Stones of Aran

by Tim Robinson

  So, in 1992, Dún Aonghasa was invested by a team of eighteen or twenty young archaeologists—graduates, student volunteers, local recruits—under the director of the Western Stone Forts Project, Claire Cotter. During their third season I came out to the island to see what they were turning up. It was a foggy, almost rainy day, and the path that wanders up to the dún across one layer of crag after another was slippery. The decrepit outermost rampart, rambling across the hillside, has a stile in it like any field-wall. A hundred and fifty yards beyond it, the path climbs through the zone of thousands of stone spikes, towards a narrow opening in the second or middle rampart, which is tall enough—well over head-height—to impose a sense of enclosure on the quarter-acre of rising ground between it and the ponderous rain-blackened bulk of the central cashel. (This middle rampart has a terrace around its inner face—which shows, I think, that terraces are not necessarily connected with the viewing of spectacles, for which the rough slanting ground within is quite unsuitable.) I found some of the archaeological tribe in a little hut here, and asked them to take me to their leader. We went up through the low gateway into the half-oval of the inner enclosure. Beyond the cliff-edge nothing was visible except shifting dampness. A high wire fence cut off the western half of the enclosure and a few tourists were peering through the mesh at the work in progress behind it. “How old is this place?” one of them called out in an Italian accent to a youth going by with a bucket of soil, who replied (in conformity with Article 2 of the aims of the Discovery Programme quoted above), “We don’t know.” I was admitted by a door marked “private” and presented to Claire (big Aran sweater and Viking ponytail), who laid down her trowel and showed me around the site.

  I had always assumed that the interior of the cashel was so near to being a naked crag that it promised archaeology very little, but in fact there is a surface layer a foot or so deep in the western sector, in the lee of the rampart. The turf had been peeled off an area about twenty yards wide all along the base of the western curve of the wall, except for two narrow strips at right-angles to each other that crossed the bared rock like the axes of a graph. Anoraked forms were kneeling here and there, mapping small scatters of flat stones, brushing soil from crevices, picking out dozens of minute objects and putting them away in little screws of silver foil. Coordinate geometry reigned: regularly spaced parallel wires stretched across the site, the ground was sprigged with numbered dockets, people were treading cautiously to and fro with rulers, tape-measures and metre-square wooden frames. Beneath this rigorous network, Claire persuaded me to see certain configurations of stone as areas of paving and foundations of huts. The earliest of the huts is represented by an arc of low slabs set edge to edge, the basis of either a stone or a wooden building about sixteen feet in diameter. A small trough, floored and walled with flags, was a cooking-place in which water would have been heated by dropping in hot stones. The blackish specks being laboriously collected out of the soil were bits of charcoal, which would all be sent away to be analyzed; the wood of hazel, oak, alder, Scots pine and willow or poplar had been identified. Much of the deposit around the hut-sites is of food debris: limpet and periwinkle shells, fishbones, seabird bones—the settlement must have been extremely smelly—and large amounts of cow and sheep bones, but very little pig, and, what is unusual for a habitation site, no remains of dogs.

  Other finds—I saw some of them later on, in the house Claire and some colleagues were renting in Cill Mhuirbhigh—include fragments of coarse pottery, a pierced bead of blue glass about half an inch across and another a mere eighth of an inch across, a few quartz crystals, and a small round beach-pebble of limestone with white spots of fossil coral in it, such as can be picked up on the shore. Little items of bronze have been found too, such as small rings and a neat pair of tweezers, and some bone pins about three inches long, one of them with a decorative moulded head, probably for fastening a cloak. Also, a pebble with a groove worn in it for sharpening pins, and pieces of clay moulds used for the casting of axes, knives, a spearhead, a sword, a pin and a bracelet. While most of the dates determined so far cluster around 800 BC, the hut itself dates from about 1000 BC. What is being revealed here is clearly a Late Bronze Age settlement. Perhaps the Aran Islanders of this ancient village—much more ancient than anything that had been expected—were concerned, not so much with defence or empire or the ultimate mysteries, as with farming and fishing and the latest fashion in bone pins. A few disturbed remains of human burials were found south of the hut and elsewhere on the site, and just north of the hut in a natural hollow of the rock was the tiny skeleton of an infant, perhaps stillborn; had it lived, it would have lived some time between 800 and 400 BC. Below it, refuse such as animal bones and periwinkles yielded the earliest date of all, between 1500 and 1300 BC—back at the boundaries of the Middle and Late Bronze Age.

  One of the lines of stones interpreted as hut foundations runs in under the cashel wall, which it seems was not itself built up from bedrock but rests on the layer of detritus. Does that mean that generations of people live up here on the bald hilltop before the cashel was built? Perhaps there was an enclosing wall to this first settlement, but if anything of it remains, it is deeply buried within the cashel wall we see today. There is a low, linteled recess in the base of the north-western sector of the present wall, and when one crouches in this and looks to either side, about three feet in, a vertical joint in the masonry is visible which might indicate the face of the original wall. Also it is reasonable to suppose that there was at least a slight wall along the cliff-top; the archaeologists have built a drystone wall just a few feet high there, and it has greatly decreased their discomforts.

  Remarkable as they are, the discoveries made so far say little about the dates and nothing about the purposes of the central cashel wall or the outer ramparts, and after three seasons of excavation the enigma of the dún has scarcely been broached. No houses or other structures of the same era as the cashel wall survive, and finds from later than the Bronze Age have been few. A finely carved comb of antler bone and a few other objects show that the dún was still in use in early Christian times, but what was going on there is still unknown. Since it overlays the Late Bronze Age deposits, the cashel wall, or at least its interior face, is of later date, presumably of the pagan or Early Christian Iron Age; a radio-carbon date of AD 600–800 has been obtained from material in the recess in the wall. But that wall itself was not built in a day; it is a complex structure made of several thicknesses, each with its face of carefully positioned and fitted blocks and its filling of loosely heaped-in stone. There are more such faces than correspond to the three levels of the wall—parapet and two terraces—for one of them can be made out in the stones composing the floor of the upper terrace. The recess was perhaps a doorway at one stage of the wall’s development; it looks as if the stones closing it were pushed in from the other side when another layer was being added to the outside of the wall. Thus the wall we see today may have been built up over a great period of time by periodic thickening and raising of an ancient core.

  The relationships of the two outer ramparts to the central cashel are still to be elucidated. Claire took me up the steps and terraces to the north sector of the cashel wall, which is about eighteen feet high here, and we leaned over the parapet and looked down at an area that had been excavated just outside it. The second or middle rampart, coming round from the east, turns southwards as if to approach the inner one at this point, but changes its mind and continues to the west. It is a massive construction in itself, eleven feet high and terraced on its inner face, but its present indecisive course looks like the result of changes of plan. Newly exposed foundations of a stretch of wall crossing the stripped ground from the kink in the middle rampart to the foot of the main cashel wall immediately below us showed clearly that at some period the middle rampart, or a predecessor of it, did indeed turn south here on a course that would have met that of the inner rampart. A deposit of kitchen-waste—bones and sea-shells—b
anked up along the east of these foundations continues under the inner rampart, which suggests that the foundations are earlier. Perhaps the middle rampart was partially demolished and re-aligned more than once. In fact all its eastern and northern length is underlain by an earlier wall, of which the newly discovered foundations mark a continuation. There is a recess in the north arc of this middle rampart as we see it today, which was evidently a gateway, and under it Claire’s team have found the floor of an earlier, paved entrance with revetted sides, cut down into a shale-band of the hillside. It may be that this entrance and the wall later overlain by the middle rampart represent the first enclosure on this hilltop, a primitive Dún Aonghasa—but its date is not known. When the skeleton of an eleven-to thirteen-year-old was found buried in that early entrance close to its threshold, the archaeologists had high hopes of getting a radio-carbon date from it that would help fix that of the enclosure—but after some months the baffling answer that came back from the laboratory was: AD 910! What could this mean? Either it was a Viking burial, perhaps of a youth who died on board a passing long-boat, or there were at that late date natives of this famously Christian island who were not using Christian burial grounds. In either case, it shows that the gateway was still open then, and regarded as of some otherworldly significance. As to the far flung, eight-hundred-yards-long outer rampart, it is as yet uninvestigated. Thus the scale and longevity of the site seem more than ample to accommodate all the purposes imputed to it by rival theories.

  After Claire had returned to her work I lingered on the ramparts and watched the strange scene for a while, never before having seen such purposive activity in the dún. Visitors to Dún Aonghasa usually look as if being here is a null state between coming up the hill and going down again; fuddled with space, they seem to float around as in an aquarium filled out of the vacancy beyond the cliff-edge. But now the concentration was palpable. Words were few and subdued; occasionally someone would scoop together a handful of dust—so it appeared—and take it across to another person, and they would put their heads together over it for a while, before returning each to their own square metre of ground. The mist welled up over the cliff, thickened, coiled a tentacle about a girl holding a surveyor’s pole near the brink for a young man who was trying to petrify the flux with the theodolite’s single eye. Claire stood motionless with a camera before a measuring-rod laid across a few stones as if on a makeshift altar; while I waited to hear the shutter fall, a fulmar came askance out of the grey, and was gone again. What was she recording, the measure of the stones, or the sacrament of measure itself? Everyone else was on their knees. Trowels rang on the rock like little bells. Dún Aonghasa, now, was a temple. The sacred rite of our times, the acquisition of fact, was being accomplished.

  MALEDICTION

  So the metric priests do not think this place was meant for the worship of storms? Their colleagues in the Cultural Studies Departments must have told them that the storms of Aran are merely signifiers in the ideological construction of the West as Other by a post-colonialist discourse, scarcely worth packing a raincoat against. They shall learn otherwise, for while they were bent on their work I have called one up. At this moment a premonitory bolt hurtles along the brink of the cliff: the peregrine falcon. Its stuttering scream says it has left a kitty-wake exploded into guts and feathers on the rock of perdition. The air in the dún twitches and wakes, crumples the sheet of mist into a ball and tosses it over the cliff. The sea is momentarily in sparkling form, a trillion sine-waving heliographs, but cumulus is raising fists along the southern horizon and darkness wells from the west. A haze slides over the sun, capturing it in a pallid ring decked to left and right with scraps of iridescence, the storm-dogs sailors fear. Now the sun is thinned to a wafer, sinking through layers of wrack, dissolving. A hollow thud rises through the rock-strata from a wave arching its back in the cavern beneath. As the first big raindrops skim across the ground, the archaeologists hastily pin down flapping plastic sheets with stones. The tourists are already scampering down the hillside, glancing over their shoulders at the sudden boiling of the bay below the dún, where wave after wave of waves assault the cliff, mad sap pers ramming home short-fused charges, blowing themselves up every time. I cling like a limpet to the parapet of the dún. The loose stones chatter like cold teeth, the chinks are whining in the wind. Inis Oírr, they say, would have been washed away once but for the limpet that held onto it; now it is up to me whether this island stands. The sea groans, shifts like the roof of a drunken cathedral, throws up staggering steeples, steeple-chasing weather-cocks, gargoyles spewing molten lead. The sea is drunk on itself, a welter of imagery. Space hurls itself at the island, block against block, cracking, split into cuboid voids and mathematico-rhetorical grykes, riven by geologico-ethical, Asbian-Brigantian disjunctions, every rift loaded with either/or. The wind whips away the biblio-biota of the cliff-face, the scrappy choughs, grande-dame gannets, ship-shape kittywakes, fulmars playing toy planes, the fox pendulating on its fern, James O’Flaherty’s ever-falling cattle. Shuffling of the sea-index follows: thirty types of seaweed fly overhead, a sea-hare, a sea-stallion, the middle cut of a basking shark with Tiger King trailing behind on a harpoon rope, a currach full of holy water, a dolphin overstuffed with metaphor. Now comes the rubbishing of the book of the interior, a tectonic revulsion against its slow sedimentary style. Pages of limestone peel away, the nautiloid springs from its rock screaming like an alarm clock, brachiopods whizz by like bullets. The island’s absurd fauna is scrapped, first the butterflies, the dingy skipper pursued by the Californian man-eater, then the one-handed blackbird, the Connemara cows with coughs, the Gort na gCapall cow with Sanskrit, a dog with some seal in it, an armigerous lizard, rabbits hand-in-hand with cats, a stallion hauling a lighthouse, all of them bundled away, knotted in rainbows and consigned to the abyss. Suddenly a rival mage appears on the cliff-top, Seáinín Bhile’s Frenchman, pretending to conduct the Apocalypse with St. Patrick’s staff I humour him, let him wave on Bolgios armed with his lightning sword, then blast him east to Ball-inasloe. The entire cast is dismissed! The Caper and his bride in their broken bed, Lhuyd wailing through the mist clutching his sprig of thrift, all the Victorian excursionists with coat-tails and sensible skirts reflexed, the French consul dancing a jig, the rector and the priest clutching each other’s windpipes (I bang those two heads to gether with especial glee), Dr. Stoney knocking in his coffin and his wife sucking poitín through the keyhole, Father Ferocious with his umbrella-stick, St. Colman with his flying saucers, Nell an Tower polishing the rocks with her witches’ broom, and her offspring gabbling the alphabet backwards, Micilín Sarah brandishing his otter-spear and thirteen-score razorbill legs at the raven’s widow. Off with you, nothing but a pack of marked cards! This storm is flying right round the world and Aran is only a crumb of bread flung out on the doorstep of European culture, not worth snapping at in passing. That these invertebrate walls should set themselves up against the palazzi of Venice! I curse this ramified cul-de-sac of an island that has wasted half the footsteps of my life. Let the empty dúns be thumped like drums, let them be tilted on their rims and sent bowling down the hills, flattening Aran’s fourteen ridiculous villages!

  Patience, my hand. Patience, my mind. Patience, my heart. Your book will be finished yet.

  AN UNFATHOMABLE PUDDLE

  Patiently, one by one, the stories of Aran are to be heard out.

  A boreen leads on westwards from the old ball-alley at the end of Cill Mhuirbhigh village, serving a row of small fields lined up like books on a shelf in the lea of the scarp on the left. After it has let one glance into about twenty of these plots, the track turns south, faces up to the cliff, and mounts it through a little pass. The land is very watery here, almost a turlough in fact, and there is a good spring at the foot of the way; hence the name of the track: Bóithrín Ghort Bheallach Uisce, the boreen of (the) way of water. This is ordinary water, limpid, plentiful, secular. There is holy water nearby too, but it is gi
ven sparingly and tastes of stagnancy. To find it one leaves the beaten track and climbs the knobbly shoulder on its right where it begins to rise up the scarp; a few stony angles and kicked-out toeholds among the heather-tussocks can be used to scramble up to the stile in the field-wall rimming the crag above. This crag is superb: not much interrupted by walls, with smooth clints the size of variously sized rooms separated by the invisible, negative, step-through walls of the grykes, which here are deep and wide enough to demand individual attention from the walker. It lies along a terrace a few dozen paces wide, tending north-westwards, between the sharp twenty-foot fall of the scarp now on the right, and the heathy hillside rising in smaller steps and steeps to the left. The holy well is about three hundred yards along the terrace, beyond the first field-wall to cross it. Bullán Mhaolodhair (anglicized on the OS map and pronounced more or less as Bullaunmalore) is its name, as recorded by John O’Donovan in 1839. He took Maolodhar to be a personal name, probably correctly, though nothing is known of such a person. A bullán is a hollow in a rock—it is the usual Aran word for a solution-hollow in a clint—and in fact this “well” is not a spring but a puddle of rainwater that has, with the help of Nostoc, excavated a shallow bed for itself. Some blocks of limestone have been arranged around three sides of it, and a slab laid across, to form a small, low, rough, canopy. A few old pennies lie in the ooze. The area is unfrequented, not on the way to anywhere, and what lore about the well survives is almost incomprehensibly garbled.

  Yet when I first visited the bullán, one February day of unexpected spring sunshine, there was a bit of heather floating in it. Later, going down the boreen again, I met an elderly Hernon, Pat Mhicilín, with his horse and a cartload of feed-beet. A tall, winterbitten man made out of a hank of sinews—he was the anonymous searod-gatherer in gloomy weather of my first volume, also the man who challenged me to match him with a spade when I found him digging potato-ridges one jubilating day by an effervescent tide—Pat Mhicilín was the village senior of old Cill Mhuirbhigh. But all he knew of the well was a vague story he had heard from King the blacksmith about a saint who got lost on the crag; people went searching for him, calling “A Mhíl, labhair!” (“Michael, speak!”), and he thought that “it stood to reason” therefore that the name of the well was Bullán Mhíl Labhair. As we discussed this unconvincing derivation, another elderly Pat Hernon, Pat Phaidi, came down the hill, wearing an old zinc washtub upside down on his head and hanging down his back like a huge cowl. The three of us had a long conversation; a few raindrops pinged off the tub now and again. Pat Phaidí looked very strange, his wizened face sunken to nothing in the tub except for his bright eyes intently addressing me. Behind his ears I could see twists of rag stuffed into the tub’s leaks; it had obviously long served as a cow-trough in some field above. He had heard that a leper once lived by the well and used to warn people off by saying “Mé lobhar,” “I, a leper”; hence its name, Bullán Mé Lob-har. Katie, Bobby Gill’s wife, would know the real story, he thought. Nobody visited the well now, he said, but in the old days people used to pray there. He had seen “a fine scissor” left beside it once. But all that was in the past. Sometimes, long ago, he used to kneel down there himself and say a prayer. Gradually edging nearer to the heart of the matter, he asked if I had noticed a thráinín in it today. I had, of course—the heather stalk. He looked pleased, and embarrassed. “Well, it was me that put that there, now!” he confessed. I was glad that I had registered the little sign, and that I had seen its significance emerge in this way, like a shy animal peering from its burrow. Looking back on that conversation, I think of The Colloquy of the Ancients, the medieval text that tells how St. Patrick, the newcomer, meets the last of the followers of Fionn Mac Cumhall and takes down from their lips the place-lore of the Celtic Ireland his own culture will supersede. Both the Pat Hernons are gone now, as irrevocably as the last of the Fianna, and what I did not note down of their talk that day is irrecoverable.