The sea was rougher than we expected. The boat was rocking so much that whenever you looked through the window the land could be seen dropping out of the sky and going down into the sea and rising up again past the window. It was an illusion that was not worth trying to work out because it would make you seasick. Which is what happened to Ellis, even though she had eaten nothing. There were paper bags provided at the back of all the seats, but Helen decided to bring her upstairs on deck where her thin vomit was carried away by the wind. The sea calmed a little as we arrived into the shadow of the islands and came near to landing.
Helen had arranged to meet a friend she knew on Inishmore. He stood on the pier waiting for us. Michael was his name and he was the principal at the school in Kilronan. He spoke to her in Irish at first and he knew exactly where to take us. He drove out along the road to where none of the tourists ever went and where nobody had much reason to go. He stopped at a place where the narrow road ran out, where there was nothing more than a stone wall and the wide shore of jagged grey rocks on the far side.
He spoke to us about the drowning of Máire Concannon. He told us that he had heard about the event from his own father. There was nobody alive now who could remember it first hand, but he went through all the versions that were told and all the rumours that were washed in by the waves down the years. There were sharp limestone rocks all around and you could see how they were ideal for making the tall stone walls for which the island was famous and so often photographed. You could never lose your mistrust of the weather, so they said. The walls could stand up to any storm the Atlantic threw in at them.
Michael pointed across the bay to Furbo, where we had been earlier. We wondered how long it would take for a drowned body to make its way over on the tide. He said it would be hard to estimate such a thing, but it was better that she had arrived here, because he had experience of bodies being washed up on the other side of the island and they were in very bad shape, often totally dismembered. There were times when they could find nothing more than a hand or a limb at the most. A foot inside a trainer, left unidentified, God knows where from.
I could hear Michael talking behind me and the distant sound of waves crashing in front, like being in between two conversations. The shoreline was too far away and rocks were too jagged for us to walk across. There was no way of telling where exactly her body was found. But then Michael led us towards a wall separating the shore from the first field. There was a flat rock set in like a step jutting out on each side. We crossed over and followed him along the inside of the wall until he stopped.
‘Here,’ he said. ‘This is where she is buried.’
He pointed out two rounded, granite stones set deep into the earth, parallel to the wall, just a metre inside. The stones were white and smooth, emerging about two feet over the ground and surrounded by grass. The distance between them was approximately the length of a human body, six feet, maybe a little more.
‘This is the first place where there was earth deep enough to hold her remains,’ Michael said.
Ellis had one hand on her belly and she rested her head on Helen’s shoulder. We were standing only a few feet away from the hastily dug grave into which Máire Concannon had been put to rest. It seemed like only yesterday that she was found on the rocks and brought here on a board, all bashed by the sea. And maybe you could say this was her real funeral, only in delayed time. Two plain rocks in the ground to mark the place where she lay. It was impossible to tell which one of them was the headstone or which way the body was turned. But you had to assume that the men who buried her under cover of night so many years ago would have done their best to place her head pointing back in the direction of Furbo, where she belonged.
Afterword
The story of the drowned woman found on the Aran Islands was first given to me by the Irish artist, Páraic Reaney from Carraroe at the opening of an exhibition of his work in Galway in the summer of 2008. He, in turn, heard the story from Michael Gill who is the principal at Kilronan Secondary School on Inishmore in the Aran Islands. In the autumn of the same year, I revisited Inishmore, where Michael and Olwyn Gill gave me the full story of this event, separating the facts and the rumours. Michael brought me to the place at Pointe (Point) on the headland of Carraig Fhada (The Long Reef) which is marked with two rocks, gone slightly white. He had heard the story from his own father and confirmed that the place is known on the island as Bean Báite (Drowned Woman). Michael and Olwyn were also in a position to tell me that the drowned woman’s name was Mháire Conceannain (Mary Concannon) and that she was from Na Forbacha (Furbo) in Connemara. Olwyn spoke to me about meeting a relative of Máire Concannon who had come back some years ago from the US to visit Inishmore in order to investigate the circumstances around her death and also to visit an ageing aunt in a Galway hospital who could still recall the events.
It is possible that further evidence may emerge at some point in the future, but apart from the oral record, there seems to be no factual account in writing anywhere, apart from a brief mention of the place called Bean Bháite by Tim Robinson in his great work on the Aran Islands.
In a poem entitled Athrú Trá (Tide Change), Michael Gill draws a link between the drowned woman and the rocks that mark her grave. Her body was brought in on the north wind and her gravestones were brought in on the melting glaciers. Granite boulders are a geological anomaly on the islands, known locally as ‘Aran visitors’.
The only definitive proof of her name and the circumstances around her death exist in folklore, passed on by word of mouth. It is difficult to put an accurate date on the events now, only to point out that they occurred recently enough to have been remembered first hand by an old woman in a Galway hospital around 2000.
There is nothing to be found in newspapers about Máire Concannon, no inquest or police reports and crucially, no death certificate. The Irish language writer and social activist Pádraic Ó Conaire, for whom there is a statue erected in Eyre Square in Galway, spent time living in London in the early 1900s. He cast some light in his writing on conditions in the west of Ireland and reported that there were no less than eight hundred prostitutes from Connemara working in London around that time. The drowning of Máire Concannon does not appear in his writing. There is also a more famous book about the Aran Islands written by the Irish writer John Millington Synge which begins with the words ‘I am in Aranmore, sitting over a turf fire, listening to a murmur of Gaelic that is rising from a little public-house under my room.’ There is nothing in his book either about the drowned woman or the place where she was found. It seems unlikely that Synge would have missed a story like that. If he had known about it, he might have written a play on the subject or mentioned it in his travel writings at least. So her death must have occurred sometime later, after he stopped visiting the islands, possibly even after his writing life ended abruptly in 1909.
Many thanks to Michael and Olwyn Gill, to Páraic Reaney, to the Serbian writer Dragan Velikić, to Sister Máire at the Presentation Convent, Rahoon, Galway, to Baibre Ní Fhloinn at the Folklore Department, University College Dublin, to Peter Browne at RTE, to Siobhán Ní Laoire at DIT, to Professor Tom Inglis at UCD, to Frank Hamilton, Brian J. Cregan, Pat Johnston, Alice Friend, Timothy O’Neill, Thomond Coogan, Jerry Parr and especially to Nicholas Pearson, Georg Reuchlein, Peter Straus and Petra Eggers.
The line of Samuel Beckett is taken from Krapp’s Last Tape. The songs quoted in the book are the traditional hymn ‘The Queen of the May’ and also the traditional Irish drowning lament entitled Caoineadh Liam Ui Raghallaigh (The Lament for Liam Ó Raghallagh, or Willie O’Reilly). It is sung in Irish by Darach Ó Catháin on an album called Reacaireacht an Riadaigh, which is published by Gael Linn, an Irish language organisation where I worked promoting Irish music in the 1980s. The rest is fiction, as they say.
Mo mhíle buíochas arís, go tháirithe le Michael agus Olwyn Gill, Cillrónáin, Inis Mór, Oileann Árainn.
Also by Hugo Hamilton
&nbs
p; Disguise
The Sailor in the Wardrobe
The Speckled People
Sad Bastard
Headbanger
Dublin Where the Palm Trees Grow
The Love Test
The Last Shot
Surrogate City
Copyright
First published in Great Britain in 2010 by
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Copyright © Hugo Hamilton 2010
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