The Frayed Atlantic Edge by David Gange

Author:David Gange [David Gange]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 2019-05-21T16:00:00+00:00

After reaching Kintyre I restarted my journey from the Irish side of the sliver of water that separates Argyll from Ulster. I walked up Ireland’s northernmost headland, Malin Head, before I rounded it in the kayak. The view was Hebrides and the hills of Lowland Scotland. This was just a slightly different vista on the worlds I’d been moving through for weeks.

The historic significance of this north-west coast of Ireland has been even more unhelpfully underestimated than the Scottish seaboard. Histories of Ireland at sea were long preoccupied with the wealthy ports of the east and south, through which grain was traded and naval power wielded. Documents like state papers encouraged that trend: it was along the seaboards controlled by the Normans and the English, not by those oriented north, that official records proliferated. As Colin Breen, a historian of the Irish coastline, has noted, ‘absence of commentary on the west might suggest to the casual reader that it was largely uninhabited or underdeveloped’.7 Similarly, hosts of books treated Anglo-Irish links as well as Anglo-Scottish ties, but until recently many fewer have explored the far stronger connections between Ireland and Scotland.

Only in recent decades have historians and archaeologists begun to acknowledge that the power, wealth and sophistication of the west coast simply belonged to a different world than south-east Ireland did. Archaeological sites in the south-west reveal more Iberian trade than English. In Donegal webs of Atlantic exchange run northwards. The intellectual innovations of early-medieval Ireland were Donegal developments led by figures such as Colmcille (St Columba) and his later follower Adomnan. It was the Irish clerics they inspired who spiralled outwards on vast oceanic migrations, following geese to Iceland or skirting Scandinavian fjords.

Later, as outsiders exerted increasing control across south-east Ireland, the west conducted its own flourishing seaboard trade, exchanging fish for wine and drawing large levies from visiting fleets. But the quays and ports of the west are tiny, and the oldest structures are buried in newer developments that use the same tides and channels, so archaeologists long learned little of west-coast trade. Fifteenth-century fleets, 600 strong, paid handsomely for access not to grand stone quays and sprawling wooden jetties but to the awesome natural anchorages amid the ragged coast’s complexities. West-coast settlements have now yielded to excavators a wealth of Valencian lustre vessels, Saintonge ware from western France, south Dutch maiolica and even Chinese Ming, showing wealth and global reach long before the seventeenth century when English wares begin to proliferate.

More than any other place on my journey, Ireland and Irish innovations were lynchpins of Atlantic worlds bigger than those my kayak could reach. The Irish brought modernity to the water: it was an Irish master mariner, Robert Halpin, who created the modern global village of instantaneous communication by laying 26,000 miles of ocean cable that ‘tied up the world’; another, Francis Beaufort, gave the world the scale of windspeeds crucial to modern seafarers. They were inheritors of a vast tradition. Ancient Irish kings and corsairs colonised

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