Wild Atlantic Women (eBook)

PROLOGUE:
BANBA’S CROWN

Malin Head, County Donegal

It’s four days past midsummer and I’m standing on the cliff edge at Malin Head in County Donegal. There’s a sheer drop beneath me and the wind is full of salt. This is Ireland’s northernmost point. Beyond lie the islands of the North Atlantic, the Outer Hebrides, Iceland and, finally, the edge of Greenland, covered in Arctic ice. But before all that is this smudged line of horizon, where the sea and sky have merged. I pull my hood up around me, try to spot basking sharks in the water. Listen to the churn of the ocean as it washes the rocks.

I’m at the end of a journey, of a series of walks I have taken along Ireland’s western coastline, county by county, from the bottom of Ireland to this northern tip – a route known as the Wild Atlantic Way. It’s a coastal pathway that was once, in my mind, connected to rugged masculinity: to war and fishing, shipwrecks and exploration – hardy, enduring and untameable. But just over three years ago, I started exploring a quieter story, one beneath the surface. I began walking – whenever I could – along this Atlantic coastline. I wanted to see if I could unravel how this elemental landscape had informed the lives of the women who had come before me. How they had moved within it, been shaped by it and how, when they had to, they had left it behind.

I had been thinking about these walks for a while. Back in 2016, on the centenary of the Easter Rising, I had visited Cape Clear, Ireland’s southernmost island, where I had celebrated the story of my great-grandfather John K. Cotter. Born on Cape Clear, he was a fisherman and sailor who’d taken part in the Howth gunrunning that had brought to Ireland the rifles used in the 1916 Rising. With skills learnt from years as a pilot in Irish waters, he’d steered Molly and Erskine Childers’s boat, the Asgard, into port, helping unload weapons into the hands of Irish volunteers.

It was only much later, thinking back over that weekend on Cape Clear, that I began to become curious about his wife – my great-grandmother Ellen Cotter. I felt that somehow, in the excitement of finding out about John K. Cotter, her story was one I had overlooked. I began to ask questions. Ellen Cotter, I found out, had been a lacemaker. A woman whose skill with a crochet hook, over a hundred years ago, had allowed her to dodge a life of domestic service. She was to become the first of a series of women in whose footsteps I would tread, tentatively at first, along this western shoreline.

The truth was, when I began to think about walking in this landscape, I was also at a crossroads in my own life. Although both of my parents are Irish, I have always prided myself on being a die-hard Londoner – a reaction, to some extent, to having two Irish parents and such an Irish name. It’s something I share with a lot of second- or third-generation Londoners – pride in a city that gave our parents or grandparents opportunity and gives us a distinct identity. But in 2019, things were shifting. London life was becoming harder than it had been and I couldn’t seem to work my way through it.

I had just turned forty but was still single and without children, seemingly at odds with the general flow of things around me. While the majority of my friends were busier than ever, balancing motherhood with their careers, I had just become freelance and had more freedom than ever before. I found myself with whole weekends of time that I was struggling to fill, wondering what my next move should be. I felt, in some ways, that I was on a new path – diverging from what I had supposed to be the template of a woman’s life. And this all coincided with a shift in my identity too, as I applied for and was newly bestowed, along with 400,000 other British people, with an Irish passport.

Using the story of my great-grandmother as inspiration, I decided to travel along Ireland’s west coast, seeking out the paths and stories of different women who once lived along this shoreline – stories that for me, as a member of the Irish diaspora, were as yet unknown. I thought that perhaps investigating their lives through the words they’d left behind, and the scholarship of the biographers and historians who had come after them, might help me make sense of my own life. That learning about these women could teach me an Irish history I had been lacking and maybe point me in the direction I should go next. And so I began this journey – walking along the coastline with the women of the past, and eventually the present, as my guides.

Each chapter in this book tells the story of a woman, distilled into one walk in the West of Ireland landscape which was or is their home. It is a journey through time that moves up the coastline from Ireland’s southernmost island of Cape Clear to its northernmost tip at Malin Head. In selecting the women whose paths I walked in this book, I chose people rooted in and connected to this landscape. My own great-grandmother lived a fairly traditional life, but the women that follow are people I consider to be outliers or subversives, to be in their own way ‘wild’. They are people who confounded, or are still confounding, expectations of what a woman can do. Somehow, each of them able to navigate the obstacles or boundaries that circumstance and wider society cast their way. Sometimes they did this through guile, sometimes through sheer grit and sometimes through outstanding talent and searing intelligence, outperforming their male peers until their talent could not be denied.

In West Cork, I walked along the shore once trodden by self-taught botanist Ellen Hutchins, who, in the early 1800s, preserved and catalogued the seaweeds of this coastline as nobody had done before. Walking alone, she found escape from a difficult life at home in the beauty of the seaweeds, lichens and mosses of Bantry Bay, laying the foundation for our scientific understanding of the Atlantic shoreline at a time when we were just beginning to study the natural world. On Valentia Island in South Kerry, one hundred years later, lived Maude Delap – a rector’s daughter and brilliant scientist. I walked her island home contemplating how, as the twentieth century dawned, in her homemade laboratory, she became the first person in the world to breed jellyfish in captivity, defying stereotypes to become an expert on these beguiling but sometimes dangerous animals.

In North Kerry, I spent time on the Great Blasket Island, once the home of oral storyteller Peig Sayers, where I found myself in thrall to the force of Peig’s personality and charm, falling in love, through her words, with the remote island on which she had lived out her days. Finding out that Peig had never intended to spend her life on the lonely Great Blasket but had dreamt of emigration to America, I sought stories of those who had made the transatlantic voyage. In my mother’s home county of Limerick, along the banks of the Shannon, I encountered the campaigning fervour of Charlotte Grace O’Brien, who, in the 1880s, sought to improve conditions for the millions of young Irish women who were crossing the ocean on huge liners, seeking a new life in America.

In Clare I walked along the Cliffs of Moher, exploring the story of perhaps Ireland’s greatest living writer – Edna O’Brien. Like my own parents, O’Brien has spent most of her life in London, but in the 1970s she wrote an Irish travelogue, Mother Ireland, in which she looked at her own relationship with this country. Immersing myself in her life and work, I compared her vision of Ireland from a distance with the one I had grown up with in London and asked why Edna O’Brien, and many other young women like her, had sought to escape.

Moving up the coast, on Galway’s Aran Islands I walked the circumference of the smallest island – Inisheer – taking in the extraordinary limestone landscape. There I met traditional knitter Úna McDonagh. In learning how some of those women who stayed in Ireland created an entire industry through the dexterity of their hands, I also found myself thinking about how these islands have often been portrayed as a romantic, rustic place by writers and filmmakers passing through. Back on the mainland, in Connemara, I continued this meditation on how the people of this shoreline have always been portrayed as a little ‘wild’ as I walked the roads around Roundstone, encountering a true bohemian – the novelist Kate O’Brien, who lived openly as a gay woman in a grand house bought with the sales of novels banned in Ireland for their frankness.

As I headed up towards my father’s home county of Sligo, I stepped back further into the more distant past. On Clare Island in Mayo, I explored the island home of ‘pirate queen’ Granuaile, who dominated the lands around Clew Bay in the sixteenth century – the daughter of a chieftain who lived her life with now mythic potency and force. Her strength inspired me to enter the realm of Irish legend, as I climbed the Sligo cairn in which the Iron Age Queen Maeve of Connacht supposedly lies.

Finally, in Rossnowlagh, County Donegal, I met Dr Easkey Britton, one of Ireland’s most well-known big wave surfers, who is also a marine social scientist. Her unique perspective, formed by a deep intimacy with Donegal’s sea and shore, opened my eyes to the most pressing issues of this coastline today – of climate change and how we build reciprocity into our relationship with nature and asked me to think about female identity itself.

Walking along the Irish Atlantic shore in the company of these women was an experience more profound than I could ever have imagined when I first set out. Treading their paths, I took inspiration from how they overcame...