachrach Aidhne, the inner bay is a low alluvial plain with many indentations. The landscape is one of "vanishing lakes, great swallow holes and mysterious rivers which rise and then disappear again in strange sinks". And here, "in the quiet, shallow bays where land and water fuse", one can find the subject of his intense interest - the slippery, salty Galway Bay oyster.

Ideal conditions

It has been there for at least 15,000 years, Prof Wilkins says in his recently published book on the shellfish. At the end of the last glacial period, there were abundant stocks in the bay's shallow margins and that was long before the first humans ever set foot on the shores. Ireland isn't that well suited for the species, but the warming of the bay's planktonic-rich waters on the extensive banks, shoals and intertidal flats has provided ideal conditions for its growth and reproduction, he says.

"Here, on a hot summer afternoon with the tide at low ebb and the pungent smell in the air of seaweed slowly decomposing, one can appreciate why Pliny thought that oysters reproduced by spontaneous combustion in mud and why others attributed their generation to a process of putrefaction!" he writes.

Opinions like these might make us agree heartily with Dean Swift when he said that it was a brave man who first ate an oyster. Whoever that brave heart was, he or she died centuries ago, because oysters have been detected among the food items in the earliest kitchen middens. Even now, great heaps of discarded shells can be found on many parts of this coastline. Apart from their accessibility - the original fast food, with no boat and no gear required to catch them - they had nutritional qualities. The ancient Chinese thought that they could cure freckles, and the Romans mixed them with powdered cuttlefish bone to cure chilblains, wounds, ulcers and boils.

And the Romans still hold the records for consumption, with Emperor Vitellius being able to swallow 1,000 at a sitting. Seneca, the philosopher, consumed several hundred a week, but he turned against them latterly and dismissed them as vices which were "no doubt pleasant to gluttons who like to stuff themselves with such food as very readily slips down and very readily returns".

Throat ticklers

This Roman habit of vomiting to make room for more wasn't confined to men; women carried peacock feathers and "other dainty throat ticklers" for purgative purposes. It came as little surprise to Prof Wilkins to learn that Sergius Orata, the best known Roman oyster dealer of his day, invented the shower bath . . .

The writer Montaigne compared a feed of oysters to "smelling violets", and Casanova ate 50 every evening. One of Napoleon's generals is said to have had 100 every morning - and that was before breakfast. Disraeli liked them, Bismark ate 12 dozen at a time, and the concept of oyster-eating as a contest lives on at the annual festivals in Clarenbridge and Galway respectively in September each year.

But not everyone has been impressed by the delicacy, Wilkins points out. Dr Samuel Johnson compared them to "children's ears in sawdust" and fed them to his cat, while Voltaire thought there was something barbarous in eating "such a pretty creature raw". He discovered that even some famous oyster openers don't eat them. One of them confessed that working among the shellfish all day put him off eating anything from the sea.

Oyster dredging

Native European oysters are hermaphrodites, and Prof Wilkins describes the life-cycle in his book, which is political, historical, scientific and humorous - all in one. He describes the significance of the oyster to the economy of inner Galway Bay for well over a century. South Galway farmers employed spailpins to help with farm work, and kept them on at the end of the year for oyster dredging. Some would arrive by hooker in Kinvara, and live on the boat until taken on by a farmer, and in the words of one source, they were "worked to the bone".

There's much, much more, including the more recent history of that "infiltrator", the Pacific oyster, and he looks to the future. New developments under the EU Pesca scheme bode well for the continuance of oystering in the area, he says. Only last year, about 10 tons of prime Clarenbridge oysters were dredged from the public beds which, he says, is testimony to "the resilience of a natural resource".

Prof Wilkins's book is published in good time for the two (rival) festivals at Clarenbridge on September 7th to 9th, and in Galway later in the month. He will be giving a talk on the subject on Tuesday, September 4th, at 8pm in Clarenbridge hall as part of that festival programme.

Squires, Spalpeens and Spats by Prof Wilkins is on sale in all good Galway bookshops, or directly from Bord Iascaigh Mhara (BIM) at Crofton Road, D·n Laoghaire, Co Dublin, or the co-publisher, the Heritage Council in Kilkenny, price £8 paperback.