Stones of Aran

by Tim Robinson

  If the Aran landscape proved worthy of their sensitive natures, most of its human aspects only awoke their patrician and sometimes overwrought sense of humour. Life at the Lodge on the hill, they wrote, had “aspects that were wholly ideal, and aspects that were unreservedly scullion.” Among the latter were the pampootied and beshawled creature that began the “strange, arduous, trifling day” by coming in with a bucket and the monosyllabic announcement: “bath,” and a glance of saturnine amusement at “the weakling of a later civilisation still in bed”; the lack of saucepans, obliging them to boil their eggs in a portly black pot and fish them out with the tongs; the “tall, brindled dogs that gnawed sapless bones in the porch, as in an accustomed sanctuary”; the tactless cuckoo sending its hoarse and hollow cry down the chimney—“Not thus does the spirit voice poise the twin notes in tireless mystery, among the wooded shores of Connemara’s lakes.” Ideal, though, was the outlook from the chief windows across a plain of sea to that beloved homeland:

  When, at some ten of the clock the rooms in the lonely house had passed from gloaming to darkness, and the paraffin lamp glared smokily at the semi-grand piano and the horsehair sofa, the wild and noble outline of Connemara was still sharp, the gleam behind it still a harbourage for the day.

  A fitting hour for the séances it is said they held in the Lodge, but of which they left no record. Perhaps on such evenings they called up Florence Fitzpatrick, so uninformatively memorialized by her relatives, and had her tell her story, or materialized O’Malley of the Hill, to find what manner of man he was. For the Lodge is full of ghosts unamenable to the séances of history.

  THE INVISIBLE TOWER

  Tangible and intangible, the remains of St. Enda’s monastery are all around one, along the track between the Lodge and the village. Three miscellaneous vertical objects form a line leading the eye up the hill to the west: nearest the track, in a hayfield, the shaft of a high cross; on a terrace of the hillside beyond that, the drum-like stump of a round tower; and perched on the crest of the slope, a little oratory, roofless, its two gables sharp against the sky. On the other side of the track, to the east, hummocks and ridges in the grass sketch vague plans of sizeable buildings. A thousand yards beyond them the cemetery by the sea is visible, in which is the church known as Teaghlach Éinne, Enda’s household, half buried in the sand. Ecclesiastical stones are secreted here and there in the village. The sill of a musket-loop in Cromwell’s castle wears a Latin cross as the badge of its previous career; an octagonal wayside pillar lies in the tide below; another cross-inscribed block retrieved by an antiquary schoolmaster decorates the garden of the one-time Teacher’s Residence, together with a few “bullaun stones,” small granite boulders with bowl-shaped hollows, thought to have been used by the monks as mortars. The walls of one or two little haggarts over the road from the castle ruins are draped in clambering hops which may have rambled on since the days when the Franciscan brothers brewed their own beer. Until recent years these leafy vines proved useful to the villager gathering seaweed for his potato-patch, who would lay wads of them on his horse’s back under the wooden straddle to protect its hide from the trickling salt water. Like this relict plant, once the bearer of modest religious indulgence, and the crumbs of fallen churches that serve as doorstops, even the miracle tales which once magnified the saints and through them the Lord are nowadays dedicated to lesser ends, and furnish a couple of lines for a holiday brochure or a joke for tourists in the bar. These fragments—of architecture, life’s modes, ultimate meanings—appeal to the renovating mind. A vast vacant axis, the absence of the round tower from which St. Enda’s bell was rung, centres his scattered patrimony. Reconstruction is as impossible as climbing its spiral stairs of empty air. I begin the task on the eastern rim of the broken circuit, at the chapel foundering in the dunes of the graveyard.

  This outlier of monastic Cill Éinne is a simple rectangular building measuring about nineteen feet by ten inside. All of it is present save the roof, and perhaps it survived the Cromwellians’ depradations because of its distance from Arkin Castle. In the eastern gable-wall is a narrow little window of Early Christian style, its round head formed in a single stone. Clearly this end of the church dates from a time when stone churches were so new an idea, at least in Aran, that their builders were still constrained by the forms of wooden structures, for the side-walls are continued six inches or so beyond the gable-wall to form a pillar running up either side of it like the corner-post of a wooden chapel. These “antae,” as they are called, may not have been totally superfluous features, though, as they could have supported the barge-boards or end-timbers of a wooden roof projecting over the gables and giving them some shelter from rain. This east gable and part of the north wall are of very large slabs set on edge (one of them is a good ten feet long), and in general appear to be very early. Professor Waddell of Galway suggests the ninth century, whereas Peter Harbison thinks there is little evidence that any of the Aran churches are earlier than the twelfth century, and mortar from the masonry of the old part of Teaghlach Éinne has recently been radio-carbon-dated to the eleventh or twelfth century. There is a small round-headed window near the eastern end of this wall, and the big squarish slab in the wall under it under it carries an Old Irish inscription: OROIT AR SCANDLAN, a prayer for Scandlan. The window looks later than the one in the gable, and perhaps there was some reconstruction of the chapel even in this early phase, for the inscribed slab has evidently been moved and is set on its side so that the inscription runs vertically, with scant regard for Scandlan. The present ground-level outside the church lies above this slab, but in recent times the sand has been dug out from in front of it so that the inscription can be read.

  The rest of the church is of the more easily handled blocks indicative of a later period, when perhaps common-sense had prevailed over the zeal that drove the early monks to megalithic excesses. The door, at the west end of the north wall, belongs to this later westward expansion of the church and has a slightly pointed arch of late medieval style, each side of which is a single curved stone. Two square-topped window openings also belong to the same period, one in the south wall and another in the west gable. The date of this enlargement of the church could well be 1666, when the last of the great chieftains of Connemara was buried here. He was Sir Morough O’Flaherty of Bunowen Castle, known in Irish as Murchadh na Mart, Morough of the “beeves” or fatted cattle. For his part in the rebellion of 1641 Sir Morough had been dispossessed of his vast estates, and he retired to Aran where he died in poverty. He must have been witness of the final desolation of St. Enda’s monastery, the long-deserted buildings of which had recently been quarried for stone to rebuild the castle at Cill Éinne. Perhaps the already ancient church in the graveyard was also disused by that time, and he thought to save it by having it reconstructed as his mortuary chapel.

  Since then both the Early Christian and late medieval portions of Teaghlach Éinne have been progressively overwhelmed by blowing sand. Nowadays the door is largely below ground-level, and until recent years one had to scramble down a steep hollow to enter, inevitably followed by avalanching sand-grains. Left to itself the interior would fill like an hourglass in a decade or two. During an archaeological investigation of the church in 1984, the Office of Public Works took a commonsensical stand against this process and had a trench dug all round the church, robbing it of a most evocative feature, the timescape seen through its little south window of the layered depths of sand blocking it on the outside.

  If the light is right as one enters the church, certain shallow markings in a block at head-height just west of the door may catch the eye. This block is a little pillar-like cross-slab which as recently as 1952 was standing inside the church and has been recycled to fill the place of a missing quoin-stone, without respect for the sacred symbol on it, which now lies horizontally. The grooves forming its linear cross and the two concentric circles around the junction of the arms and shaft are as simple as fingertip tracings on sea-washed sand.
Another small slab like this one, but with a single-ringed cross on either face, was found partly underlying a modern grave-surround near the church in the course of the 1984 investigations. Despite their great age, such Early Christian cross-inscribed slabs, of which there are about twenty to be seen in and around Aran’s churches, have the freshness of works from the first decade of modern abstract art, and in one or two of them Kandinsky would have recognized a spiritual fervour behind the ingenuous charm of their oddly balanced crosses and circles.

  Other figured stones rescued from the village have been assembled in the church. Some are cemented into the simple altar under the east window, and one of these has a spiral motif incised in it which is dark from the touch of hands lifted to it in prayer. Another has a rudimentary Latin cross and, in the four quarters into which this divides most of its surface, these cryptic syllables (reading clockwise): BENT, DIE, F AN, and SCAN. Expanded according to the customary rules of such time-saving messages to eternity, this says “Bendacht die for ainm Sanctan” God’s blessing on the soul of Sanctan. This stone was found face-down in the church in 1936 by Cill Éinne’s national schoolteacher, James Donnellan. (I mention such facts, if I happen to know them, not out of pedantry but in recognition of the way in which the patina of history is built up of individual fingerprints.)

  Just inside the door the same schoolmaster assembled three fragments of a high cross, cemented together one above the other to make a little pillar. Two of these were rescued by the Aran doctor, O’Brien, when they were on site for use in the building of cottages in Cill Éinne, where they had long been lying in the ruins of the castle—and so this is at least their fourth phase of existence. The other was found, heavily whitewashed, built into a cottage garden-wall. They have been shown to belong to the cross-shaft in the field below the round tower, which itself is not in its original (and unknown) location. One of these fragments has the figure of a horse and rider in relief on it, blackened like the spiral in the altar by the hands of people kneeling in prayer beside it. It would be interesting to know what meanings have been seen or felt in this motif over the centuries, for it has been suggested that it bore a very definite ideological charge when the cross was carved. According to a study by Liam de Paor this fragmentary cross shares a number of characteristics with the high crosses in two ecclesiastical centres of north Clare, Kilfenora and Dysart O’Dea. The styles of the abstract and animal ornamentation on it are close enough to those of the Kilfenora crosses to suggest that they are by the same hand or at least from the same workshop; for instance a particular square labyrinth-pattern on the part of the cross-shaft near the round tower also occurs on what is called the West Cross at Kilfenora, but is unknown outside this group. Below this square fret on the Cill Éinne shaft is a panel filled by four scrolls, which on close examination one can make out to be coiled-up animals with little ears and large jaws; and below this again is a purely abstract panel of shell-like spirals; these motifs are Scandinavian in origin, and may indicate that the mason had connections with the Scandinavian-influenced areas of northern Britain. Earlier high crosses such as those at Kells and Clonmacnois usually had their surfaces divided into a number of panels illustrating scriptural incidents, but this local group of limestone crosses are of a late eleventh-or twelfth-century type in which one face carries a large figure of the crucified Christ, and in a number of cases the other side figures an equally large clerical figure, as in the famous Doorty Cross at Kilfenora. (And since Dr. de Paor’s article, Françoise Henry has published a tentative reconstruction of the Cill Éinne cross, in which the missing central portion has a crucified Christ on one side and an ecclesiastic with a crozier on the other; most of this portion is missing, but hints towards it remain on the other fragments.) Whether the cleric represents a bishop or a pope (the experts disagree) his authoritarian stance may reflect the reforms in church administration initiated by Pope Gregory VII, under which the abbots of the ancient monastic foundations lost their power over church affairs to the bishops in their sees. The figure of the mounted horseman is also known from east Scotland, and reoccurs on the Doorty cross, where it seems to be riding over a church-like building. Given the apocalyptic terms in which the Gregorian reformers fulminated against monkish laxity, this may represent the terrible rider of the Apocalypse of St. John, who will tread out “the winepress whose wine is the avenging anger of Almighty God.”

  A fragment of another high cross was found under about two feet of sand just east of the church by Conleth Manning, director of the 1984 investigations. It consists of the central and upper portion of the cross plus one arm, with part of the ring that linked the arms and shaft. On one side is an abstract interlace ornament and on the other a crucifixion, both carved in relief. A naive Christ with a big doll-like head occupies the hub of the cross, and on the surviving arm of the cross is a peculiar little manikin crouched under Christ’s outstretched hand, holding a pole with a cup on it: Stephaton, the Roman soldier who offered Christ the sponge. Only the head and arm survive of his traditionally opposite number, Longinus, who is thrusting his spear into Christ’s side. This is the only known example of a high cross in which these two attendant figures are placed on the arms so that the crucifixion scene spans the full width of the cross-piece. The prominence of the crucifixion again suggests the twelfth century. Most probably there were several such high crosses around the monastery. Originally they would have been painted, and in the severe Aran light they must have been very dominating presences. But to my mind, and even disregarding the tentative interpretation of the late crosses of Clare and Aran in terms of the imposition of diocesan structures, high crosses in general are unlovely assertions of authority. What is most worth saving from the sands of time of the spirit of Cill Éinne is the metaphysical wit of the earlier cross-inscribed slabs.

  Four churches have totally vanished from the core of the Cill Éinne settlement; their exact sites are unknown but, thanks to the devotion of two churchmen and the intervention of pure chance, their names have been preserved. During the early years of the 1640s John Colgan, a Franciscan teacher in the University of Louvain, was labouring to fulfil a command to collect the lives of the Irish saints. Fr. Colgan wrote up all the saints with feast-days in January, February and March, but never took this systematic attack further. Fortunately St. Enda’s day is the 21st of March. At about the same time the Archbishop of Tuam and Confederate leader, Dr. Malachy O’Cadhla, made a list of the churches of his archdiocese, as if he foresaw his own defeat and death in battle in 1645 and the great levelling of churches that was to follow the Cromwellian victory. The diligent Colgan had obtained from Dr. O’Cadhla the relevant part of his list of churches, which he appended to the Life of St. Enda and which is the only part of the list to have survived. So, in Acta Sanctorum Hiberniae (Louvain, 1645) we nave the following, from “a tabular description of the churches of the diocese of Tuam, lately transmitted to us, and faithfully written by the most illustrious lord Malachias Quaelaeus, archbishop of Tuam, a man distinguished for his zeal in religion, and endowed with every virtue; extracted as they lie”:

  1. The parish church (to wit of the first island) commonly called Kill-Enda, lies in the county of Galway and the half barony of Aran; and in it St. Endeus, or Enna, is venerated as patron, on the 21st of March.

  2. The church called Teglach-Enda, to which is annexed a cemetery, wherein is the sepulchre of St. Endeus; with one hundred and twenty-seven other sepulchres, wherein none but saints were ever buried.

  3. The church called Tempull mac Longa, dedicated to St. Mac Longius, is situated near the parish church, which is called sometimes Kill-enda, that is the cella or cell of St. Endeus, and sometimes Tempull mor Enda, or the great church of Endeus.

  4. The church called Tempull mic Canonn, near the aforesaid parish church.

  5. The church called of St. Mary, not far from the same parish church.

  6. The church which is named Tempull Benain, or the Temple of St. Benignus.

  �
�� and the list continues with seven other churches further east in the island, two in Inis Meáin, and three churches and a former monastery in Inis Oírr.

  The second of the Cill Éinne churches on this list is (in modern Irish) Teaghlach Éinne, and the sixth is Teampall Bheannáin, the little oratory on the skyline to the west. Of the missing churches, three would have belonged to the ancient monastery: the parish church, Cill Éinne, from which the village takes its name, and two presumably smaller chapels close to it. The “Mac Longius” to whom one of these was dedicated might be the same as the St. Mac Luagna, mentioned by Colgan as a brother of St. Ciaráin and the successor of St. Enda as abbot. Equally dubiously, the “Mac Canonn” of the other chapel might have some connection with St. Gregory of Inis Meáin, who is known in Connemara as St. Ceannan or Ceannanach.

  The fourth missing church, St. Mary’s, must have been the chapel of the Franciscans’ monastery, for the old annals of the order state that it was sub vocatione Sanctae Mariae Virginis et omnium Sanctorum. Very little has been recorded of the history of the Franciscans in Aran, except that they came in 1485, probably under the patronage of the O’Briens, and that they were of the Third Order. Perhaps they took over the buildings of St. Enda’s foundation, which may have been deserted by that date. O’Flaherty supposes that the line of St. Enda’s successors in Aran continued unbroken to “the time of the suppression of abbeys,” i.e. the reign of Henry VIII (who was declared King of Ireland in 1541), but the last of these successors he found mentioned in his sources (lost, it seems, to us) was “Donatus O’Leyn, abbot of Aran, Anno Domini 1400.” Long before Henry’s time, though, the abbeys of the old Gaelic church, torn between the English colony and the resurgent Gaelic chiefdoms, were in decline, and by the early sixteenth century both Clonmacnois and Ardagh were almost deserted and open to the sky, and the word of God had been largely abandoned to the vigorous hands of the friars of the European orders. When the Franciscans came to Aran they may have found St. Enda’s sunk in weeds and torpor; in 1506 their report was that “in the islands of Aran of the Saints… things of the church are neglected and there is ignorance of Christian doctrines.” Nothing seems to be known about their monastery thereafter until 1629, when it was recorded as being deserted. In 1645 there were monks here again, under the rule of a Fr. Gaspar Fonte. He was among the priests held prisoner in Aran by the Cromwellians after their triumph in 1652, and probably saw the quarrying of his monastery for stone to rebuild the castle. After the Restoration in 1660 the Franciscans returned, using what buildings we do not know, and their abbots are recorded down to a Fr. Proinsias Bodkin in 1697. The Penal Laws must have driven them out after that, for although abbots were appointed down to 1717 none of them took up the office.