An Irishwoman's Diary

Question: what do a Victorian pub in London's Soho, a bed and breakfast on the Scottish isle of Mull, a music duo in San Diego and a line from Robert Louis Stevenson's book Kidnapped have in common? Answer: all are responses to the reference "clachan" in a Google search on the internet.

This term for a 19th-century Irish or Scots settlement or hamlet has even given its name to a website for cheap hotels, and to a 260-unit apartment complex in Ontario, Canada. If the same apartments have no church, no shop, no school nearby, might they just meet a 21st-century definition of a clachan? Not quite, according to the characteristics identified by several historians, and referred to by participants in a major historical research project currently running in the north-east. "Close kinship ties between resident families" would be an exception rather than the rule in most apartment blocks; and the "rundale" system of cultivation would be hard to spot in modern balcony or rooftop gardens.

"Rundale", involving a scattered system of infields and outfields and commonage for the tenant farmers in clachans, represented a "crazy system in the eyes of up-to-date thinkers", Connemara writer Tim Robinson noted in Atlas of the Irish Rural Landscape. After all, it necessitated "endless trailing to and fro and an inefficient fragmentation of the tenant's effort".

Yet, Robinson argues, had it not been "sucked dry by rents" and "driven into its eventually fatal complicity with the potato" (as in the Great Famine), rundale could have been remembered as "a good ecological jigsaw-puzzle interlock" between a rapidly multiplying population in pre-famine west of Ireland and the "narrow strip of habitable complexity between sea and bog".

North-east Ireland escaped the worst ravages of the Famine, but there too, the landscape is dotted with derelict homes, sometimes in the characteristic cluster of the clachan. Over two years ago, Eileen McAuley and fellow members of the Glens of Antrim Historical Society embarked on research into rundale and the concept of the clachan, made redundant by rapid changes in agricultural practice. "We felt we had to document those identifiable settlements - mainly ruined cottages - before they were all gone, and find out why some survived longer than others," she says.

The result has been an examination of 46 clachans scattered through the nine glens of Antrim and on Rathlin island. It is striking that a rich tradition of seafaring, as opposed to farming, has emerged as a dominant thread. Land, or the prospect of land ownership, appeared to offer such a limited future that the sea became the maritime "commonage" for the communities. After all, Antrim, bordered by the North Channel, Belfast Lough, the rivers Lagan and Bann, and Lough Neagh, was originally "Endruim", or "the habitation upon the waters".

Supported by the Heritage Lottery Fund, the Clachan Project has uncovered stories such as that of Patrick Joseph Murray, who left the clachan of Dunouragan in 1891 and went to sea for 10 years. Thrice he rounded Cape Horn, thrice he was shipwrecked during voyages to South America, India and Australia - and he was one of many. Inspired by such narratives, the Glens of Antrim Historical Society has organised a weekend of maritime history, culture and art in Cushendall in late May, which ties in with the Celtic European Festival of the Sea in the north-east from May 22nd to June 4th.

The Glens event opens with a concert on Friday evening, May 26th, with traditional musicians such as Allan MacDonald, piper and Scots Gaelic singer from Glenuig in western Scotland, Vincent, Jimmy and Peter Campbell, fiddlers from Glenties, Co Donegal, and the Antrim singer Sorca McLaughlin. Workshops will be held on Saturday, May 27th in the Layde Church of Ireland Parish Church in Cushendall, with speakers including Dr Jonathan Bell, curator of the Ulster Folk and Transport Museum, Cultra, Annie MacSween from the University of the Highlands and Islands, Stornoway, and Brian MacLochlainn, an expert on Antrim Irish.

The Clachan Project has also resurrected a number of old children's games, and these will be demonstrated by pupils from local schools on Sunday afternoon, May 28th, on Legge Green, Cushendall beach. Complementing the coastal programme will be a four-day watercolour workshop, given by art tutor Barry Herniman from May 25th to 28th. As Eileen McAuley points out, the stunning Antrim coastline and glens have inspired many artists over the years, including Andrew Nicholl, Humbert Craig, Maurice Wilks and Cushendall's own Charles McAuley.

Details of the festival are available from the Cushendall Development Group at 048-21771378 (code 028 if dialling from Northern Ireland), and the programme for the Glens coastal art school

is available from Mary McFadden, owner of an award-winning guesthouse at Drumkeerin, Cushendun (048-21761554 or email drumkeerin@zoom.co.uk). The web link for the Glens of Antrim Clachan Project is www.antrimhistory.net.

Down at the opposite end of the island, Cork's Meitheal Mara is hosting the second Ocean to City race on the same weekend, May 27th, when currachs, coracles, seine boats, skiffs, yawls, drontheims and contemporary kayaks will navigate 15 miles of the world's finest natural harbour from Crosshaven to the marina at Shandon.

[ www.oceantocity.com ]