by Tim Robinson
However they do it, grykes eat clints. Other things being equal, an area of crag with big clints will also have wide grykes. (Simple, at least on the flowing-water theory: for clints of similar shapes, the rainfall on them is proportional to their areas, i.e. to the squares of their perimeters; therefore the run-off per unit length of a perimeter is proportional to its length; therefore longer perimeters are more rapidly eroded.) But “other things being equal” is not the normal state of affairs in this landscape of entropic dissolution, and in walking it one’s footsteps have to learn a vast variety of fissurings, carpet-patterns of the void woven into the rock. Just north of An Poll i’ bhFolach the two steps of the “Asbian-Brigantian contact” form platforms running along the hillside, four and eight feet above the terrace on which the boulder perches. The lower platform is so closely divided by parallel fissures that it consists of large slabs standing on edge, the outer ones leaning and about to fall over onto the terrace below, of a size and shape that the builders of the wedge tomb above would have found handy, while the upper platform is dissected into even thinner blades of stone. It seems that certain strata are predisposed to fissuring in particular patterns. A geologist, David Langridge, explored this question for his M.Sc. dissertation in 1969. He roughly classified the types of pavement by the average width of the clints (measured between the north-south grykes, which are nearly everywhere the best developed). Pavements for which this measure was less than 45 cm are nearly all on the uppermost stratum of the island, where they cover most of its exposure; this is the regularity that underlies the monotonous terrain of Na Craga. At the other extreme, pavements with clints over 105 cm wide occur principally on the terrace below An Scairbh. Broken rubbly surfaces in which clints and grykes are scarcely definable are found mainly on the lowest levels of the island. These patterns of jointing reflect the interplay of stresses in the earth’s crust with the strengths of particular strata, which in turn depend on their thicknesses and composition, and so the question is plunged back into the sea in which these strata were deposited, its depth, temperature, chemistry, fauna and flora—matters not beyond all conjecture, and which I quit with a certain sense of duty unfulfiled.
Making my way northwards from the crag of the perched boulder towards Oatquarter, I pass over several strikingly different ground-patterns developed on the same terrace; those answers from the Carboniferous sea-depths, even if I had them, would not explain this. The most tremendous of these terrains—probably the most tremendous in Aran—is a three-or four-acre crag called Leacrachaí an Fháin, the flagstones of the slope. Here the surface is riven by gullies six or ten feet deep, full of grass and heather, into a number of ridges only a few yards wide and several hundred yards long, aligned with the usual north-south major set of joints and interrupted here and there by smaller crosswise gullies following the minor joints. These ridges have bevelled edges and smoothly undulating tops; they rise and fall by two or three feet in waves thirty to forty yards long from crest to crest. The gullies are explicable: the ice-flow, coinciding in direction with master joints, has plucked out blocks of stone one after another. But the whale-back ridges? I thought I had the explanation when I noticed that here, in addition to the usual north-south set of joints, there is another set crossing them at an angle of only a few degrees; if there is some regular variation in the lateral spacing of joints in each of these sets, their intersections would tend to be closer together in certain zones evenly spaced out along the ridges, and these zones would be more vulnerable to erosion than the intervals between them. However I think my simplistic geometry is inadequate to the elemental mix of rule and randomness in this topography. It must have been the Ice Age that moulded these ridges. Passing across this part of the island, the glacier danced a little. Why? Science answers, “You wouldn’t know!”
From the next crag to the north, a little path, Bóithrín na Scairbhe, the boreen of the rough place, leads down to the village, between greener, more humanized, patches of land reclaimed from the rock. But before I leave the geo-illogical uplands, the typical north-south bent of this boreen prompts me to ask one more question of the ground. What caused the characteristic pattern of the jointing, from which that of the grykes derives, and thence that of the fields and paths? What is the origin of this direction I have called “Aran North,” this prevailing wind in the stone? The major jointing in the Burren is parallel to that in Aran, and what attempts at explanation of it I have read are in terms of compressive forces emanating from the south during the phase of earth-history known as the Hercynian, when the Harz mountains, in ancient Hercynia, were born, and here the Carboniferous sea-bed was being lifted. But such a force would not give rise to north-south jointing; also, I am told, the limestones of north Mayo are jointed with the same orientation, and that is near the limit of Hercynian influences. Paul Mohr, the professor of Geology at Galway, whom I pester with these questions, has wondered if this regional effect is connected with a major tectonic event more recent than the Carboniferous: the parting of Europe and North America and the opening-up of the Atlantic in Jurassic times, two hundred to a hundred and fifty million years ago. Such a gigantic rifting would have exerted huge tensions on the lands to either side. A mere speculation, he insists, he never dared to publish it. Well, there it is now, for daws to peck at. It appeals to me, for if it is true, then the Aran farmer in his boreen, and this book in its devious criss-crossing of the island, are walking arm-in-arm with the Atlantic and talking of the breakup of Pangaea.
THE BLOOD OF THE HEART
Long ago, as I have been told by one of the elders of the village, a man from Fearann an Choirce travelled as far as Athenry looking for a calf with the makings of a good cow. When he had been walking about that neighbourhood all day, he met a woman carrying a wooden firkin of water and asked her if she would give him a drink of it. “Gladly,” she replied, “And I guarantee you never drank better, unless you ever tasted the water of Tobar Ghrióir in Árainn.” “Why!” said the islander, “That’s the water I’ve been making my tea on all my life!”
Tobar Ghrióir, Gregory’s well, the pride, the very source itself, of the village, is under the scarp of An Scairbh where the road twists north to climb down it. The villagers revert to its water when the piped supply fails for some mechanical reason or tastes salty after a gale; I have filled many a bucket there myself, when helping out at the nearby guest-house, Gilbert Cottage. After long droughts the flow is a mere seepage, but if you pluck one of the stiff fronds of hart’s-tongue fern that grow by it, fold it lengthwise and jam it into a crack of the wet rock-face, water will come rolling off its point like pearls off a broken thread. There are two stone-lined troughs built against the foot of the scarp, a long one to which beasts wandering the road have access, and a small one reserved for humans, defended by a little wall with a stile in it and tucked into the corner between the scarp and the ramp of the road. A fool washed out an oil-barrel in it once, and Bríd Gillan, an outspoken octogenarian living nearby, took a can of white paint and wrote on the rock-face above it, “God gave us this well—keep it clean.” Twelve years later, I notice, just enough of this lettering shows through the mosaic of mosses, lichens and ferns to give the rock an air of cryptic significance.
Water, shelter, a little soil from the shale-band—the usual “givens” of the scarp faces, the usual narrow dispensation of natural treasures—have been repaid by generations of unstinted labour here, so that the village, starting at the foot of the slope by the well and accompanying the road westwards for a few hundred yards, is a green respite from the grey barrenness above and below it. The cottages and houses and bungalows are interspersed with hayfields, potato-plots and pastures, nearly all of them on what is called “reclaimed land.” (The term “reclamation” seems to imply the winning back of something lost, but if anyone ever squandered aboriginal soil here it must have been a thousand or two thousand years ago.) Stócáil (“to stoke” or “to prepare,” according to the dictionaries) is the local word for t
he process of making fertile land out of bare or nearly bare rock. The method is as follows. First the plot is cleared of loose blocks, which are piled into stacks or used to build walls. The grykes are filled in with small stones, and the smooth clint surfaces broken up with a sledge-hammer or by dropping a boulder on them. Then the ground is spread with basketsful of sand and seaweed carried up from the shore, supplemented sometimes by shale or clay scraped out from under the scarps and little winnings of soil and turf accumulated along walls or scooped up from fissures. A potato crop can be grown in the first year on such a mixture, and the depth of soil increases as more sand and seaweed is added year by year.
The earliest description of the process I have come across is in Samuel Ferguson’s account of his visit to Aran in 1852, shortly after the Great Famine:
Re-entering among the rocks, we passed through another village, the pathway to which runs between enclosures apparently of a very unprofitable kind; for, in several cases, the only thing enclosed is the bare surface of limestone, no earth having yet been laid down; and, when earth does occur, it is wholly adventitious, having been carried from a great distance and spread upon the rock. Yet these patches of fictitious soil yield very good crops of oats and potatoes…. This practice of forming artificial fields, recalls the Fir-Volgic origin of the early inhabitants of Arran…. These Fir-Volg, according to their own account, were Thracians, who had been enslaved in Greece, and there employed in carrying earth in leathern bags, to form the artificial terrace-gardens of Boeotia.
This agreement of contemporary practice with ancient origin-legend appealed to the nationalist antiquarianism of Ferguson’s time. However, it seems likely that land reclamation became important only as food demand outgrew the capacity of the indigenous soils under the scarps and on Na Craga, during the generations of rapid population growth leading up to the Famine. Most of the new land would have been for that fateful crop, the potato, the only filling available for the cavernous hunger of the labouring man. (Even today the main meal of the day is still sometimes referred to as na fataí, the potatoes.) According to information gathered in the course of the British Association’s visit in 1857,
Of the entire area of the Aran Isles, amounting to 11,288 acres, only 742 were under crops, of which 692 were sown with potatoes in 1855.
It is interesting to compare these statistics with those of a “base line” report drawn up in 1893 for the Congested Districts Board, according to which, on the 578 holdings of £4 valuation or less, potatoes took up on average an acre and a quarter, and barley, rye, and small amounts of oats and cabbages, only another quarter of an acre. Making some allowance for the 117 larger holdings, this indicates that about 1200 acres were under crops, nearly all of them potatoes. There were 562 families in the islands in 1893, and if these figures are anywhere near the truth, they imply that the average family had reclaimed about an acre of land for crops over the two preceding generations. No doubt some reclaimed land was under grass too. This rate of activity was evidently enough to attract the attention of visitors, and the fact that he made his own land became part of the romantic image of the Aran islander, along with the currach and the pampooty. It was also an index of his exploitation, and as such first appears in the unlikely context of The Lives of the Irish Saints, by Canon O’Hanlon. When visiting St. Brecán’s church in Eoghanacht some time before 1873, the Canon was shown a “gort or small garden” by a peasant, who told him that his grandfather had made it by laying sand and seaweed on the naked rock, and that the tenant had also built the house close by and the wall enclosing the holding:
For that poor homestead and plot—where not only were the improvements but the very soil created by the peasant’s unaided toil—one pound annually was extracted as rent. No human ingenuity could procure much more than such a return, from the culture of that gort; and yet this was only a solitary instance of similar hard cases which fell under the writer’s observation.
By the 1890s, when Ireland itself was the object of symbolic reclamation, the Aran man forced to pay rent on land he had created himself became an icon of the oppressed nation. Mary Banim, writing for the Weekly Freeman, placed this figure in a long perspective of wrong:
Naturally, there is not a spot of earth on any of these islands; but the law of their owners, since the English gained possession of them, has been to exact from every tenant that a certain portion of the rock shall be broken up, sea-sand and seaweed carried up, load by load, by the men and women, and thus gradually accumulated on the spot partially cleared of the upper crust of stone; but when this little patch of land is made, it is appraised by him who says he owns the stones, and the maker henceforth has the privilege of paying a smart rent for what the labour of his own and his children’s hands has made…. With the exception of the landlord, and perhaps of his agent, all who see the place are of the same opinion as Mr. Labouchère, one of the cleverest of English journalists. Here are that gentleman’s words, taken from “Truth”:
“I give it as my deliberate opinion that the inhabitants of Arranmore ought, in justice, to pay no rent whatever…. The island is as much theirs as if they had made it with their own hands. With their own hands they have, most truly and literally, made it, so far as it is a place capable of supporting human life…. I declare, if I were an Arran fisherman, I would sooner throw my rent into the Atlantic Ocean than pay it to any landlord whatever.”
The CDB report of 1893 noted that potatoes were sown year after year in the same plots as there was no tillage land to spare for the rotation of crops. However, in the 1920s the spread of a parasite known as eelworm made it necessary to leave potato-fields fallow for four or more years after cropping them, and despite the declining population there was a further investment of effort in “making land.” Government grants for the work were introduced in the ’thirties. Pigs were also fed on potatoes, until the rising cost of fuel to cook the mash for them made pig-rearing uneconomical. An elderly man of Fearann an Choirce, looking back to the heroic days of his father, tells me that “Each man planted as many potatoes then as a whole village does now.” That was the era of the most famous representation of land-making, in the film Man of Aran. Choosing a spectacularly primeval crag as the site of his new field, Tiger King shatters it with magnificent hammer-blows; the Siegfried rhythms of the sequence culminate in his lifting a mighty boulder above his head and dashing it down with giant strength. Meanwhile Maggy, his wife, delves a handful of soil out of a crevice and sprinkles it delicately on the ground, twiddling her fingers to get rid of the last grain (“You’ld think it was flour!” commented an Aran lady I watched the film with once). In the opinion of the anthropologist John Messenger, the use of the boulder is the film-maker’s invention, part of the “nativism” and “primitivism” that distorts most accounts of the Aran Islands. However, the natives are not averse to a little nativism and primitivism themselves, and Tiger King’s brother has shown me huge boulders that the Tiger and he shifted, or incorporated high up in walls, just to show that it could be done. Also, an Inis Meáin description of land-reclamation contemporary with Flaherty’s film states that the ground-surface was broken up with a ceann mionnáin, a roundish granite boulder weighing about a hundredweight, lifted onto the shoulder and flung down. Peadar Ua Concheannain’s is perhaps the first account by a practitioner; I quote part of it, in the rugged and vigorous Irish orthography of his day:
Is lom fuar sgéirdeamhail go deimhin fhéachas an t-oileán carraige seo i súilibh an strainséara agus bíonn iongantas an domhain air cia’n chaoi is féidir leis na daoinibh maireachtáil ann chor ar bith. Ní i nganfhios dá genámha é, creid mé ann, arae tá siad moch agus deireannach ag stócáil agus ag réidhteach, ag réabadh ‘s a’ pléasgadh, agus ag maolú uláin agus carraigreacha cloch le ceann mionnáin, sin agus ag dúnadh sgalprachaí agus ag tarraingt fhód agus sgrathachaí le na gcliabh thiar ar a ndruim, agus dá sgaradh amach ar na breaclachaí garbha sin ag iarraidh bheith a’ déanamh talamh de.
