Stones of Aran

by Tim Robinson

  The lane going south from the village by Kilmurvey House is the way to Dún Aonghasa; it passes the gates of the house on the right, the old stables on the left, and ends in a little open space before the village well, which is enclosed by a half-cylinder of wall, with only a narrow entrance, like a little round tower tucked in against the first scarp of the hillside. The well used to overflow into a few marshy square yards of fool’s watercress, water forget-me-not, watermint, water speedwell, and bright inverted heights of sky and cloud below them, that lapped onto the end of the lane. Now the space has been tarmacked as parking for minibuses bringing tourists as near as they can to the island’s prime tourist attraction—there is a narrow stile on the right here, beyond which the rocky climb to Dún Aonghasa begins. I regret the loss of this left-over scrap of the earthly paradise as much as I would the dún itself if a cliff-fall were to dump it into the sea. Pony-traps and side-cars stop a little further back, near the gates of Kilmurvey House, and in the busy season there are often half a dozen jarvies sitting or crouching on the grass verge there, backs to the wall and caps pulled down over their noses, waiting while their “loads” as they call them climb the hill, admire the dún, and descend again; some of the more energetic and ruthless jarvies even whip their horses back to Cill Rónáin hoping to capture another load in this interval. A notice is affixed to the wall here, stating that Dún Aonghasa is one of the finest ancient monuments of Celtic Europe and exhorting the visitor to assist in its conservation. It is hardly credible, but Bridgie Hernon, the lady of Kilmurvey House, tells me that some people take this to refer to the house itself, and wander in to explore it; a visiting priest enjoying a late morning in bed there once was awoken by a couple who opened his bedroom door, looked in at him, and retreated saying to each other, “I told you it was inhabited!”

  Kilmurvey is, on the Aran scale, a Big House. Square, plain, and stolidly Victorian, it has two storeys, a hipped, slated roof, and a small central porch, with a big sash-window to left and right of it and three similar windows above. The lichen-grey plastering is relieved only by shallow rusticated architraves around the windows; there is no fanlight over the door, no pediment or pillars or battlements or any other fancy features. A small front-garden is separated by a low wall from the big flat meadow, in which the grass is often tall and rank, that surrounds the whole and is crossed by a curving concrete drive from the gates. The back of the house incorporates the long single-storey farmhouse that preceded it, and a workaday yard and outhouses are hidden to the rear. Behind these premises is a walled orchard gone wild. Over its low door a stone plaque reads “Patrick O’Flaherty Esq. 1809.” One steps through into the heart of a huge Escallonia bush, and the harsh tang of nettles mixed with the syrupy perfume of Himalayan balsam arises as one pushes through the undergrowth in search of the mossy old apple trees. A narrow belt of trees extends to right and left of the orchard in the shelter of the steep fifteen-or twenty-foot scarp with which the land begins to step up to the bare plateau to the west. This crescent of woodland, scarcely taller than the scarp-face, domed and bevelled by the western gales, is still deep enough to cast a spell not to be felt elsewhere on the island. In August, when men are pitchforking the haycocks of the meadow onto a high-piled cart, there are tenuous shin-high groves of enchanter’s nightshade on the damp ground under the alders and sycamores, and the dim, tangled canopy overhead flickers with the shade-favouring sorts of butterfly such as the ringlet and the speckled wood. A trace of nostalgia for the regime of the Big House, even, has stolen into this wood, and persists in its shelter when it is denied all rights to existence by the harsh crags above.

  On the edge of the wood, behind and to the right of the house, is the roofless ruin of a curious old chapel, Teampall Mhic Duach. To reach it one has to cross the field under the formal gaze of the side of the house, and for many islanders this is difficult; when one of our elderly neighbours took the opportunity of our company to visit it for the first time, he had to assure himself aloud, as we passed the glacial windows, “I have the right to walk here!” The church is picturesquely half withdrawn into the dappled shade of the wood. A few paces from it is a craggy limestone slab about seven feet tall and two feet wide, with the outlines of a ringed cross sharply cut into its west face and a simpler cross, almost effaced, of single, broad grooves on the other. It leans slightly, as if it were dawdling about, enjoying an uncanonical hour of birdsong before a bell summons it from the church. But this broad-shouldered brother could hardly enter, for the door, in the west gable-end, is a narrow slot just five foot five inches high, twenty-three inches wide at the bottom and only fifteen inches wide at the top. It looks as if it were compressed by the weight of its tremendous lintel, a block of granite over five feet long. According to O’Donovan this lintel was damaged when a Scotsman tried to pull it out to make a quern-stone of it, and was stopped just in time by Patrick O’Flaherty; Wakeman has a better version of the story, in which the church itself prevents the sacrilege by grabbing the thief’s hand in a crevice of the masonry and holding him until he confessed his evil intentions.

  The church consists of a nave and a chancel separated by a round-headed arch. The western part, the nave, represents the original building, and one would guess from the great size of the blocks in its walls, the massive antae prolonging the sides beyond the west gable-wall, and the lintelled doorway with its inclining jambs, that it is of comparatively early date. But it seems that none of the Aran churches are quite as ancient as their architecture suggests, and in this case a recent radio-carbon test of mortar from the nave placed it in the eleventh century. On the outside of the north wall, near the west end, is a block with an animal carved into it, a rather long, sinuous horse, perhaps, significance unknown.

  The arch dividing the nave from the chancel is Romanesque, as is the lovely slim round-headed lancet window-light in the east gable. The chancel is a little narrower than the nave at ground-level and has been fitted onto the east end of the older building between its antae, but it has projecting parapets along its eaves bringing it out to the full width of the rest, probably added in the fifteenth century. These ragged crenellations give the church a romantic air; one can imagine some aged cleric defying the robbers of the wood from them, or preaching to inattentive wood-pigeons that go clattering off through the treetops every time he appears on their level.

  Whoever the embattled priest of these woods was, he was not St. Colmán Mac Duach, the dedicatee, for the latter is supposed to have studied under Enda in the far-back days of Aran of the Saints. Geoffrey Keating’s history of Ireland, Foras Feasa ar Éirinn, tells us of Mac Duach’s lifestyle:

  When Mochua or Mac Duach was a hermit in the desert the only cattle he had in the world were a cock and a mouse and a fly. The cock’s service to him was to keep the matin time of midnight; and the mouse would let him sleep only five hours in the day-and-night, and when he desired to sleep longer, through being tired from making many crosses and genuflexions, the mouse would come and rub his ear, and thus waken him; and the service the fly did him was to keep walking on every line of the Psalter that he read, and when he rested from reciting his psalms the fly rested on the line he left off at till he resumed the reciting of his psalms. Soon after that these three precious persons died, and Mochua, after that event, wrote a letter to Columcille, who was in I [Iona] in Alba, and he complained of the death of his flock. Columcille wrote to him, and said thus: “O brother,” said he, “thou must not be surprised at the death of the flock that thou hast lost, for misfortune exists only where there is wealth.” From this banter of these real saints I gather that they set no store on worldly possessions, unlike many persons of the present time.

  Mac Duach is usually identified with Mochua, brother to the seventh-century King Guaire of Connacht. Guaire dispensed his legendary hospitality from Durlus Guaire, by Kinvara near the head of Galway Bay, and Mac Duach’s principal foundation was six miles to the south of that, where the round tower of Kilmacduagh still look
s out across the grey limestone plains stretching eastwards from the Burren heights. A tiny, ruinous oratory, a spring well and a cave under the great inland cliff of Eagle’s Rock in the Burren itself are also associated with him. In this savage and lonely “desert,” accompanied by one follower, he observed Lent, living on one meal a day of a little barley bread and watercress:

  And when Easter day had come, and Mochua had said Mass a desire for meat seized the young cleric, and he said to St. Mochua that he would go to Durlus to visit Guaire in order to get enough of meat. “Do not go,” said Mochua, “stay with me, and let me pray to God for meat for thee.” And on this he knelt on the ground and prayed with fervour to God, asking for meat for the young cleric. At the same time while food was being served to the tables of Guaire’s house, it came to pass through Mochua’s prayer that the dishes and the meat they contained were snatched from the hands of those who were serving them and were carried away over the walls of the dwelling, and by direct route reached the desert where Mochua was; and Guaire went with his household on horseback in quest of the dishes; and when the dishes came into the presence of Mochua he set to praise and magnify the name of God, and told the young cleric to eat his fill of meat.

  The latter thereupon looked up and saw the plain full of mounted men, and said that it was of no advantage to him to get the meat, seeing how many there were in pursuit of it. “Thou needest not fear,” said Mochua, “these are my brother and his household, and I beseech God to permit none of them to advance beyond that point until thou hast had thy fill.” And on this the horses’ hooves clung to the ground and they could not go forward till the young cleric had had his fill…. It is a proof of the truth of this story that the Road of the Dishes is the name given to the five mile’s path that lies between Durlus and the well at which Mochua then was.

  As further proof, a farmer of that locality pointed out to me the imprints of the hooves on the rock, as well as the marks left by the plates and even the salt and pepper pots. I have indicated the spot on my map of the Burren, together with the grave of the young cleric, who, the farmer’s wife told me, died of overeating.

  On the other side of the lane past Kilmurvey House, in the field behind the old stable-yard, are the remains of another little chapel, for which O’Donovan could collect no name from the islanders, but which has somehow come to be labelled as Teampall na Naomh, the church of the saints, on the OS maps. It is a featureless, broken-down rectangle about fifteen feet long, the little window in the east gable and the narrow door in the west both almost obliterated. An arc of low stony mounds in the field just north of it indicates the course of a vanished cashel wall, which perhaps surrounded the chapel and may relate to a great mossy bank of stone behind and on the south of the house itself, among the trees by the orchard wall. From these two disjunct scraps it is hard to envisage what George Petrie saw here, fifty years before Patrick O’Flaherty’s cottage was magnified into Kilmurvey House. This was:

  …the great fortress of Muirbheach Mil…erected by a prince of the Firbolgs about the commencement of the Christian era, the interior of which is occupied by two churches, and the numerous round houses of the monks of St. Mac Duach. When I visited Aran, in the year 1821, nearly half of the fortress remained, and the wall was in some parts twenty feet high, and thirteen feet thick at its summit.

  He also discovered, near the churches,

  …the ruins of a building that would have been large enough to serve the purposes of a refectory…an oval structure, without cement, of fifty by thirty-seven feet external measurement, with a wall of six feet in thickness.

  In fact the ancient references to this Mil, brother of the legendary Aonghas, suggest that his dún was on some other muirbheach or sea-plain in Galway or Clare, but perhaps some Aran chieftain resigned a cashel here to a community of monks, as happened elsewhere according to several Lives of the early saints. Little of all this remained even when O’Donovan was here in 1839. Westropp, writing in 1895, noted that

  Mr. O’Flaherty, in making his garden near this church, found nine or ten oblong cells in groups of three, connected by passages. Many brass pins were found, and monumental slabs, with inscriptions “like arrow-heads,” unfortunately broken up and used for the wall.

  Now the only witness to St. Mac Duach’s foundation, apart from the two chapels, is his holy well, tucked away to the back of the meadow south of the house. It used to be the object of a local pilgrimage, but this died out a few decades ago, and the well itself is dry. Its fern-lined basin, shadowed by the margin of the wood, has a low horseshoe-shaped wall around it, built into which is a stone seat suitable for meditation on the transience of material things.

  Having trampled though the nettles and the rank wet grass and the deep sense of privacy all around the back of Kilmurvey House, I will now look into the little front garden, as I find it in my memory from a recent revisiting of the island. A small antique cannon, an O’Flaherty trophy, perhaps from a wreck, lies by the porch. Also, a limestone block carved with a heraldic device, which used to be set in the wall by another gateway into the grounds south of the main entrance, until someone tried to carry it off, after which it was brought here for safety. Nobody seemed to know what it was, so I made a sketch of it and had it identified: a rowel spur, winged, the crest of the Johnston family. Otherwise, everything here is modern and everyday: a rectangle of lawn on either side of the path, a few marigolds and wallflowers, a child’s tricycle, a couple of tourists’ bikes leaned against the wall under one of the windows. I feel I am bringing in too much ancient history like mud on my boots. The old wooden door, I see, has been replaced by a plastic one since I was here last. As I approach, a gong sounds from within. This is not the moment to call; Bridgie will be in the kitchen stirring gravy and minding her new grandson while Treasa carries a laden tray into the dining-room, obstructed by her little girl scampering up and down the hall. In any case, I do not want to call on these old friends with one hand as long as the other, as they say. Bridgie has often asked me who could write the history of the O’Flahertys. I could not—the material is not to hand—but I could go away and do some reading, and come back with a tapestry of O’Flaherty lore, extended to cover the house’s more recent occupancy. Would the gift be welcome? It might serve for the children someday, a present from the past to the future.

  THE FEROCIOUS O’FLAHERTYS

  Argent, two lions counter-rampant, supporting a dexter hand, couped at the wrist, gules: in base, an antique galley, oars in action, sable.—Crest, on a helmet and wreath of its colours, a lizard, passant, vert.—Supporters, on the dexter, a lion, gules, argent, armed and langued, azure; on the sinister, a griffin, argent, armed and langued, gules.—Motto, “Fortuna favet fortibus.”

  Mere modern trumpery, these armorial bearings, picked up with the rank of knight when one of the O’Flahertys of Iar-Chonnacht was suborned into the feudal system by Queen Elizabeth’s crafty statesmen little more than four hundred years ago. Six hundred years before that ignominious event the Flaithbheartach from whom they all descended—the name means “bright in sovereignty” or “lordly in action”—was lord of Maigh Seola, the rich limestone plains east of Lough Corrib and the Galway river. Another four hundred years back his ancestor Duach (called Teangumha, copper-tongued, “from the sweetness of his voice; for the music of the harp was not sweeter than the sound of his words”) ruled the whole of Connacht. Duach himself was great-great-great-great-great-grandson of Eochu Mugmedon (lord of slaves), the High King of Tara, while behind Eochu, in the Celtic dawnlight of Lebor Gabála, the Book of the Taking of Ireland, looms the magic father-figure of Éremón, pre-eminent among the Sons of Míl who won the island from the Tuatha Dé Danann.

  A magnificent descent—but descent is what it was, from those semi-divine beginnings. For according to the medieval genealogists who tried to make history out of these Iron-Age myths, Eochu had four sons by his wife and then another by a woman he had carried off during one of his raids on Britain. One day when
they were thirsty from hunting, the five sons found an ugly hag guarding a well, who said she would only give water to the one who would kiss her cheek. Niall, the illegitimate son, embraced her, and she changed into a beautiful girl, a goddess in fact, the incarnation of sovereignty. So it was Niall who became High King of Ireland (he was the famous Niall of the Nine Hostages)—and his descendents the Uí Néill held the High Kingship almost uninterruptedly for six centuries. But the O’Flaherty line comes down from Brión, one of the legitimate brothers. He had to content himself with the Kingship of Connacht, which for generations was disputed between his descendants the Uí Briúin, and the Uí Fiachrach, descendents of another brother, Fiachra.