Stones of Aran

by Tim Robinson

  … and so it goes on in ever more ghoulish detail, ending with the whole village being rewarded with pensions because of their hospitality to the corpse of an American millionaire. Again and again during Clara’s stay, James drifted into the kitchen and sat down by the fire in his long-belted raincoat that “lent to him an air of seedy civilization,” and begin his stories of “corpses, cruelty, and spells of witches.” Her last view of him is on the morning of her leaving:

  Under the sea wall by Kilmurvey Harbour I found James sitting down and looking at the sea and smoking, occupied thus with three cronies. He had told us he must be at work by eight o’clock and it was now well after nine. I never saw a man who looked less like beginning a day’s work.

  That is James Johnston, caught in the perspective of Lady Vyvyan’s holiday snaps. From another social angle I pick up an auditory trace of him: a merry clattering on the road in the small hours, as he rolls home from the pubs of Cill Rónáin with a fellow roisterer, the painter Charles Lamb over from his studio in Connemara for a spree—a sound that broke the sleep and lodged in the memory of one of our Oatquarter neighbours when he was a child sixty years or more ago.

  Late in his life James married Bridget Coyne, the daughter of a substantial cattle-dealer from Ballybrit near Galway who often visited the island. In 1947 Bridgie opened Kilmurvey House as a guest-house for the first time. James died in 1953, leaving no offspring. Bridgie’s second husband was Sonny Hernon, a Cill Mhuirbhigh neighbour. Their daughter, Treasa, I first noticed as a skinny little girl with sparkling black eyes, taking the lead in an Irish-language play in the school at Fearann an Choirce; she soon became one of the little band who used to call in on us on their way home. Sonny I remember as a small, neatly-built man, intent on his work with the cattle, sparing with words. When the attics of Kilmurvey House had to be emptied to make way for more guest-accommodation, the question arose of what to do with heaps of mouldering O’Flaherty papers; “Burn them!” said Sonny, and a lot of stuff that might mortally have delayed my progress to the end of this chapter drifted off in smoke over the crags. Once, when I remarked to another villager how curious it was that the O’Flaherty demesne had become a Cill Mhuirbhigh farm like any other, he grumbled that at least in the old days one could rent a field from Johnston, but now Sonny worked them all himself. Bridgie used to sigh, and say, “He comes in from his work; he has his tea; he goes out again!” But then Sonny changed. “The first I noticed of it,” the neighbour told me later, “was when we were talking about the damage the rabbits do to the fields, and Sonny said, ‘Ah, the rabbits will be here after us!’” Stricken by premature senility, Sonny vanished from the island into hospital, and lay there, null. Treasa abandoned her studies and came home to work in the factory and help her mother with the guest-house. It was a dark time; “My husband is dead,” said Bridgie, “but we still have to visit him!” Sonny’s death was not complete until the end of January in 1980.

  But now, returning to the island in 1993, I find the house full of laughter, the accommodation renewed—little bathrooms juggled into corners of the big old-fashioned bedrooms, decayed window-frames replaced, etc.—Treasa’s amiable husband sitting in the kitchen when he is not off with his Cill Ronáin-based trawler, two grandchildren welcoming Bridget into a new phase of life, and the present moment vigorously reasserting itself. The parlour is still the same, with the TV set looking as if it had barged in among Lily O’Flaherty’s Victorian knicknacks and James Johnston’s worn-looking ’thirtyish travel books. The ancestral portraits that caught Petrie’s attention in 1821 and mine a century and a half later still hang there, all the more impressive for the darkness of age: Patrick O’Flaherty’s uncle Thady (that was his name, says Bridgie), a handsome, rubicund, portly personage, and Thady’s wife, daughter to the “respectable English Catholic” who had a large fortune, exhibiting a glacial expanse of bosom. (If Sir Henry Englefield had his portrait done by Sir Thomas Lawrence—it was shown at the Royal Academy in 1813, when Lawrence was the most sought-after portraitist of London—it was obviously some lesser, provincial, artist who painted his sister and brother-in-law?) Thinking about these reminders of the O’Flaherty past, I realize that this room is the setting of Ó Direáin’s late, self-questioning poem, “Neamhionraic gach beo.” Máirtín the Sruthán village lad would of course never have been allowed into this sanctum of gentility, but when he was an established Dublin literary figure, Bridgie tells me, he used to call on the Johnstons. Evidently the well-upholstered hospitality of this room represented a seduction, and its antique fixity a reproach, which he had to address in obscure argument with himself:

  Nuair a bhí tine is ól mar dhíon

  When sheltered by fire and drink

  Ar shíon na hoíche fuaire

  From the cold of a stormy night

  Babhurla beag beadaí tú

  You luxuriated lumpishly

  I dteas na tine os do chomhair

  In the warmth of the fire before your face

  Is ó mheidhir an fhíona taobh leat;

  And the cheer of the wine at your elbow;

  Ach d’aird fós ar do ghnó

  Yet with your mind still at its business

  In ainneoin tine, óil is teasa,

  Despite fire, drink and warmth,

  Ach ní rabhais ionraic ar oileán

  But you were not faithful on an island

  Ná aon duine den bhuín a bhí i do theannta.

  Nor were any of your companions.

  An seantriath ar an mballa

  The old chief on the wall

  Gona mhéadal nósmhar,

  With his formal paunch,

  Is a chaofach mná thall

  And his lady wife there

  Gona brollach nósmhar,

  With her formal bosom,

  Atá ceaptha in dhá phortráid

  Who are captured in two portraits

  Atá neamhbheo gan malairt

  Inanimate and unchanged

  Le trí chéad bliain is breis—

  For three hundred years and more—

  Táid beirt ionraic ar oileán,

  Both are faithful on an island

  Mar tá cloch carraig is trá

  As are stone rock and strand

  I lár na hoíche fuaire.

  In the cold of midnight.

  The idea of an inherent faithlessness between people and things leads the poet on into a troubled personal reflection, which I shall follow out when I come to write about Ó Direáin in his Sruthán setting. For the moment, I borrow from the poem only a sense of this room’s four-square, thick-walled, heavy-curtained snugness, enhanced by the lament of the night wind in the trees outside.

  There are many other relics of old times here, notably a portrait of Patrick O’Flaherty himself (perhaps it is only the naivety of provincial portraiture that gives him a nose like a bent knife-blade), a studio photograph of James O’Flaherty, solid-cheeked and bearded, as Eminent Victorian, a silhouette of James Hardiman. The unidentified subject of another portrait from Patrick’s era is familiarly known as Bob Hope from a rather striking resemblance. Well hidden away are the magnificent Missale Roma num (1732, from Plantin’s famous printing-house in Antwerp) and the vestments said to have been brought by the O’Flahertys’ priest from Aughnanure. Hanging over the fireplace is an embroidery of the O’Flaherty shield and lizard crest. In a few years’ time the new generation will begin to wonder about this lizard and its long tail of history, which they inherit no less inevitably for being biologically disjunct from it, since an old house is a habitable form of DNA; and then, I hope, the fireside entertainment I have made of it will not come amiss.

  DÚN AONGHASA REVISITED

  At the Second Battle of Moytura the Fomorians deployed a terrible weapon against the Tuatha Dé Danann, the single eye of their leader, Balor of the Poisonous Eye. Four men were needed to raise its lid by a polished ring, and its gaze could waste an army. But the god Lugh with a slingshot knocked it through to the back o
f his skull, so that it looked upon Balor’s own supporters and turned twenty-seven of them to stone. Balor, whose name seems to mean “the flashing one,” is associated in mythology with Mizen Head in Cork, with Tory Island off Donegal, and perhaps with Land’s End, the ancient Bolerion, in Cornwall; it has been suggested that he was the Celtic god of the setting sun. In the foggy timescape of myth this Second Battle is hard to distinguish from the First, the defeat of the Fir Bolg by the Tuatha Dé Danann. The outcome of this latter was (according to the pseudohistory of the Lebor Gabála), the retreat of the Fir Bolg to the western shores, and the building of Dún Aonghasa by their leader Aonghas.

  If the south-west is bright, the plateau behind Cill Mhuirbhigh looks like a long dark curtain-wall, on which the central cashel of the dún is a turret at the farther, Atlantic, end. I have often noticed that from a certain stretch of the main road a tiny rectangle of sky is visible through the gateway of the cashel, so that, as you walk or cycle down to the village from the east, it is as if an eye opens, fixes you for a minute or two, then closes. This look is not baleful, but it is both tremendous and ambiguous. After encountering it, to climb the half-mile hillside from the village to the cashel, and pass through that gateway, a slanting passage up through the thirteen-foot thickness of the rampart, is to submit to inspection by whatever lies within—which appears, rather intimidatingly, to be nothing.

  Dún Aonghasa is so strangely and extremely situated, in immediate apposition to the precipice, as to suggest three possibilities: that it addresses itself to the rest of the island, as a last defensive toehold; or to the sea and the long vista of the Clare coast visible from it, as the citadel of some regional power; or to the beyond, as a temple. The first theory was the favourite of the Romantic era, but has long been abandoned as impracticable. The earliest full expression I have come across of the last theory is by W.Y. Evans Wentz, that Casaubon-with-attitude of the Celtic Twilight:

  In Dun Aengus, the strange cyclopean circular structure, and hence most likely sun-temple, on Aranmore, we have another example of the localization of the Aengus myth. This fact leads us to believe, after due archaeological examination, that amid the stronghold of Dun Aengus, with its tiers of amphitheatre-like seats and the native rock at its centre, apparently squared to form a platform or stage, were anciently celebrated pagan mysteries comparable to those of the Greeks and less cultured peoples, and initiations into an Aengus cult such as seems once to have flourished at New Grange…

  Evans Wentz here is confusing Aonghas of the Fir Bolg with Aonghas of the Tuatha Dé Danann, who is associated with the Neolithic tumulus of Newgrange. Thence it is but a step for him to show that this same cult of “the Celtic Zeus” was practiced in the “druidical temples” of Stonehenge and Carnac, and in one more hop we reach the Great Pyramid, whose main entrance, he tells us, is a passageway oriented to the south-east like that of Newgrange and having its opening under the Great Sphinx, but unfortunately not yet discovered.

  Etienne Rynne, the professor of archaeology in University College, Galway, has long nursed the idea that not only Dún Aonghasa but the other six Aran forts and similar stone structures in the Burren and elsewhere in western Ireland were ceremonial sites. Unlike Evans Wentz, he advances arguments for thinking so:

  There are four main purposes for which monuments are built, namely, for living purposes, for burial purposes, for military purposes, or for ceremonial purposes. The first two alternatives can be eliminated without much trouble insofar as Dún Aengus is concerned. The place is in no way suitable for either living in or burial: there is not enough earth there even for a shallow burial, and furthermore, it fits into no known funerary monument-type, while anyone who has ever been there in wet and windy weather conditions knows that living there would be out of the question—one does not try to rear a family on the edge of a high cliff, a permanent danger to children and even to adults, and where there are no adequate facilities for normal living, there being not enough soil to grow food for humans or pasture for cattle, not to mention the lack of fresh water on the site….

  The third alternative, the military one, is less easy to dismiss. Should it have been built and used for military purposes then it could only have served as a place of refuge which, ipso facto, implies siege warfare. Quite apart from the fact that the ancient Irish did not normally engage in siege warfare, the site is quite unsuitable for such on many points. There is, for instance, no fresh water, no escape route, and the terraces of the inner citadel are not suitable for looking out over the ramparts for defensive or other such purposes. (The top rampart is mainly a reconstruction carried out in the 1880s by the Board of Works and originally was at least im. higher.)…

  By a process of elimination, therefore, one is left with the fourth and last alternative, that Dún Aengus was conceived, built and used for ceremonial purposes…. By the same process of elimination all these related monuments can be interpreted as having been built for ceremonial purposes, purposes such as inauguration ceremonies, or for the annual or seasonal aonach (assembly/celebrations) of the tuath (tribe), where and when payment of tribute, making of treaties, arranging important marriage contracts, holding ritual games, promulgating laws, receiving honoured guests, etc., would have taken place…. These ancient “forts” are not only impressive in themselves but are sited in positions which immediately command attention and respect, generally in positions overlooking vast areas and thus eminently suitable as meeting-places for the people of the surrounding regions. Furthermore, their stepped and terraced walls are much more suitable for looking inwards than outwards, indicating that these monuments should more fittingly be regarded as amphitheatres rather than as forts….

  When visiting Dún Aengus, therefore,… the visitor should conjure up an image of druids, ollavs, bards, kings and nobles, all processing formally through the Dún’s impressive entrance, some to perform rituals on the stage-like platform, some to assist in the innermost enclosed area, and others to stand on the surrounding terraced wall chanting incantations or singing sacred songs while viewing the solemn proceedings taking place against the dramatic backdrop of the wild Atlantic Ocean whose waves sonorously thunder against the rock-face far out of sight below.

  Recently an archaeologist of the rising generation, Michael Gibbons, undertook to correct his former professor on this question, pointing out that there were noticeable traces of habitation, including hut-foundations, in the western sector of the inner enclosure. The controversy caught the attention of journalists, who stepped forward to hold the combatants’ coats. An article in The Irish Times quoted Michael Gibbons as follows:

  In fact, Dún Aengus was probably built during a period of great maritime power by a people who held sway over all of Árainn and probably much of the Burren during the period 800 BC to AD 400.

  While Michael Gibbons will allow that the platform of natural rock in the inner enclosure may well have been used for ceremonies—traces of rectangular temples have been found in other Iron-Age enclosures—ritual was not the raison d’être of the cashel.

  In this same article I was as surprised as Professor Rynne must have been to read that he had “suggested that Dún Aengus was built for ceremonial purposes, such as storm worship.” In hastily mugging up the background to the dispute, The Irish Times columnist had evidently noticed a passing thought of mine from Pilgrimage, quoted by Professor Rynne as a literary ornament to one of his articles on the dún: “I would rather believe the place was built for the worship of storms, to which it is well adapted, than to impress the neighbours.” Having escaped from literature through science into journalism, this notion is now breeding in the wild; in Aran’s newly opened Heritage Centre, under a picture of Dún Aonghasa the visitor can read that “some believe it was built for the worship of storms.” Well, every idea has its day, and although I doubt if my little literary flourish would have impressed the Fir Bolg (though why not, if indeed Bolgios was a god of lightning, as O’Rahilly suggested fifty years ago?), it could c
ome about that when religion returns to its roots Dún Aonghasa will be the official seat of communion with the sky’s disinterested violence.

  Meanwhile, and for the first time, a proper archaeological investigation of the dún has begun, and facts are being troweled up and sieved out that may amount to evidence for one or other of the rival suppositions as to its purpose, or even bury the entire debate. This excavation is part of the Discovery Programme, a national—indeed a nationalistic—archaeological project initiated by the then Taoiseach Charles Haughey in 1991, the aims of which are “1. To work towards a coherent and comprehensive picture of human life on this island from earliest times,” and “2. To formulate the results in ways that can be communicated both to experts and to the general public.” In pursuance of this programme the Late Bronze Age and Early Iron Age was selected as the “core period” for intensive research (perhaps it was felt that “life on this island” offered a more coherent picture then than it has done since), and a critical topic within that period was identified:

  The Western Stone Forts Project was set up to address the questions posed by a group of large stone forts which occur along the western seaboard and on the western islands. Between twenty and thirty of these forts survive, mainly in counties Galway, Clare and Kerry. Dún Aonghasa on the Aran Islands, Grianán Aileach in Co. Donegal and Staigue in Co. Kerry are among the best known examples…. At present we know very little about the people who built these forts and the social or environmental conditions which prompted the construction of such large scale defensive monuments….