Stones of Aran

by Tim Robinson

  The 1745 reference to John Digby is in connection with a curious legal dispute between himself and the Mayor of Galway, concerning a whale stranded on the island of Muínis in south Connemara. Digby had harpooned this whale and extracted from it blubber and whalebone to the value of £160. The oil from this blubber was seized by the Galway authorities, and then somehow repossessed by Mr. Digby. Galway took him to court, claiming that these products were a royal franchise, and that the Crown at some distant period had made a gift of that franchise away from the O’Briens of Aran to the Mayor, he being Admiral of Galway Bay. Digby’s lawyer on the other hand argued, successfully, that a whale is not the King’s property to grant, as the tail half belongs to the Queen, to keep her boudoir in whalebone.

  The incident shows that at least part of the Digby family was in the west at the time, and they may even have lived in Aran for a while. Local tradition is that a Digby removed from An Spidéal to Cill Rónáin, bringing with him his tenants, the Gills and the Folans, whose surnames are still frequent in the island, and built the three-storey dwelling known as Digby House. However, by the time of the earliest documentary reference to Digby House I have come across, in the census for 1821, it was leased to a John Brown Moyne, and was occupied by a caretaker, James Connor, and his family (the future poet Séamas Ó Chonchúir was his son, aged one at the time), and twenty-five years or so later it was in ruins. I am told that its stones were used in the building of the Rev. Synge’s rectory, and that when the rectory in its turn was abandoned it was quarried for stone for the Catholic curate’s house.

  To continue with the history of the absentees. In 1822 there was some “distress” in the islands due to potato blight, and the then landlord, Mr. John William Digby of Landenstown, contributed to a relief fund. He was, according to J.T. O’Flaherty’s paper of 1824,

  a Gentleman of popular character, much esteemed by his tenantry, and considered one of the best of landlords. He allows annually 20 guineas to school houses, for the instruction of orpans; and £20 annually for clothing the poor, with other pecuniary donations. His annual rent, on the three islands, is £2700. Mr. Thomson, his agent, visits them twice a year, not only to receive rents, but to adjust all differences.

  However, the popular character of the Digbys did not survive for long in the miserable years that followed. The potato harvest failed in 1825, and the consequent distress was said to be worse than in 1822. By March of the next year the Connaught Journal was attacking the landlord, now the Rev. John Digby, for neglecting his tenants. The land-agent George Thompson (father of the Thomas Thompson who succeeded him in this post) wrote to the newspaper in his master’s defence:

  You state that people are Dying of Starvation with no help from the landlord. The landlord in the past gave meal and potatoes to the people and empowered a gentleman living in Arran to do likewise at his expense. Enquire of Patrick O’Flaherty if you believe this to be false.

  The newspaper refused to apologize to either Digby or Thompson, saying that the parish priest, the Rev. Gibbons, had asked them before Christmas to publish the plight of the people and that the resident gentleman (i.e. Patrick O’Flaherty of Cill Mhuirbhigh) had asked them to press on the Government and the landlord the need for aid:

  On Christmas Day we saw several people with starving children asking for some of the oatmeal he had got the previous day. We later truthfully published what we saw and within the last fortnight heard of three deaths from starvation. Only one ton of oatmeal was distributed by Mr. O’Flaherty from the landlord, only enough to whet the appetite and not to appease hunger.

  By April however the paper could report that the Rev. Digby had purchased meal and potatoes for his tenantry, and added “If we spoke harshly the reader will appreciate the circumstances.” In 1831, though, conditions in Aran were again “as bad as in 1822,” and Digby distributed a free cargo of potatoes. Cholera spread from Galway to Cill Rónáin in the next spring and claimed two lives; there was neither doctor nor dispensary in the islands, and the Connaught Journal urged the landlord to do something for his tenants. In August the coastguards in Aran reported that there had been twenty-five deaths, people had deserted Cill Rónáin and Cill Éinne to live among the rocks, and the O’Malleys had fled from the Lodge to Cill Mhuirbhigh. A messenger had come to Galway for medicine, but it was felt that in the absence of a doctor medicines could do more harm than good. By September there had been fifty-seven deaths. Mr. O’Malley and Mr. O’Flaherty contributed £5 each to a relief fund, but according to the Journal nothing had come from the landlord or the agent. The epidemic was over by the spring of 1833. The parish priest was then building the chapel at Eochaill, and the Journal “joyfully” announced that the Rev. Digby had contributed £21.

  At the time of the Great Famine that started with the blighting of the potato crop in 1845, the owner of the islands was Miss Elizabeth Francis Digby of Landenstown. By the next spring a local relief committee had been instituted and there was a dispensary in Cill Rónain; unfortunately the doctor, Surgeon Richardson, was dangerously ill himself, and a Dr. Stephens was enquiring into the extent of an outbreak of fever. The Connaught Journal in November had a rather indefinite report of deaths from starvation, but since none such are mentioned in a letter they published from the Parish Priest, the Rev. Harley, in the January of 1846 it seems likely that the strong Aran belief about the Famine, that the islands were spared the worst of the blight and that only one person died, is soundly based. However there was immense distress, as the priest’s appeal makes clear—poor crops of potatoes, a shortage of turf due to the stormy weather interrupting supplies from Connemara, a failure of the herring fishery for some years previously, no Government relief or public works, no resident gentry or local institution to look after the peoples’ interests. According to his figures, about two thirds of the population was without food and dependent on the others, who he claimed would soon be reduced to the same state. Only two tons of meal had been received from Miss Digby. The Rev. Harley’s appeals for Government aid were finally answered, and in the next February he received a second contribution of £100 from the Central Relief Committee. That spring the potatoes were sound, though not many had been planted.

  The divergence of fortunes between the Digbys and their tenants thereafter became more and more glaring. Miss Digby’s niece, Henrietta Barfoot of Landenstown, married Sir Thomas St. Lawrence, the third Earl and twenty-ninth Baron of Howth, KP, Vice Admiral of Leinster. It was his second marriage, the first having been to a daughter of the thirteenth Earl of Clanricarde. He died in 1874 and Henrietta in 1884; thereafter the owners of Aran were old Miss Digby of Landenstown and her niece’s offspring: the Hon. Thomas Kenelm Digby St. Lawrence, Henrietta Eliza of Sloane St., London, who married Captain Lee Guinness and became Lady Guinness, and the unmarried Lady Geraldine Digby St. Lawrence; down to the end of the century different combinations of these resounding names and titles appear on the ejectment notices served on those Aran tenants who for one reason or another failed to contribute their mite to the upkeep of the noble family. By 1911 the surviving proprietors, the two last-named ladies, had agreed to sell out the estate, but it was not until 1922 that the Land Commission finally took possession of the islands, for the sum of £13,721 paid in land stock, and began to distribute the land among those who had worked it and in many cases created it out of rock. It seems entirely appropriate to the Digbys’ role in the island story that not a stone remains identifiable of Digby House.

  Walking on from this obscure corner associated with unknown saint and absentee landlord—two figures reduced to abstractions and invested with essential goodness and badness respectively, perhaps only by our ignorance of their humanity—one comes into a quietly pleasant quarter of the island, in which one might imagine nothing had ever happened, but which has in fact been disturbed by two events, rather alike in their murderous futility, bearing dates 1584 and 1920. (Perhaps, all the same, one should not complain about just two such incidents, over the last
four hundred years; these fields are less blood-soaked than many!) Where the road running north-westwards through Baile an Dúin emerges from the last of the village, it opens up a view on the right hand, of low-lying sandy pasturage divided into small plots, stretching to the seashore half a mile away. This area is Log na Marbh, the hollow of the dead, and in a field a couple of hundred yards below the road, by a modern water-tank, is a squarish mound with traces of stone kerbing and a small upright stone, in which, I was told, nine murdered Connemara men lie. The invaluable Fr. Killeen noted down the more detailed tradition still current in the 1940s, identifying the event with a battle recorded by no lesser authorities than the Four Masters. I give their account of it in all its antique tangledness, so expressive of the nature of this, the last outbreak of clan warfare in Iar-Chonnacht:

  A.D. 1584: A contention arose in Iarchonnacht between the descendents of Owen O’Flaherty and the descendents of Murchadh, the son of Brian na nOinseach O’Flaherty. The cause was this: The head of the race of Owen O’Flaherty (Tadhg the son of Tadhg na Buile, i.e. the Mad, son of Murchadh, who was son of Owen), and the race of Dónal an Chogaidh (of the Battle), son of Gilduff, took the island of Ballynahinch from Tadhg the son of Murchadh na dTua, who was the son of Tadhg O’Flaherty, for the race of Owen were saying that the island was theirs by right, and that Tadhg took and kept possession of it by unjust violence. But be this as it may, as to the taking of the island Tadhg prevailed over them, and he left not a single head of cattle in any part of their country to which he came that he did not kill or carry off. And the others though unequal in power did great injury to Tadhg.

  On one occasion this Tadhg, the son of Murchadh, went with the crew of a boat in the month of June on a nocturnal expedition in pursuit of the race of Owen O’Flaherty to Aran, and overtook them at break of day when they were unprepared between sleep and vigilance on both sides of the prow of the ship. And unfriendly was the salutation he made them on that shore, and indeed the island [Ballynahinch] was not worth all that was done about it on that one day, for Murchadh, the son of Edmond Óg, son of Edmond, son of Hugh, the proprietor of Leitir Mealláin, who joined the race of Owen O’Flaherty, was killed, as were also the sons of the seneschal of Clann Maurice, who was along with them on the same predatory excursion, and also Tadhg Salach [dirty] the son of the O’Flaherty [Tadhg] himself, and a great party of the race of Owen O’Flaherty besides these nobles. Thus they continued at war with each other, until the English made peace between them in the succeeding Autumn, when the island was given to the race of Owen O’Flaherty.

  To make what passes for sense in a murderous world out of this, one should remember that the divisions between the two branches of the O’Flahertys were fomented by Queen Elizabeth’s statesmen-soldiers, the better to control the rebellious clan. The chief of the eastern branch, Murchadh na dTua (of the battle-axes), had been recognized by the English as head of the clan, whereas under the old Brehon Law the rightful head was a member of the western branch. The latter had five castles around the coast of Connemara and a central one on the lake-island of Ballynahinch. Murchadh na dTua (who was now Sir Murrough O’Flaherty, having traded in his Gaelic identity for feudal rights and title) seized Ballynahinch and installed his son, Tadhg; this Tadhg then had to defend Ballynahinch against the sons of two famous chieftains of the western branch with the intimidatory names of Tadhg na Buile (of the rage) and Dónal an Chogaidh (of the war). Some of the western party then went to Aran, where they were set upon and slaughtered by the Tadhg of the eastern branch. In the end it seems the English re-established the westerners in Ballynahinch, but it was Sir Murrough who in the year 1587 received a grant of all the lands and castles of Iar-Chonnacht “to hold to him and his heirs for ever by the twentieth part of a knight’s fee, as of the manor of Arkin in the Great Isle of Aran.” This scheming was a tiny part of Elizabeth’s European strategy, in itself a part of the vast upheaval of the Reformation. A fraction of the dire energy of that centuries-long storm broke up the old world of Connemara; a vicious little eddy from that wreck span itself to death in this backwater of Aran.

  The quiet little road goes ambling on from “the hollow of the dead” towards the bay at Mainistir, a summer’s day stroll margined with wild-flowers and tall grasses, with a reminder of winter rain-storms in its torn-up surface. After a quarter of a mile it passes a small stone plaque set among the stones of the field-wall on the left, which the stroller may well not notice:

  PRAY FOR THE SOUL OF LAWRENCE MCDONOUGH

  SHOT BY CROWN FORCES DECR 19 1920

  DIED 23 R.I.P.

  The “Crown Forces” were the Black and Tans, a body of licensed ruffians scratched together and put into heterogeneous uniform by the British government earlier in that year, to throw into the campaign of murder and retaliation the RIC was losing against Sinn Féin. Fifty of them came to Aran, in search of three armed members of the Volunteers who had fled from Galway to hide out with friends and relatives in the island. An old man early awake in Cill Rónáin saw in the dim winter dawn a man-of-war in the bay and soldiers landing from rowing-boats, and ran to warn his neighbour, Pádraig Ó hIarnáin, who had been sheltering one of the fugitives. I am told that a woman in another household heard the Black and Tans coming into the town and thought at first it was Connemara men bringing in cattle to winter. She looked out of the window and saw armed men, and just had time to hide her money-box under her petticoats before they burst into the house. They turned the place upside down in search of drink, and went roaring off again, one of them wearing the veil he had torn from a large statue of the Virgin. (The Black and Tans seem to have had an urge to add feminine touches to their motley—in their drunken night of murder and arson in Clifden three months later they broke into a haberdashery, and went dancing through the streets wearing corsets over their uniforms!) Ó hIarnáin had run off to hide in a crevice of the Creig Mhór, taking his gun with him, but the Black and Tans arrested his brother, who was in bed with flu, and left him tied up on the quay all day. Later they found a horse they mistakenly thought was Pádraig’s, and shot it between the eyes. Detachments of soldiers, obviously acting on information, hurried east and west along the main road to certain other houses. Pádraig Mac Giolla Phádraig of Cill Éinne, who had sheltered another of the Galway men, was arrested, and in Eochaill, where a Pádraig Ó Domhnaill was the target, his next-door neighbour was taken by mistake, but managed to escape from his captors. Máire Gill tells me that two uncles of hers were seized and dragged behind the Minister’s gate in Cill Rónáin, and her grandmother was brought out to see them shot; one of the islandmen had connections with the Irish Republican Brotherhood, the other did not, and it is indicative of the complexity of conflicting loyalties that it was a third uncle, home on leave from the British armed forces, who came by in his uniform and got them off.

  Later that morning some of the Mainistir people were on their way to chapel in Cill Rónáin, when they were turned back by two of the Tans. One lad, Larry Beag, determined not to miss the Mass, went down to the coast road and tried to creep along to Cill Rónáin in the shelter of the wall; one of the Tans saw him from the main road, aimed with the telescopic sight of his rifle at a gap in the wall, and shot him. Larry died a few days later, on the 23rd of December.

  Another warship came into Port Mhuirbhigh that dawn, and soldiers visited houses in the west of the island. One man arrested in Fearann an Choirce was Máirtín Breathnach, who had been training the island Volunteers. (There were about seventy of them, I have been told; they had no arms, but they drilled on the roads and in Johnston’s big fields in front of Kilmurvey House, no doubt to the annoyance of Johnston himself, who was by no means a supporter.) In Gort na gCapall the Black and Tans were looking for the chief of the Aran Volunteers, Thomas Fleming. Thomas’s father had come to Aran as a young mason, building the teachers’ residences, and had married a sister of Liam O’Flaherty, and it was in the O’Flaherty house that Thomas and his wife were living. It was four in
the morning, and he would have been caught but that his mother-in-law was heating milk for the baby when the soldiers arrived; she opened the door with the baby in her arms, and delayed them for a couple of seconds while Thomas ran upstairs and squeezed out of the gable window. He had to hang from the window ledge by his fingertips for a moment until a soldier with a flashlamp went inside, then he dropped to the ground and took off for the crags. (We used to hear the details of this adventure from Thomas himself, whom we knew as a spry old man who would hop off his bicycle to sit on a wall with us and chat. He told us whom he suspected of having informed on him: a poitín-drinking Fearann an Choirce man who often visited Galway and seemed to have mysterious access to ten-pound notes, and who once showed him a poem in praise of a brave Black and Tan fallen in battle; this man soon afterwards left the island, and was followed to Tipperary, and shot.)

  The three Galway Volunteers, who had been spending most of their time hiding in a store on the Hill Farm, were not betrayed and the Black and Tans did not find them, which perhaps spared the island a gun battle and further retribution. But they were saddened by the trouble they had brought down on their protectors, and soon decided to move on. Early one morning, after receiving communion from the curate Fr. Mártan Ó Domhnaill, a supporter of the cause, they were smuggled aboard the Dun Aengus and sailed back to Galway. That ended Aran’s direct involvement in the War of Independence, which was terminated by the Truce of July 1921.