The Rule of the Land by Garrett Carr

Author:Garrett Carr [Garrett Carr]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780571313365
Publisher: Faber & Faber
Published: 2017-03-04T16:00:00+00:00

A Peak, a Pot, a Tunnel

I’ve heard it in Belfast, been told it in Dublin: there are smugglers’ tunnels under the border. Nobody can say exactly where. They haven’t seen them personally – they don’t live near the border. But they believe in them.

They are wrong. The tunnels are border mythology. The border is potent as an idea but rarely visited; this is a recipe for myths, cooked up between the imagination and a few half-remembered news reports. Tunnels were dug under the Berlin Wall, maybe the idea comes from there, but tunnelling made sense for Berliners in a way it never did for borderlanders. To get from one side of the Wall to the other, you had to beat a narrow strip, saturated with guards, where getting caught could mean getting shot. The stakes were very high and the West was very close. Tunnelling was the obvious answer. Ireland’s border was different. Guarding and patrolling took place over a wide band; a tunnel would have to be miles long to be of use. Moreover, even during the Troubles there were remote stretches without checkpoints. It was much easier to make your crossing there than dig a tunnel. You could simply hack your way through a border hedgerow or lay planks across a border stream.

However, there are natural tunnels under the borderland I’m walking today, it’s an area shot through with subterranean voids and fractures. Rain running down the slopes of Cuilcagh Mountain has bored holes in the soft stone below, creating a hidden network of caves. I’m walking over them, towards the mountain. Cuilcagh rises from miles of heath. North or south of here I could appreciate its length – Cuilcagh is a ridge that looks like a capsized ship – but following the border from the east I am presented only with the bow, its smallest face.

Cropped green grass turns into yellow-grey tufts as I move away from the road. The fields become threadbare then give up and turn to bog. Songbirds fade away; here there are only crows. A rusty yellow digger has been parked halfway into a ditch. The engine lid is ajar and parts have been swiped. A squall of rain passes over and I shelter in the cab, reading the five-year-old magazine I find under the seat.

I set off again. The border moves against the flow of a narrowing stream. I see black fissures in the streambed. The water has run off the mountaintop, which is impermeable sandstone, and here flows across limestone, a soluble rock that gives way to it. Water is sapped through the cracks, down and away. The stream is just a brief horizontal detour on the water’s journey from cloud to water table.

My Ordnance Survey map shows lots of boreholes just over the line in Fermanagh. I succeed in finding one, tugging the heather back from its craggy lip. Its rim is a foot-deep layer of turf and exposed roots, dropping to a void. The floor is a shelf of rock, wet with running water.

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