Stones of Aran

by Tim Robinson

  The road backs to the south-west to climb the last of the hill above the crossroads, and on its right here is an area well known as a bruíon or fairy dwelling. An Oatquarter man of two or three generations back, Col Citte, used to say he once heard the sound of milk being churned here, and of keening or wailing for the dead; but it was on a Sunday morning and he was late for Mass, and so he hurried by without investigating. The place is called Clochán an Airgid, the stone hut of the money, and if you leave the road and struggle across four field-walls straight up from the crossroads you might stumble upon the ruins of the clochán in question, sunk among hazel-thickets under the brow of the hill. Enough of its basis is visible among the collapse of its roof to show that it was circular, and about twelve feet across. The idea that there is treasure buried in it has been its ruination; it is nothing but a spoil-heap of frustrated hopes. The stories about the place are so disjointed and faded, though, that collecting them is like trying to read a rain-soaked page found tattered in a thornbush.

  The same is true for another ruin in the vicinity, of which the scarcely decipherable foundations lie in the second field on the right, going north from the crossroads; it is said to have been a church, and for that reason it is left perplexed by undergrowth, but it is otherwise unremarked by tradition, nameless, and unvisited. But here I found out once more how many crossroads of perception there are, in incalculable permutations with those of the physical path. I had come to find this church, of which I had been told by Dara Mullen, and as I was crossing the field to its ruins, as obscure as everything else on this occult hillside, I heard through the whispering of the still summer afternoon something that could have been Col Citte’s otherworldly churning. Falling water is so rare on Na Craga that I did not identify the sound until I saw a recess under a little scarp at the back of the field, in which silvery drops were cascading through fronds of maidenhair fern and making them tremble continuously. Around this lovely spring were more wild-flowers than I had ever gathered in a single glance. On one side of it was a small hawthorn bush with honeysuckle and meadow pea climbing through it, and a lemon-yellow spire of agrimony below, while on the other a tutsan leaned forward to display its flame-coloured berries. Brooklime was growing in the shadow behind the fernleaves, and the other flowers of damp pastures—purple loosestrife, yellow pimpernel, silverweed—mingled with the meadow flowers at my feet—purple clover, kidney vetch, meadow buttercup, tormentil, bird’s foot trefoil. The stonier slope above the well assembled the flora of the crags at the level of my eyes: burnet rose, bloody cranesbill, mountain everlasting, milkwort, quaking grass, the tiny squinancywort, the last of the early purple orchids and the first of the common spotted orchids, all with a minutely delicate interweaving of fairy flax. Along the foot of the scarp beside the well I could see wild strawberry, scarlet pimpernel, sanicle, the elegant St. John’s wort. There were tall mulleins flowering on the top of the slope, and twayblades in the shadow of the thickets around the ruin. The band of grey limestone above the well gave it the solemnity of an altar, around which the plants were gathered, each in the colours of its faith. What truth, distilled moment by moment from the rock, was held in perpetual reservation in the dark cup below? The church behind me, brought to its knees among penitential thorns, attended humbly upon the priestcraft of water.

  I will go a little further, though I must turn back soon. The grey, knit brow of the hill, and the level heights beyond like a huge fossil mind, with echoes of old stories and whispers of “they say” circulating in its stony corrugations, are to be read in wonderment. The road slants across the last rise of the hill, then turns “Aran west” to integrate itself with the vast perspective of the plateau top, in which a few thousand little fields, each a more or less remote hearsay version of a rectangle, are jigged into a grid of awesome regularity. Straighter and more determined than any other in Aran, the rocky road looks as if it is going to Dún Aonghasa on the distant skyline, though in fact it will drop into the intervening lowland a mile or so away and hidden from here. But at this point, which commands mountains pale with distance in Kerry, Clare and Connemara, and a wide threshold of the Atlantic, my attention always goes to a wild rose rooted in the loose stones of the verge. It forms a knee-high thicket several paces around, with hundreds of flowers like small ivory cups stained inside with purple-red in grainy streaks, and some grains of yellow too. When I check out its characteristics in a botanical key it seems to be a burnet rose, but perhaps it is crossed with another, for in Aran the burnet (Rosa spinosissima as it used to be called, the rose that perhaps tripped you into metaphysical associations in my “Timescape with Signpost” long ago) is a sparse ankle-clutching thing with just a few stems and creamy-white petals. I have not had the heart to go and see if this exceptional beauty has survived the attempt that was made to “improve” the road a few years ago; I prefer to leave its ghost as sentinel there.

  And beside it, what is this odd wisp of small white cross-shaped blossoms? Arabis hirsuta, the hairy rockcress, to be ticked off in the book. And then, ranks of tall valerian, swags of honeysuckle, red carpets of bloody cranesbill … They say there was a couple once who often walked this road to their home further west. Whoever they were, their eyes must have been full of flowers.

  DEVELOPMENT

  From its enchanted hinterland back to the plain town of Cill Rónáin the shortest, but not the most certain, route is by a neglected right-of-way of an oblique and secretive sort I shall be discussing later on in this book. It begins with the path of Creig an Chosáin, which connects with a sequence of not very noticeable stiles in walls leading across Creig na gCaorach, the crag of the sheep, and finally An Chreig Mhór, the big crag—in all, a traverse of nearly a mile of the most irremediably barren rock in Aran. Arriving somewhere (probably not exactly where one intended, given the obscurity of the way) on this desert tract’s farther rim, a steep scarp or in places a cliff about twenty feet high, one finds oneself on a level with the rooftops a short distance ahead. This unofficial viewpoint shows that rock as well as sea has had its say in the siting of the town. The scarp runs north from the innermost point of Cill Einne bay, and then curves to follow the general outline of the coast westwards, and Cill Rónáin has developed along an arc around and in the shelter of this shoulder of land. Like all the major scarps it has a line of springs along its foot and a narrow band of fertile land immediately below it, both due to the stratum of shale underlying the limestone. Such areas of naturally occurring soil are too precious to have been built on, so the houses are a little farther out, on the poorer ground along the rim of the next terrace below the great crag. In fact the buildings in the foreground of the view from the scarp-top are additions from the 1950s and ’60s: the health and dental clinics, and the community hall. Nearby is the Catholic church, a stolid blue-limestone building dedicated in 1905; it stands on a little road that bypasses most of the town, slipping between small green fields frisky with calves in spring, in the lee of the scarp. The buildings just mentioned are at the back of the town, and what one sees beyond them in this rear view are the generally greyish and unkempt back-premises of the shops, B&Bs and bars of Íochtar an Bhaile, the “bottom of the village,” the nucleus of old Cill Rónáin, focused on the old quay.

  The other essential stay of the modern community is the vocational school, Gairmscoil Éinne, where children can now study up to Leaving Certificate level without making that break with the island their parents so much fear as the first step into emigration. The large planes of its pitched, tiled roofs show over the house-tops at the other extremity of the town, a third of a mile north along the gentle rise of the terrace. That neighbourhood was once the hamlet of Baile an Dúin, named, it is supposed, from a long-gone ring-fort or some such ancient enclosure. It had its own boreen to the sea at Trá na bhFranncach, and felt little need of connection with the original Cill Rónáin; in fact the Ordnance Survey map of 1839 shows one road running north from Baile an Dúin to Port Mhuirbhigh, and another running so
uth from Cill Rónáin to Cill Éinne, but no road at all linking the two clusters of cottages. By the time of the revised map of 1898 the Protestant establishment had filled this gap; the constabulary barracks, the coastguard station, the Episcopal church of St. Thomas and the rectory, with their slate roofs and plastered façades, were the first substantial buildings in Cill Rónáin, four cornerstones of Protestant rule spanning the gap between one clump of thatch around the old quay and the other to the north. The barracks, a grey-faced two-storey house on the main road, has long been shared between a pub and the post-office, and its earlier role is witnessed only by the names that two or three of its former occupants passed a few of their boring hours in scribing on the natural limestone flag paving its little forecourt. The coastguard station is down a little side-road opposite, and still looks out across the bay with a degree of professional smartness; a corner of it is occupied by the gardaí, another by the telecommunications link with the mainland, and the rest has recently become a heritage centre, and both buildings are welded by the press of more recent developments into the lower part of the town. But the zone just beyond them has again become rather void with the extinction of the Protestant presence since Independence, for St. Thomas’s stands roofless and sky-windowed in a tussocky roadside field around the edges of which are a few graves, the National School has taken over half of the rectory grounds as its football field, and the rectory itself has been reduced to low ragged walls and broken outhouses, its stone gone into the Catholic curate’s house nearby. The rector’s untrodden drive curves down from broken iron gates into a shadowy grove of sycamores, the wind-bevelled tops of which make a huge bank to the road, buzzing like a generator with flies in the summer, turbulent and gesticulatory in winter, as opulent and alien a presence in the otherwise treeless town as was the Protestant ascendancy in its day.

  Íochtar an Bhaile (“Downtown” might translate it without too much satire) is where Aran happens, in the eyes of most visitors and many islanders. Two or three pubs, the bright and orderly supermarket which has replaced the shadowy old village shop with its chaotic shelves, the smart restaurant that has been made out of the dingy court-house and obsolete dispensary, several craft-shops and half a dozen guest-houses, cluster where the main road is linked to the water-front by a twisty alley and the triangular space—which one might almost call a place—the vertex of which is a high cross, to remind us of the parish priest who set the town on its feet a century ago. For the summer visitors, sitting on the wall outside the American Bar with their pints or their icecreams from the shop opposite, this bottle-neck of minibuses and pony-traps is something between street theatre and street party, exotic enough to hold the attention as spectacle, homely enough to make lingering there comfortable. But for misanthropes like ourselves, inhabitants by choice of the secluded western hamlets, this is the invasive fringe of the Pantown we had hoped to leave behind us; it is Development, of which the future promises more and more. Pushing our bikes laden with shopping through the social rapids we escape it as quickly as possible; we sneer at its “pub culture” of slurred philosophy and incipient brawl, and profess only to like the place in winter, comatose under a yawning skyful of rain. The dilemma of topographical writing is this, that to omit the areas one feels alienated from is to disrupt one’s mirroring of the earth’s continuities, while to include them is to exhibit as blemishes what may in fact merely be dull spots of the mirror, failures of sympathy or comprehension. And the usual escape from this dilemma is into the time dimension, where even drab contingencies have their precedents and pedigrees. Perhaps the interest of the little town will emerge from my indirections, if I poke around in its history a while.

  I begin by revisiting the high cross, and looking up what I wrote in Pilgrimage about the man it honours:

  He was Father Michael O’Donoghue, parish priest of Aran from 1881 to 1892, and he is said to have sent a telegram to Dublin Castle in 1886:

  SEND US BOATS OR SEND US COFFINS

  —an act which, if not so miraculously or electrically causative of the C.D. Board’s intervention as oral history would have it, is the perfect emblem of his dedicated representation of his flock in the face of governmental delay and the agent’s rapacity.

  I detect a note of polite acquiescence in this; it reads as if I had felt that in the absence of hard facts I had better go along with the conventional pieties. Let me take a closer look at those crucial years in the fortunes of Cill Rónáin.

  In fact this famous telegram, mentioned in several accounts of the islands, has proved hard to pinpoint. Antoine Powell, the author of the most thoroughly researched history of Aran, found no official record of its having been received. However, recently I came across the following, in Memories: Wise and Otherwise, the memoirs of Sir Henry Robinson, who was an executive of the Local Government Board at that period:

  “Send relief or send coffins,” was another dramatic effort of the part of a Galway priest to waken the Government to the necessity of relief works, and the effect of this portentious telegram would have alarmed the Government very much less than it did had they seen the parish priest taking it round the town and showing it with the utmost hilarity to his friends. Among others, he took it to his old friend the late member for Galway, George Morris, the Vice-President of the Local Government Board. The official utterance of the Vice-President on this occasion was, “Begorra, Father James, you are the boy who knows how to talk to them.” No one really took the telegram seriously except the Irish Office, who were rather upset about it, as although they referred it to the Local Government Board for observations, the Vice-President could not very well explain that he himself on the previous day had highly commended the parish priest for the humour of it.

  Morris became Vice-President of the LBG in the winter of 1890, and so, if Sir Henry’s memory here is one of his wise ones, the telegram was sent between that time and Fr. O’Donoghue’s leaving the islands in 1892. Whether this was one of the hungrier periods in Aran is doubtful. Sir Henry, a staunch Loyalist, regarded the various Catholic priests he had to deal with in the west as wily buffoons, and he has some disgracefully funny anecdotes to back his opinion. He also felt that the Government’s policy of funding relief-works in time of shortage led to gross exaggerations of the prevalence of “distress”:

  Who indeed could be surprised at it? Conceive what weekly payments of wages must have meant to a people living on credit, who never had the handling of money and only caught a fleeting glimpse of it after the sale of their livestock as it passed from their possession to the pockets of shopkeepers, landlords, and cess collectors and other creditors…. Small wonder, then, when relief works were hinted at, that the people were almost beside themselves in their efforts to persuade the Government that the distress was acute and overwhelming near their homes. They found willing helpers in every quarter to back them up, as the famine was a godsend to everyone. The shopkeeper saw in it a means of wiping off his bad debts, the clergy received their dues with punctuality, the police got 4s. per head per day for superintending the work, and the landlords and cess collectors had arrears of rent and rates reduced and found that they were no longer engaged in the hopeless task of trying to get blood out of a stone.

  Even W. L. Micks of the CDB, who was committed to the Nationalist cause, had much the same to say, in his own buttoned-up manner:

  I was for many years entrusted with the supervision of Poor Law administration at different times in counties embracing congested districts, in which I was a resident inspector when failures of the potato crop and other calamities caused distress more or less serious. At such times I was painfully conscious of my serious responsibility for ascertaining the actual condition of the poor. It was my two-fold duty to give such information as would enable the Department to adopt measures for the prevention of suffering from destitution by the poor, and at the same time to submit such accurate reports as would tend to avert an unnecessary expenditure of public funds in deference to exaggerated assertions
of the existence of destitution…. There used to be a most natural desire on the part of some shopkeepers and others, including the indebted poor, to have money brought into and spent in a locality. This led to a competition in the making of grossly exaggerated statements as to the condition of the inhabitants in order to secure the starting of relief works. If the promoters succeeded in their efforts, almost every man in the district, whether in need or not, tried to “get a share of what was going.”

  Is there an objective truth about the degree of suffering, to be estimated by averaging out the reports of priests and officials? Both classes would have been inured to seeing the vast majority of the people around them in circumstances so different from their own as to preclude imaginative identification. Their assessments of those people’s distress in any given year or neighbourhood would not have been relative to their own circumstances but to the indigenous community’s welfare in previous recent years and similar nearby districts. In these terms, in terms of a forecasted death-count for the year in question, Fr. O’Donoghue’s telegram probably exaggerated. But to begin to feel what life was like for his flock, it helps to consider how it changed during his pastorship. There is also the question of how instrumental he personally was in the improvement; the “hilarity” of Sir Henry Robinson’s disturbing anecdote might throw some light on that.

  When Fr. O’Donoghue came to Aran in 1881 the talk must have been of the latest dirty deed—poison in a cattle-trough, a bullock blinded—in a furtive campaign against the landlord’s agent, the Protestant vicar, O’Flaherty the middleman, and the bailiffs. Also of hunger and crop failures, and of the Government’s response, the extra police sent in to man the new barracks at Cill Mhuirbhigh, the gunboats Bruiser and Merlin nosing round the coast. Whereas in the year of his departure, 1892, all attention was on the catches being landed by the Rover’s Bride, True Light, Mystical Rose, and the other exotically named fishing-boats from Arklow that had come to work out of Cill Rónáin; and in the next year, the year of his early death, of the Aran boats that joined them, the St. Enda, Mary and Joseph, Louisa Mary Ann, Hero, M’Laren Smith, St. Patrick, Breaker, and the Father O’Donoghue itself, an Arklow-built nobby bought, like two of the other boats, out of a fund raised by Fr. O’Donoghue. And although after the 1894 season the Arklow crews were so poor that a collection had to be made to get them home, and only one of the Aran boats was not in debt, a fleet and a fishery had been established, which persisted with some fortune until the disturbances of the 1920s. While it was true, as a critic writing in the New Ireland Review a few years later pointed out, that the number of Aran boats was very small for a community of 530 families, Mr. Micks was justified in the longer term in claiming that