Three of the
national treasures listed in
Ithaca are in the west,
near Galway. Countless paintings, postcards, and posters have
featured the dramatic "
cliffs of Moher," southwest of the
Burren in County Clare. Running for nearly 10 miles along the
coast and dropping hundreds of feet vertically into the North
Atlantic, they give one a sense of coming to the abrupt, jagged
end of the earth.
The "
windy wilds of Connemara" lie some 40 miles farther
north on the same rugged coast. A cultural region in the western
part of County Galway, Connemara has stony land, poor people,
winds perpetually promising rain or snow, and the largest
Gaeltacht in Ireland. It is
famous for its rare green-veined "
Connemara marble,"
mentioned in
Cyclops. That chapter also mentions the "
Connemara
hills," and
Oxen of the Sun refers to "
the
wilds of Connemara."
Directly between these two sites, at the mouth of Galway Bay,
lie the three famous "
islands of Aran," another
stronghold of the Irish language. Beginning in 1898
John Millicent Synge spent
several summers on these remote islands, soaking up the rhythms
of western speech that came to suffuse his six plays. Joyce
himself visited Aran with Nora in 1912 and wrote two Italian
newspaper articles about its islands, which continue to hold
huge appeal for tourists from Ireland and around the world.
Three more inspiring sites are in the north, starting with "lough
Neagh with submerged petrified city." This freshwater
lake shared by Counties Antrim, Tyrone, Armagh, Down, and
Londonderry is the largest anywhere in Ireland or Britain, and
its extensive "banks," mentioned in Thomas Moore's Let
Erin Remember the Days of Old, are one of the Irish
glories said to be embroidered on the Citizen's impossibly
crowded handkerchief. Ithaca recalls one of several
old legends about the lake's origins: Gerald of Wales' Topographia
Hiberniae (ca. 1188) reports that it formed when
someone neglected to replace the lid covering an ancient
city's freshwater spring. The entire city was drowned, and
Gerald reports that on calm days fishermen can see tall round
"ecclesiastical towers" rising up from the lake bottom.
Moore's poem mentions these round towers as well.
Some 20 miles east of the lake lies "the Queen's Island
shipyard in Belfast," a massive manmade island (nearly
200 acres) occupied for many generations by shipbuilders
Harland and Wolff. Originally called Dargan's island for the
man who directed the dredging and filling operation, the land
became Queen's Island in 1849 after Victoria paid a visit to
Belfast. As the chief builder for the White Star Line, Harland
& Wolff produced the famous trio of Olympic-class
ocean liners: RMS Olympic (launched 1911), RMS Titanic
(launched 1912), and RMS Brittanic (launched 1914). Eumaeus
repeatedly evokes icebergs
and large ships in
ways that suggest the Titanic disaster. In recent
decades, a large chunk of the island has been renamed the
Titanic Quarter and given over to developments encouraging the
tourist trade.
North of Lough Neagh, on the coast of County Antrim, is "the
Giant's Causeway," a spectacular formation of some
40,000 hexagonal basalt columns stretching from a seaside
cliff northward into the water. Legend has it that Finn
MacCumhaill (a giant in this story, though not elsewhere) laid
them down to walk across the sea and fight a Scottish giant
who had taunted him from across the narrow strait. The
Causeway remains a major tourist draw today, contributing
mightily to the economy of Northern Ireland. Over one million
people visited it in 2017, bringing nearly half a billion
pounds of revenue into the north coast region.
Three more sites on Ithaca's list can be found in the
southwestern part of Ireland, near Cork. "Fort Camden and
Fort Carlisle" are coastal defense fortifications (now
renamed Forts Meagher and Davis) guarding the great natural
harbor at Queenstown (now Cobh), just beyond Cork on the
southwest coast. The forts face one another on headlands on
either side of a narrow strait, dominating access to the
harbor. In Eumaeus, the garrulous sailor who
says his name is Murphy says also that he comes from a town
called Carrigaloe and challenges his listeners to say where
that is. Stephen correctly identifies the town as being in
"Queenstown harbour," and Murphy confirms his answer by
bragging about a local claim to fame: "That's right, the
sailor said. Fort Camden and Fort Carlisle. That's
where I hails from. I belongs there. That's where I hails
from."
Some 40 or 50 miles northeast of Cork lies "the Golden
Vale of Tipperary" (sometimes called the golden "vein"),
a stretch of rich pastureland north of the Galtee Mountains
that occupies parts of Counties Tipperary, Limerick, and Cork.
It is about 15 miles long and half that wide. The adjective
"golden" may refer to the fertility of its soil, said to be
the richest in Ireland, or it could be a corruption of Gowlin
(Irish An Gabhailín), a village that itself is now
called Golden. Pastures and dairy farms fill the valley.
West of Cork, some 50 or 60 miles away in County Kerry, are "the
lakes of Killarney," set in a low valley surrounded by
mountains. This varied and spectacularly beautiful landscape
is now protected as Killarney National Park. Its three "lovely
lakes" are mentioned also in Cyclops. In Wandering
Rocks Stephen sees a Pocket Guide to Killarney
on a bookseller's cart, and Gabler's edition places a copy of
The Beauties of Killarney on Bloom's bookshelf in Ithaca.
The perpetual appeal of this area, largely wild but also
comfortably human-scaled, makes the nearby town of Killarney a
touristic hellhole in the summer months.
Finally, the list mentions three natural attractions close to
Dublin. The "pastures of royal Meath" are another rich
stretch of agricultural land in County Meath, named for the
ancient Kingdom of Meath which for many centuries was the seat
of the High King. These attractive green rolling hills around
the River Boyne, several miles northwest of Dublin, are
studded with sites of archeological interest: the Hill of
Tara, megalithic passage tombs like the one at Newgrange, and
many other artifacts of the Neolithic age, including mounds,
henges, cairns, and tombs.
"Brigid's elm in Kildare" is a puzzle. It is said that
in the late 5th century St. Brigid, one of three patron saints
of Ireland, lived in a cell beneath a large tree and founded a
famous religious house there, possibly in the vicinity of what
is now the town of Kildare, 30 miles southwest of Dublin. But
the tree was not an elm—the town and county name derive from
the Irish Cilldara, "Church of the Oak"—and if any
such tree has survived to become a tourist destination I have
not heard of it. The Citizen's reference in Cyclops to
"the chieftain elm of Kildare with a fortyfoot bole and an
acre of foliage" seems to refer to the same thing but
begs the same questions. If this immense tree exists, no one
seems to have documented its location, and the elm, Gifford
notes, was a "common," not a "chieftain," tree. He infers that
"the one in question was not renowned for the chieftain
associated with it but for St. Brigid, a chieftain's
daughter."
The last of these three eastern sites, "the Salmon Leap,"
is a waterfall on the River Liffey at Leixlip, about 10 miles
west of Dublin on the border of Counties Kildare and Dublin.
The name Leixlip derives from the Norse words lax hlaup, meaning
"salmon leap." Many artists have drawn or painted these low
but picturesque falls.
Ithaca's list of tourist attractions not only evokes
the lands and waters around Ireland's four major cities:
Dublin, Cork, Belfast, and Galway. It also shows the
protagonist of Ulysses taking a good deal more
interest in his native country than does the character whose
meditations conclude Dubliners. Gabriel Conroy dreams
of trips to the Continent, and scorns Gretta's appeals to
visit her native Galway—until the revelation of her interest
in another man convinces him that "The time had come for him
to set out on his journey westward." His thoughts of snow
falling on the Bog of Allen, and the River Shannon, and the
churchyard in Galway where Michael Furey is buried, are
incomparably lyrical, but they are thoughts of death. Gabriel
resolves to go west in a spirit of defeat, feeling that the
loss of his love portends the extinction of his life:
"His own identity was fading out into a grey impalpable world:
the solid world itself which these dead had one time reared
and lived in was dissolving and dwindling."
Ithaca comically presents the possibility of Bloom
becoming an aged, homeless, disrespected beggar, but this
jilted husband does not scorn his native land or dream of
death through snow-misted images. The thought of losing Molly
terrifies him, but he also thinks with characteristic
equanimity that it could present a long-postponed opportunity
to see the world, starting with the wonders of a pretty
remarkable island.
