Stones of Aran

by Tim Robinson

  However, having misled myself this far, I might as well cross the crag, climb the wall into Bóthar an Screigín, and follow it southwards, uphill, and then scramble across the head of the ravine south of the turlough. Here, with shocking suddenness, one is at the brink, and the vastness of the ocean rushes to one’s feet. Only a crack in the ground, a long step, separates the land from the top of a hundred-foot high rock-stack, An Aill Bhriste, the broken cliff, still leaning in arrested collapse as it was when I wrote about it ten years ago. Evidently the same major joints running across the island that guided the formation of the ravine also define this projecting buttress of the cliffs. Nearby to the west must be Poll Talún, the hole in the ground that opens like a skylight into the roof of a huge undercutting of the cliff, giving a dizzy vertical view of breakers a hundred feet below. In Pilgrimage I gave the legend of the fox that had its lair on a ledge of this cavern’s roof, which it reached by swinging by its jaws from a fern growing in the hole. Now I would like to revisit the place and add a few details to the story. According to an old Cois Fharraige story-teller recorded in the 1920s, this fox was brought across from Connemara. Some boatmen who were loading turf at Barr Roisín in Ros an Mhíl saw the fox lying on a wall, apparently dead, and they threw it in on the turf, intending to show it to any Aran fishermen they might meet—sheer malevolence, this, for it is unlucky to see a fox when going fishing; an old curse says:

  A fox on your line,

  A hare on your bait,

  And may you kill no fish

  Until St. Brigid’s day.

  But as soon as they made fast at the quay in Cill Rónaín, the fox jumped ashore and ran off to Gort na gCapall, where it left neither duck nor goose alive that night. When the villagers discovered the slaughter the next morning, they borrowed a pack of hounds from the O’Flaherty of Cill Mhuirbhigh and hunted the fox. The hounds pursued it so hotly that, when it ran to the cliff and swung itself down by a briar (in this version), they plunged over the brink, and were dead before they hit the water. The next day the fox raided Eochaill, and another pack of hounds was lost in the same way, but this time a man in a currach below saw how the fox escaped. Bun Gabhla lost its fowl next, and the men from that village came and cut through the briar except for a bit of its skin, and hunted the fox with hounds borrowed from Inis Meáin. And when the fox swung on the briar, it broke, the fox fell, and the hounds went down with it.

  But where is the site of this disturbing little fable? Revisiting in 1991, I walked along the cliff-top looking for it, two or three hundred yards west of the rock-arch and, as I remember, about thirty feet in from the edge. Failing to find it, I walked on around the bay, and looked back. A great rim of the cliff, about a hundred and fifty yards long, had fallen, and lay piled in gigantic rubble heaps below. The fox’s hole no longer exists, and a page has been torn out of my book. The Atlantic has bitten into the island’s neck like a stoat, and will in time consume it all. Aran is a dying moment.

  GOLD AND WATER

  The hillside gently rising westwards from the turlough is so full of the vaguely wonderful, the ghosts of stories half forgotten and half reinvented, dateless ruins foundering in blackberry bushes, crooked paths to dreams of buried treasure, that before broaching it I should establish its prosaic chief landmark. This is the old reservoir a quarter of a mile up the slope, a squat truncated pyramid of sombre masonry, infinitely preferable to the dull concrete slabbishness of the new tanks below it. Water supply has always been a problem in this leaky little island, and nowadays, what with the islanders’ own appreciation of washing machines and bathrooms, and the tourists’ natural expectation of showers, public toilets and well-swilled beer glasses, more and more storage tanks have had to be constructed here and there, and the lovely otherness of Aran is squandered as if it were an inexhaustible resource. The old reservoir, built in 1956, is a good-looking structure though; it gazes with Egyptian solemnity back across the valley and the centuries to Dún Dúchathair, the “black fort,” which from this height shows itself in profile against a brilliant vista of sea and the distant hills of Clare.

  A boreen angles up the cliff at the north-western corner of the turlough and crosses the terrace above it, by the new reservoir, to the next scarp, where there is a spring and a small pump-house which is sometimes muttering away to itself as one passes, driving water further up to the old reservoir. This area is called An Carna (which must relate somehow to the word carn, a mound or cairn or height), and there is a song, “Uisce Glan an Charna,” about the bringing of “the clean water of An Carna” from here to the cottages of Cill Éinne through “beautiful pipes of white plastic”; its composer, old Antoine Ó Briain, used to sing it in Fitz’s pub ar an sean-nós in the traditional, modal, semi-tonal, nasal, “old style” which reports all events, from the mundane to the tragic, with the same timeless dolefulness. Here he is describing work in progress on laying the pipes:

  Nuair a thosaigh siad ar dtús air,

  When they first began

  Bhí na bóithre cumhanga,

  The roads were very narrow

  ‘S bhí an chontúirt go han-mhór

  And it was very dangerous

  Dul thar na trinnsí.

  Going by the trenches.

  Dá mbeadh fear ann a bheadh óltach,

  If a man was drunk

  Le fuisce nó le pórtar,

  With whiskey or with porter

  Ba mhór an chontúirt báis dó,

  He risked a deadly danger

  Nó giorrú lena shaol.

  Or shortening of his life.

  ‘S nuair a tháinig siad Cill Éinne,

  And when they reached Cill Éinne

  ‘Gus thosaigh siad a’ pléascadh,

  And began the blasting

  Bhí claidheachaí ‘s geataí réabtha,

  Walls and gates were shattered

  ‘Gus binneana na dtithe;

  And the houses’ gables.

  Na mná siúd a bhí pósta

  And the married women

  Tá siad scannraithe fós ann,

  They are frightened still

  Nuair a théadh na clocha ‘n airde

  From the flying stones

  ‘S iad a’ tutim ar an tslinn …

  That were falling on the roofslates …

  And so on.

  During this great work heaps of periwinkle-and limpet-shells were turned up around the site of the pump-house, the refuse of an old settlement. The local tradition is that during a cholera epidemic (of 1832, if it is the one recorded in newspaper reports) the sick were sent off to live here in little botháin or huts, the stones of which can be glimpsed here and there among the roots of elder-bushes under the scarp. But at some much earlier date An Carna was an ecclesiastical settlement. In the centre of a field opposite the pump-house are the remains of two rectangular buildings, one reduced to its foundations and the other, said to be a church, collapsed except for a five-foot-high fragment of neat unmortared masonry in its east gable. There is no record of the original name of this church—its present name, Cill Charna, or Kilchorna as it appears on OS maps, derives merely from the name of the area—but there are reasons, too tenuous and tedious to rehearse here, for thinking that it might be an otherwise unknown Cill na Manach, the church of the monks, listed among the churches of Aran by Archbishop O’Cadhla in the 1650s. When O’Donovan was investigating on behalf of the Ordnance Survey in 1839, a six-foot-high cross-inscribed pillar-stone stood about forty paces south-west of the church. His artist assistant William Wakeman sketched it—a beautiful piece of work in Early Christian style, with a Latin cross drawn in outline above a circle containing the sort of X-shaped pattern one learns as a child to make with a pair of compasses. In the 1940s this stone was recorded as lying broken in the ruins of the church, but unless it is buried under fallen stone and moss it must have been carried off since then.

  I met the owner of this plot once when I was mapping my way around this hillside; it was as if he had b
een waiting with all his lore at the ready for me to come by. He showed me around the field, which at first glance was rather bare but in which he disclosed marvels, though it was a little difficult to attend to it all with his two bullocks staging a mock bullfight with the brightly coloured shoulder-bag in which I had my camera. Most of what he knew, he had from his grandfather and father (who would have been one hundred and three if he had lived, he told me, as if proud of this posthumous longevity). Once when he was young he began to shift one of the flags lying near the church, and an old man working in a field higher up shouted to him to stop, because they were gravestones. Maybe because it is holy ground, it is the most fertile field in Aran; it can be grazed eight or nine times a year, and in summer if it is grazed bare it can be grazed again in two weeks’ time. It has never been tilled, yet the white clover grows in it, “however it got there!” He showed me a big quern-stone, a flat disc of granite, lying in the long grass, and told me that Donnellan the teacher had taken off another one to his house in Cill Éinne. There used to be a stone here that people used to visit to pray for a change in the wind, to their own advantage or to spite a neighbour, but the parish priest came and stopped this pagan practice by breaking it up. He pointed me to the holy well under the cliff two fields south of the church—afterwards I fought my way to it down a tiny róidín filled head-high with hazel, brambles and nettles. It is dry now and has not been visited for decades, and the pot of gold said to be buried near it has never been found.

  A fold of the hillside above the reservoir, called Fán an Uisce, the slope of the water, holds another legend of buried gold. A Cill Rónáin woman called Peggy once dreamed that there was treasure hidden there. She told her husband, and he went off one night with two other men to dig it up. They had with them torches made out of tin cans fitted with long wire handles and filled with turf ash soaked in paraffin oil. They were working away in the gully with shovels and crowbars when Peggy’s husband stopped to ask how the money was to be divided. “Equal halves!” said the others, but he held out for an extra share for his wife, and they began to fight. The noise woke the birds roosting in the bushes behind them, which rushed out into the light of the torches and gave the men such a scare they all ran home thinking the fairies were after them.

  That is one version of the story, so prosaic it could be the truth. Here is another, to which a number of scraps of folklore have attached themselves, as if it were ripening and would become a well-rounded folktale in a few generations more, if grandson could still hear grandfather over the ravings of the television set. One night a man who lived at the top of the old road in Cill Rónáin was visited by the ghost of a Spaniard called Mac an Bhaird (!). He said he had been guarding a treasure in Fán an Uisce for seven hundred years, and the Aran man could have it if he went for it by himself and either at midnight or at twelve o’clock of a Sunday morning. Since twelve o’clock was the time of Sunday Mass in those days, the man was afraid to go. But the Spaniard appeared again one night, and told him he could take anything he liked with him in the way of holy water or his rosary beads, but that he must go alone, and that if he did not, a redheaded man from Eochaill would get the treasure. That decided him, but since he was frightened of going alone he told the village tailor and another man, and one night they set off. Halfway across Creig an Chosáin they had a terrible fight because the tailor demanded a share for his wife, who had nothing to do with the matter, but they made up their differences and went on to Fán an Uisce. While they were “rooting” there, they looked round and saw that the bushes at the end of the gully were on fire, and they ran off in a fright, expecting the devil to appear at any moment.

  It was Dara Mullen, the postman, who gave me this more elaborate version of the tale. I often used to meet him on his rounds when I was mapping the island; as he drove by we would exchange respectful salutes like two knights whose quests cross, and then when he was delivering the mail to our house in Fearann an Choirce he would report to M on my progress: “He’s measuring the road back in Cill Éinne!” Dara was Aran’s chief channel of information, island-long, carrying as much old lore as news of the moment, and retailing all with the same sardonic grin. Sometimes he would stop beside me on the road, wind down his window and tell me tales that seemed absurd but that turned out to have something in them. Once he kept me bowed to listen so long that when I straightened up I had a twinge in the back, as if I had shouldered a too-heavy post-bag of messages from the past.

  Having heard so much about this treasure hunt I got Dara to guide me to the site of the adventure. From his house, close to where the man in the story lived at the top of “the old road” running up west from Joe Watty’s pub in Cill Rónaín, we crossed nearly a mile of crag by an old right-of-way which I would never have found by myself, as some of the stiles in the field walls are blocked up and hardly identifiable. This debouched by Creig an Chosáin, the crag of the path, into Bóthar na gCrag just north of An Carna. We turned up the hill there, leaving behind us the rubbish dump with its pennant of scavenging seagulls, the furthest intrusion to date of our century into the island’s core of confabulating stone. The region we entered there is likened by my memory to Dara himself, almost skeletally sombre but winking with glints of mirth.

  On the left of the road where it cuts and ramps its way up the first scarp is a little nook, almost a cave, in the cliff-face, called Pluais an Ghréasaí, the den of the cobbler, and a spring, Tobar Ghréasaí na Scilleacha, the well of the cobbler of the shillings. If you succeed in catching a leprechaun he will promise you the shilling in his purse, but he is sure to find some way of tricking you into taking your eyes off him for an instant, and escaping with his shilling. Oddly enough Dara did not know these particular place-names, which I have from another islander, and whether they are in fact connected with a leprechaun tale is more than the latter is prepared to assert. For Dara, the steep rise here was Carcair na gCat, the slope of the cats, and again it is from another source that I hear that Carcair na gCat was a fairy dwelling—for I have reconstituted this hillside, this hinterland of Nod, out of many fragmentary testimonies.

  The level above this first scarp is called An Coinleach, the stubble field, and it is indeed rather less uncultivable than the great crags below, though nobody has tilled any of its fields in recent years. A boreen branches to the south here, gets up onto the next step of the hillside, and twists and turns for nearly a mile, following now the warp and now the woof of the field-pattern, working south-westwards towards the great cliffs, but then stopping short as if bewildered within sound of the ocean. Fán an Uisce is a long gully beside its penultimate southwards tack. We stood on a wall and looked down into it. The spoil-heaps of the treasure hunters are still to be seen; the blazing bushes, where the path twists across the south end of the gully, are still to be imagined. It was a peerless evening. The tide was very high in the bay a mile to the east, the sea utterly motionless, the island becalmed in time.

  On our way back Dara stopped for a moment where the boreen angles out of the north end of the gully. This path, he told me, used to be very narrow—it was widened in the thirties—and for a long time the key of a clock lay in it at this corner, and people would take great care to step over without treading on it. I record this because he made a point of telling me about it. If I understood it, I would understand much about this island. It is no doubt the key I have been searching for these many years, up and down the winding paths.

  Though it means a long doubling-back to the bustle of Cill Rónaín, I will follow Bóthar na gCrag further west now, and pick up a few more scattered bones of stories lying about this rumorous hillside. Fortunately the Rocks Road, as it is often called, is too rough for traffic; it usually unwinds in utter quietness apart from one’s own pebbly footfalls and perhaps the wishbone-thin scream of a lapwing overhead. At the scarp above An Coinleach it leaves Cill Rónáin territory—the boundary is a wall not much stouter nor much less crooked than all the others, that comes dog-legging across the island f
rom north to south. A few hundred yards further on is a crossroads; the right hand turn leads eventually to the main road, the left zigzags south-westwards, and after half a mile abandons you among a ragged patchwork of creigeanna or crags and creigeáin, plots hardly to be called fields but not quite as barren as crags. Bóthar na gCrag itself climbs on ahead, eventually to traverse the entire central section of the plateau of Na Craga. It is a good deal wider than the other boreens, and is edged by double walls topped with good-sized blocks of stone, every second one of which is set on edge and stands proud of its neighbours, forming a sort of rustic crenellation that gives the road an official presence. In my early days of enquiring out the island’s history I asked a lady from one of the western villages how long ago the Rocks Road had been built. She looked rather mystified, and said, with a smile at herself, that she had supposed it was there since the beginning of the world. Later on I came across a reference to it having been “built by Balfour” in 1891. Arthur Balfour was at that time Chief Secretary for Ireland. So this remote road, emanating from Westminster via Dublin Castle, was part of the network of measures with which the Government sought to placate the desperation of the West; it was a “relief work,” built by hungry men, and one could see those crenellations as marking off the hours before they got their feed of Indian meal.