Achill-henge is joyfully mad

I’M just back from Achill, a wet windy outpost of mountains and cliffs, where it gets dark later than anywhere else in Europe.

On the map, Ireland’s largest island resembles a hand gun pointed at America. With 87% of it covered in blanket bog, you wouldn’t expect Achill to figure on the world stage but you’d be wrong. Its adopted sons include a famous painter, a great English novelist and a Nobel Prize winning giant of German literature. Sir John Franklin stayed with the Achill Mission shortly before his tragic attempt to find the North West Passage. The island first came to public attention when a fanatical cleric arrived in the 19th Century. That story wasn’t finally put to bed until last year, when Catholic and Church of Ireland bishops prayed over the unmarked graves of 190 ‘soupers’.

The island’s latest controversy concerns ‘Achill-henge’, (insert, right) a circle of pre-cast concrete slabs resembling the famous structure on Salisbury Plain. Planning authorities want it removed. However, according to an article in The Mayo News, scientist-musician Richard Brock thinks it ‘could yield valuable clues to musical archaeologists’. Tests he carried out show that ‘echoes of sound made in the centre of the mass concrete circle create a dome of sound in much the same way as the original Stonehenge.

The wildlife too has a dramatic history. ‘Achill’ means ‘eagle’ but both the golden and white-tailed species were exterminated in the 19th century. Marine creatures also suffered. Whaling stations opened on Inishkea and Blacksod in 1909 and 1910. When operations were suspended at the outbreak of war in 1914, over 700 whales had been caught within a 100km radius. The slaughter resumed briefly in 1920 but, by then, the industry had moved to Antarctica. Happily, Achill’s cliffs now offer excellent whale-watching.

During the 1950s and 1960s, a basking shark fishery operated from Keem Bay. Over-exploited, the Atlantic’s largest fish was absent for several decades. Now it’s back and in good numbers. The Irish records for porbeagle and blue shark were made off Achill. Thirty-four fish species have been recorded. With so little arable land, fishing has been a mainstay of the island diet, perhaps for 5,000 years; there’s a fine megalithic tomb just off the road between Doogort and Keel.

The Reverend Edward Nangle began his ‘Achill Mission’ in 1831. He learned Irish so that he could talk to the locals whom he regarded as pagans. The Catholic Archbishop of Tuam, John McHale, rowed in against ‘these venomous fanatics’. “There is no place outside of hell which more enrages the Almighty”, he said of the island. During the great famine of the 1840s, Nangle’s enemies accused him of refusing food to starving Catholics unless they converted to Protestantism. Many ‘took the soup’ but, in fact, food was distributed by the Mission to people of all persuasions. Indian meal was imported from America, blight-free potatoes were planted and employment given to thousands. There are conflicting accounts as to whether the ‘deserted village’ was abandoned then or decades later. The old ‘lazy beds’, and some fine quartzite boulders, can still be seen among the roofless shells of a hundred tiny homes. The proselytising tradition continues; on the beach at Keel last week, evangelists tried to persuade holiday-makers to repent of their wicked ways.

Achill has been a Mecca for German tourists ever since a famous novelist fell in love with the place. Heinrich Böll, who died in 1985, lived there during the 1950s and 60s. His travelogue, Irish Journal, published in 1949, put Ireland on the map for his fellow countrymen, although he blotted his copybook somewhat with a documentary film entitled Children of Éire. Five decades later, I can still remember some of its hilarious sequences. Böll, whose house is now a residency for artists and writers, translated some of Synge’s and Shaw’s writings into German. The Playboy of the Western World may have been based on an incident which took place on Achill. Graham Greene wrote The Heart of Matter, while on a protracted visit. The novel had the distinction of being banned in Ireland. Paul Henry, whose maternal grandfather was a minister of the Achill Mission, painted his Launching the curragh at Keem.

Should Achill-henge be removed? Maybe it’s a stroke of genius? Who knows? Perhaps it should be left alone.