Stones of Aran

by Tim Robinson

  Evans Wentz was a young American anthropologist studying under the Celticist Sir John Rhys at Oxford. He brought to bear on “Old Patsy” and a hundred other “witnesses” in Ireland, Scotland, Wales and Brittany, a theory synthesized out of William James’s religious psychology, Yeats’s occultism, and the investigations of the Society for Psychical Research. His conclusion was that, after Patsy’s and his compeers’ tales have been sifted of all “ethnological, anthropomorphic, naturalistic, or sociological influences on the Celtic mind,” there remains a residue of the veridical and unexplained, “the x or unknown quantity in the Fairy-Faith.” Fairies, it seems, are discarnate consciousnesses, instances of the common “protoplasmic background of all religions, philosophies, or systems of mystical thought yet evolved on this planet,” and that the Celtic Otherworld, like the classical Hades, is but the lower arc of the soul’s cyclical progress from birth to rebirth. All this is very wonderful, but to me not as wonderful as the fact that when, years after leaving Aran, I opened Evans Wentz’s crabbed tome for the first time, out jumped Móinín an Damhsa, my favourite blackberry spot, as from a pop-up book, complete with a pair of small tortoiseshell butterflies, the smell of a cow-pat, and the ringing of stone as Mícheál “knocks the gap” to let his pony in to graze.

  Immediately beyond Móinín an Damhsa is the Residence, as it is still called. The little house is almost hidden by the walls of its garden, which have empty window-frames in them here and there. These are thick, double walls, eight to ten feet high in most places, and on the south-western, windward, side of the house, eighteen feet high; it is said that Moloney paid Joeen na gCloch thirty shillings for building them. A rusty old farmyard gate of tubular iron lets one look into the garden from the road. All around it, Moloney’s shrubs—laburnums and lilacs, a richly scented Escallonia, some evergreens I looked up once, Griselinia littoralis, Pittosporum crassifolium and Pittosporum tenuifolium—have grown up to the tops of the walls and been beveled off by the wind. The rest is a little hayfield now, with a few Jerusalem anemones and montbretias, relics from the former tenants’ gardening. At the farther end of the grass-invaded garden path a cypress, a contorted mass of thunder-dark green, leans across the faded primrose-yellow façade as if to tap on the door. There is a sash window on either side of the door and two small ones above it, drawn together under a central gable. The house is one of those with a distinct face, in this case a simple and affectionate one like that of a domestic pet. I pause at the gate, my hand on the bolt. Residence. Domicile. Sanctuary. Termon. Temenos. Nemeton….

  This is the last of the village proper; from here the road drops steeply down a scarp that marks an ancient mythological boundary between east and west, and the scatter of houses beyond are distinguished (by those who like distinctions) as the hamlet of Creig na Córach, the crag of the just division. But first there is more to be said about the fields of Fearann an Choirce, and then I must call in on some of the other houses, those inhabited by rain and nettles as well as those with people in them, before entering this Residence, that seems to stand like a dún against, or in advance of, a further degree of westernness.

  SPUDS

  Potatoes left uneaten in dark outhouses over winter open their eyes towards the spring, and put forth pallid tubes of growth. If these sprouting potatoes are then put into the earth they give rise to new plants, or rather clones of the old ones. But if this is repeated over two or three years the stock becomes less productive, as if an accumulating tiredness blurs the genetic message. So it is best to start afresh each year with seed-potatoes provided by the Department of Agriculture and obtained by them ex nihilo in some way we in Aran have not thought of enquiring into. The first I knew of this yearly distribution of seed-potatoes was from printed notices that appeared overnight pinned to the doors of ruins by the roadside and other prominent places; one was tied to the orange-brown sphere of a big iron buoy rusting in the grass near the beach. I puzzled out the unfamiliar Irish of bureaucracy: each holding of not more than £15 rateable value is entitled to a hundredweight of oats or two hundredweight of seed-potatoes at a reduced price, preference being given to the smaller holdings. The January wind soon tore down these annunciations, but the process of the year had been initiated.

  Potato-planting in Aran is supposed to be completed before the cuckoo calls, and the man who doesn’t get his spuds in early enough is derided as a cuckoo-farmer. There is a logic in timing things thus, as a cold spring should delay both the start of vegetable growth and the migrations of birds, but it is a back-to-front logic since the bird gives its timekeeping cry after the event. People do not take the cuckoo as seriously nowadays as they used to. A story is told in Inis Oírr of a joker who saw his neighbour cutting up seed-potatoes in preparation for planting, climbed onto the walls of the cashel overlooking the village and imitated the cuckoo; the man thus convicted of laziness was so disgusted he abandoned his work and fed the potatoes to his hens. I determined that, before the cuckoo called, I would learn how to set a potato-garden, a skill as definitive of a true islandman as the rowing of a currach. Meeting an elderly man I knew having his horse shod at the forge, the first step in the process, I arranged to learn from him.

  Towards the end of March, when the oriental carpets of red-weed that had lain under the winter rains in the fields selected to be this year’s potato-gardens had bleached and ravelled and almost melted into the ground, word came that the potatoes would be arriving on Saturday’s steamer. Séamaisín and I jolted along the three hilly miles to Cill Rónáin on his “common cart” to collect his quota. It was a mild, hazy day; columns of smoke were rising from bramble-patches being burned out of the corners of fields. The sophisticates of Cill Rónáin used to call people from the west of the island “asailíní an Chinn Thiar,” little donkeys of the west end; Séamaisín was old enough to remember the gibe, and shy enough to be glad of my support on the crowded pier. But on his cart he was at ease and talkative, and as bent on self-improvement as I was. He was an odd-looking little fellow; all his features seemed to have been tucked into a cleft in the middle of his face, from which they peered out at me questioningly. What was the right English for the gráinneog? (Hedgehogs are unknown in Aran.) Does it have ears? Does it hop about? Had I ever seen an animal like Dara Kenny said he’d found in a store last winter, with no legs, and two wings like parasols, and ears it could make bigger and smaller? He had heard I had a book with pictures of all the birds in it; did it have a picture of the peacock? I suddenly felt the silliness of a bird-book that didn’t illustrate the finest bird of all. Neither did it mention the saying he gave me, that the peacock would die of pride but for the two skinny legs under him. Nor could my plant-book have told me that there were male and female briars, the females being those that bend over like an arch and grow into the ground again, while my fish-book was ignorant of the fact that a horsehair that falls into a well will grow a little head and turn into an eel. Séamaisín would not hear of objections to this theory; tiny eels were found in springs up on the crags that no big eel could find its way to, and horsehairs were living things, so it “stood to reason.” It was clear that the potato season was going to be an induction into a medieval logic.

  Down on the pier we joined the semicircular herd of men, each clutching a scrap of paper, around the pile of knobbly sacks which the agent was dispensing “on production of the documentation.” Vans, tractors, common carts and small donkey-carts were jumbled together trying to get as close by as possible. “Look at the great sack I carried!” gasped a plump fellow collapsed in the tail of a van. When Séamaisín got his two sacks he spelled out the brandname UP-TO-DATE printed on them, tapping each letter with his finger, as if he suspected he was being fobbed off with old potatoes. I pushed forward to help him carry them. He showed me how to hold the sack by grasping a potato inside each of its ears, and he was most particular about our style in heaving it up onto the cart: “Don’t swing now! Don’t swing now! Now—swing!” We sat on the sacks for the drive h
ome. Passing Powell’s shop on our way out of town, he stopped to buy a pound of butter, leaving me holding the reins. He was a long time gone, but fortunately the horse’s natural inertia kept it where it stood. Shopping was difficult for a bashful man, he explained; he’d been standing back from the counter waiting for a heap of women to finish gossiping. On the cart again he recovered his standing. Plodding up the hill we overtook a donkey-cart that was making little progress; “The shafts are too low!” he shouted at its owner, who leaned against a wall and nodded wearily, speechless with drink. As we rattled down from Baile na Creige he pointed out the little field by the roadside, Buaile Phatsa, Patsy’s milking-pasture, in which he intended to plant the potatoes. Although it had been a pasture for some years it was, he explained, a garraí loirg, a garden in which potatoes had been grown before, as opposed to a garraí bán, fallow grassland never broken up for crops. The blackweed he had spread over the grass a few weeks earlier was satisfactorily “stuck to the ground,” he said, and we were to start the next fine day. I went home to consult Estyn Evans’ Irish Folk Ways on spade-ridges or “lazy-beds.”

  It seems that there is a boundless variety of ways to make a ridge, but in its simplest form,

  … the strip of grass that is to become the furrow is notched centrally down its length and the sods on either side are each undercut by two spade-thrusts and levered over on to the beds, where they lie flat, grass to grass, like closed hinges.

  And there is a multiple rationale to the process:

  Not only does this method make full use of the humus and decaying grass but it prevents the sets from becoming waterlogged and rotting, for the whole bed is raised above the water-table. And the unbroken sod checks the down-wash of plant nutrients. The trenches or furrows between the ridges provide open drains, and the lazy-beds are always carefully aligned with the slope of the land. Moreover when the trenches are dug a second time for earthing the potatoes, they often go deep enough to penetrate the hard layer of iron pan which tends to form under heavily leached soils by the washing down of iron salts. Breaking the impermeable pan not only improves the drainage but provides minerals which are returned to the topsoil when the potatoes are earthed.

  Clearly this was not all applicable to Aran’s few inches of droughty, stony, earth, which surely would have a logic all its own.

  On the twenty-seventh of March Séamaisín and I started to set Buaile Phatsa. When I arrived he was stamping and peering about, bending down to interrogate the ground obliquely for the tracks of the old ridges. I gathered that although the field had been roughly flattened after the previous potato crop, it was important to have the new trenches where the old ridges had been, so that one was digging out the deeper and more compacted earth. Then he snapped a couple of hazel twigs off a bit of scrub in a corner, and pegged out a length of string where the first edge of the first ridge was to run. He inspected the withered scraps of blackweed littering the grass; since not all the salt had been washed out of it, he decided not to lay the potatoes on it straight away lest they get burned. I was set to find pebbles, which Séamaisín arranged in a row a couple of inches inside the string, as stand-ins for the potatoes, which would be stabbed into the ridges later on. When there were no more pebbles to hand he ran into the next field and came back crumbling a bit of dry cow-dung to complete the row. “Wasn’t that a good idea I had!” he said. He removed the string, took up his long-handled spade, and, guided by the row of pebbles, started to open the ground with the speed and ease of a chef filleting fish. The sods were not square as in Estyn Evans’ diagram, but triangular; as a sod was hinged by one of its sides over onto the row of pebbles, it left behind it a complementary triangle of grass with its point towards the ridge, which was then scooped up and dropped upside down onto the ridge beside its mate; the first sort, I learned, was the scraith bhoird (edge-scraw), and the second the scraith láir (middle-scraw). Every now and then a stone came up, and was flicked off the spade to the margin of the field. Séamaisín backed steadily the width of the field, a neat rectangular trench about ten inches wide obediently coming into existence under his stabbing and twisting blade, flanked by the first side of the ridge. Then he pegged out the string for the next trench, using a notch on his spade handle that marked off a distance of about four feet, to ensure that it would be parallel to the first. The notch was old; for many, many seasons it had kept new trenches in step with old ridges. The handle itself was grey, its varnish worn off long ago, and smooth, fed by the copious spittle with which Séamaisín lubricated his hands. The left-hand bottom corner of the blade was worn into a large quarter-circle, and before tackling the second trench he took the spade over to a granite boulder that sparkled in the wall, and sharpened it until its edge gleamed like a scimitar. A discussion of granite—had these useful boulders always been here? How long ago did they come? Were there people here then?—led us into the theme of earth-changes in general. Séamaisín had a theory that the ground moved up and down with the tides, causing the cracks in houses to widen. He had also heard that the earth itself moved, but he said that it was difficult to see how that could be. “If I come and make a mark on the ground there, and I come and look at it, it might be in the same place for twenty years!” The homophony of earth (talamh) and Earth (An Domhan) does not obtain in Irish, and before I could deconstruct its false logic, Séamaisín was at work opening the second furrow, turning the sods back to complete the first ridge. The size of the sods was judged to a nicety so that each one fell pat into its place, butting up against one from the first trench to close in the grass like a neatly carpentered box-lid. Soon the whole ridge was complete. It stretched for twelve yards across the bright grass, as grand as the shadow of the campanile on the Piazza San Marco.

  It was then my turn to sharpen my spade. I was to work back along the furrow Séamaisín had just finished, doubling its width by turning in sods for the first edge of the next ridge, while he constructed its farther edge by opening up a third furrow. This task of “turning in” is junior to that of “opening up,” the line of the trench having already been established, and is traditionally the part of the learner. I played my role as beginner satisfactorily; the earth or Earth met my spade at the wrong angles, my edgescraws broke at the hinges, my middle-scraws were not congruent with the triangular spaces they were to be inverted into, stones stubbed bluntly against my keen blade. Séamaisín came round to look along the bit of ridge I had put together, and remarked consolingly that potatoes would probably grow just as well in a ridge as crooked as a ram’s horn; nevertheless, “If any stranger came by, now, I wouldn’t like them to see that!” Why then, I wondered, had we set to work in this roadside field, since it was a commonplace of our village that the men of certain other villages had nothing better to do than to stroll around criticizing other people’s potato ridges? I sucked the blister in the cleft between my thumb and first finger, and absorbed Séamaisín’s remarks on the importance of not letting the levered-over sod break, for if it does, weeds will grow out of the side of the ridge, and of making the central sods cover the space they are intended for, so that the blackbirds wouldn’t see bits of rotting seaweed poking out and destroy the ridge by pulling at them to get the maggots. When he had slapped the ridge into shape with the back of his spade we continued. On the next ridge I ran into a shallow place where the spade could not find its way between the stones; I felt like saying, “It can’t be done here; let’s skip this bit,” but I persevered, remembering a young teacher at the technical school who had left a hummock that was hardly more than a rock-outcrop in his garden unridged, and had been called upon by a deputation of villagers who insisted he finish the job and promised that the impossible bit would give the best of the crop. Gladly I watched the clouds gathering that would bring down a curtain of rain on the scene of toil.

  A few days later the sun appeared again. I strolled up to see if Séamaisín was at work, and saw that he had completed the garden. Thirty-two ridges stood, proud, parallel, level-topped, above
the knobbly rock of the trenches. I found Séamaisín in his bare kitchen, seated on a wooden chair with a bucket on another chair facing him, cutting up seed-potatoes. The concrete-floored room was chill and the cracked cast-iron kitchen range full of dead ashes, while the back door was left open, in the Aran bachelor’s fashion, to let the wind keep him warm. He showed me how to cut the potatoes into bits each with one eye, to make them go further, and told me that when rats eat a potato in a ridge they leave the eye so that they will have potatoes in the future: “See! The Nature!” he exclaimed, with a wink at its roguery. He was in high spirits, looking forward to ridging a lea garden he owned down on the sandy land near the beach, exulting in his strength and skill: “When I’ve no drink taken for a fortnight,” he cried, “I could drive a spade through that floor!” As he worked he repeated a garbled scrap of verse, that never got beyond lines I came to know by heart:

  They could’ve let the poor man live

  And yet as lordly be

  For ruined cabins were no stuff

  To build a lordly hall …

  When the bucket was full, we walked down with it to the Plains, as he oddly named the arena of slanting fields around the bay, and surveyed with relish the smoothly swelling hillocks of rabbit-nibbled sward and rain-washed blackweed in his lea garden. A few primroses showed among the briars along the foot of its south-facing wall, over which a suddenly sun-intensified vision of the white-pocked, blue-black sea and the snow-dusted peaks of Connemara glared at us. Having pegged out his line, Séamaisín put down the bits of seed-potato in three staggered rows to adumbrate the ridge to be, and spat on his hands, evidently with as much expectation of pleasurable hours as I would have felt (reminded of it by the arrangement of the seeds, at the four corners and central points of a succession of squares) in settling down to read Sir Thomas Browne’s The Quincunx, or the Garden of Cyrus.