ANOTHER LIFE: Towards the end of the 12 days of Christmas the people of Inishkea, off north-west Mayo, would gather in the house of the maor, or headman, to draw lots for land on the twin, windswept islands. First, the maor cast lots to assign each group of families to one of the stone-walled "quarters"; then the tenants of each quarter cast lots among themselves for the individual plots they would sow and plant in the spring, writes Michael Viney.
Within the quarter walls, only stones marked the ever-shifting boundaries on the sandy island soil.
Today, the Inishkeas form one of Ireland's most haunted landscapes. The two coastal clachans loom up in a frieze of spiky gables and sand-filled ruins, and the deserted fields of the quarters are grazed by thousands of wintering Barnacle geese. But the old usages of Inishkea, the nearby townlands at the tip of the Mullet peninsula and many other corners of the bleaker western seaboard combine in the rich mystery of "rundale", the apparently chaotic and fragmented system of land-use by which these remote communities ran their lives.
The tightly clustered settlements, or clocháns, of the west were once seen as archaeological relics of Ireland's ancient past - refuges of a timeless peasant culture. Then along came Kevin Whelan, the economic geographer, to dismiss this as "Celtic twilight". The clocháns and their communal landholdings were, he argued, a product of the population explosion of the late 18th and early 19th centuries - even, indeed, a "sophisticated ecological adjustment" to the problems of pioneer
settlements on marginal land.
Now an US sociologist (not often my favourite breed of scholar) has fitted the Irish rundale episode into the wider history of Europe. He shows that that the clochán-dwellers of Connemara, Mayo and elsewhere, however remote, were able to discover and adapt the details of a communal code that could be traced back, in Germany, for example, to medieval times.
Tom Yager, who over the last 40 years has meandered annually through Ireland on his bicycle, makes his case in a brilliantly readable essay - "What was rundale and where did it come from?" - in the latest volume of Béaloideas, the journal of the Folklore of Ireland Society.
This is the society, founded in the State's early years, that helped to build up the huge folklore archive in UCD (much of it in Irish) and is now actively looking for new members.* Its annual journal, which this year deals with traditional instruments and St John's Eve bonfires along with rundale and other topics, is a posh hardback production meant to last on its members' bookshelves.
It is positively lightweight, however, by comparison with Strangford Lough, a sumptuously produced archaeological survey of the lough's maritime cultural landscape. This is published in partnership between Belfast's Blackstaff Press and the North's Environment and Heritage Service, an arrangement that made possible the price - a modest £25 sterling - and a quite dazzling variety and excellence of illustration.
Well-guarded, not only from the open sea but from the ravages of modern development, the lough preserves a remarkable physical archive of human use.
Every inch of its shore and seabed has been searched by the authors, Thomas McErlean, Rosemary McConkey and Wes Forsythe, and the riches of its settlements ashore are matched by the discoveries of fish traps, kelp "farms" and the myriad landing places around the sheltered harbour, all of them vested with a vivid sense of human effort. The range, accessibility and visual delight of this book makes it a good companion for the Atlas of the Irish Rural Landscape, published by UCC a few years ago.
Quite as exceptional as either, in a different way, is Ingenious Ireland (Town House, €30), billed as "a county-by-county exploration of Irish mysteries and marvels". This is the work of science writer Mary Mulvihill, who is the very model of an inquiring mind. Her six years of research have pieced together a sort of visitor-centre companion for the whole island, full of engaging facts, well-digested and easily browsed, and set into an eager observation of natural history and landscape.
Mulvihill is a missionary when it comes to the many unrecognised pioneers of Irish science and technology, especially the sort that did exceptional things with telescopes or bell jars in the non-imperial backwoods of the island. Her book could do great service, almost incidentally, in recruiting the young to follow suit.
The Irish sense of place has known many howls of outrage, not least in the lines of Oliver Goldsmith's long poem, 'The Deserted Village', first published in 1770. For all the cosily rhyming couplets and affectionate images that set its scene ("Sweet Auburn, loveliest village of the plain,/ Where health and plenty cheered the labouring swain. . .") it is the bit beginning, "Ill fares the land, to hastening ills a prey" that has been lodged into our heritage of rhetoric.
Should John Dillon, the IFA president, need a prompt, the poem has just been republished by Gallery Press, (€18.95 hardback; €10 pbk) with drawings, sometimes ironic, by Longford artist Blaise Drummond and an introduction by Vona Groarke, also a poet of the county. Indeed, she was born "two fields away from Lissoy parsonage", the childhood setting borrowed for Goldsmith's angry parable.
Her introduction echoes John Montague and Declan Kiberd in insisting on the poem's continuing and urgent relevance, as traditional rural communities are swamped by dormitory estates and golf courses are made from redundant farms. "Where wealth accumulates and men decay. . ."
• Details from Deirdre.Hennigan@ucd.ie