by Tim Robinson
Molaimid thú a Chéipir
Ar thús na bhfear in Éirinn‚
Mar is tú a fuair an bhean ba géimiúla
Dár rugadh riamh san ait
San oíche a dtáinig tú dá hiarradh
Bhí an baile trína chéile,
Is gurbh fhearr leat bheith i gCill Éinne
Ná i do chléireach sa chaisleán.
Oh Caper, we praise you
Above all men in Ireland,
For it’s you that won the liveliest girl
That ever was born in this place.
The night you came to ask for her
The village was upside-down,
And you’d rather be in Cill Éinne
Than be a clerk in Dublin Castle.
But although she was fine-looking girl (and I am told the Caper “wiped the eye of the local lads”), her family were desperately poor, and all her father could provide as dowry was this salt-blasted hillside and the dunes just north of it, plus the gear for scratching a living off the shore:
Thug sé an Teannaire mar spré dhó,
Poll an Ghamhna agus Port Daibhche dhó,
Sin agus beart cléibhe,
Agus máilín ma mbaoití,
An gliomach a bheadh faoin áfach,
An portán rua agus an cráifisc,
Agus na duáin a bhí fágtha
A bheadh aige lena shaol.
He gave him the Pump as dowry,
The Pool of the Calf and Barrelport too,
Sally-rods to make a basket,
And the little bag for bait,
The lobster down in its hole,
‘The red crab and the crayfish,
And the fishing-hooks left over
Would last him all his life.
Can I imagine myself taking the island into my possession like this, in her penniless beauty? The welcome was generous enough:
Bhí arán is jam is feoil ann,
Is bhí ceathrar ag seinm ceoil ann,
Bhi fuisce is lemonade,
Fíon is punch dá réir ann …
Bread and jam and meat was there,
And four musicians playing,
There was lemonade and whiskey
And wine and punch as needed …
But while the girl’s father sat with his back to a creel of turf politely ignoring the goings-on and her mother started keening, the whiskey somehow disappeared into the night, the guests, ag deanamh “joy” den oíche, making “joy” of the evening, broke up the bridal bed, and nobody got a wink of sleep. Fortunately the weather was too bad for the steamer to bring out the fifty policemen who were to search the place or the Justice and Crown Attorney to try the cases arising from that night.
Nothing suits me in this precedent. The island is no longer the village maiden of ninety years ago. The identification of a territory with a woman, a theme of great significance in Celtic mythology and one which tempted Synge too, is nowadays fraught with tensions. And, although I trust prayer no more than whiskey, I would rather drift ashore in a barrel than accede to a holding of this island through such ructions.
However, through all this frowning over my scrawled difficulties and disorderly data, I find that I have now arrived, unbeholden to saint or sage or father-in-law, and by my preferred literary transition, a slinking behind my own back. Nothing could be better adapted to this broken ground, riven by quantum jumps and contradictions. Now, all those problems of tense and person can be left to piecemeal solution. In the glow and hum of my word processor I am already mooching about below the half-abolished tower, as tenebrous as ever, trying to understand what it is I am to understand, peering into the crevices of the crag like the wise old women of Aran, in search of a simple for a complex.
MAIDENHAIR
In shadow, a recessive shade. Greyish-green flakes floating in an elaborate and slightly dishevelled pattern. The eye slowly sorts it out into perhaps five or six triangular fronds. On a closer look an individual frond breaks up into a small number of triangular sprays of five or six leaflets the size of a little fingernail. Each leaflet is fan-shaped, with straight sides and a scalloped outer margin, and is attached at the apex to a fine stalk, which in its turn branches off the slightly thicker axis of the spray, and so is connected back to the stem of the frond. Even these stems are so slender that the fronds bend outwards under their own weight, so that each leaflet offers its upper surface to the eye and the whole array canopies a curved darkness below. The articulations are so delicate that a breath is enough to start a flickering fan-language of display and concealment, chaste provocation, coquetry—or so one reads it, prompted by the fern’s English name. The Irish goes bluntly to the root: dúchosach, black-footed. Part the foliage and see how the wire-thin stalks emerge in a dense bundle like a jet of earth-force from a crack in the rock, glossy brownish-black, grading into green as they diverge into their parabolic trajectories. The peasant, sturdily rooted in the compost of its ancestors.
Adiantum capillus-veneris (to take up its Linnaean binomial as one would a magnifying glass for scientific objectification) is the Aran plant par excellence. It is extremely rare in Britain and in Ireland except on the Burren and Aran limestone, and the earliest Irish record of it commemorates the first visit of a scientist to the island. Edward Lhuyd, writing from “Pensans in Cornwall, Aug. 25, 1700,” says:
In the Isle of Aran (near Galloway) we found great plenty of the Adianthum verum, and a sort of matted campion with a white flower, which I bewail the loss of, for an imperfect sprig of it was only brought to me; and I waited afterwards in rain almost a whole week for fair weather to have gone in quest of it.
The campion would merely have been the common sea campion; Adianthum verum was the old name for the maidenhair fern; and without the rain there would be no such fern here. Lhuyd was Keeper of the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, and catalogued its collection of fossils; he was at the same time establishing himself as a Celticist, and his visit to Aran was in connection with the preparation of his great work Archaeologia Britannica, described on its title-page as “giving some account Additional to what has been hitherto Publifh’d, of the LANGUAGES, HISTORIES AND CUSTOMS OF THE ORIGINAL INHABITANS OF GREAT BRITAIN: from Collections and Observations in Travels through Wales, Cornwal, Bas-Bretagne, Ireland and Scotland.” In his second chapter, “A Comparative Vocabulary of the Original Languages of Britain and Ireland,” I notice:
Adiantum … The Herb Maydenhair; Ir. Dúv-xofax … Black-fhank
which perhaps records the rusty voice of some Araner of nearly three hundred years ago. Another name for the fern I have heard, tae scailpreach (scailpreach meaning a place of rocky clefts), probably dates only from the last century when tea became such a comforter of the poor. Dinneen gives it in his Irish dictionary, with the remark that the fern was used as a substitute for tea; this seems unlikely, and I imagine it was the appearance of its sere and shrivelled fronds in winter that made people think of the craved-for drug.
But why does a plant of the warm south grow on these bleak islands, whose other botanical stars are the limestone bugle, from northern and mountainous areas of Europe, and the spring gentian, best known from the Alps? In an old encyclopedia I read that the maidenhair fern is “abundant in the south of Europe, where it covers the inside of wells and the basins of fountains (as at Vaucluse) with a tapestry of the most delicate green.” Fontaine de Vaucluse is where Petrarch retired to in a vain effort to forget his Laura. What brings the delicate Provençale to Penultima Thule? The answer begins to open up the labyrinth of Aran.
On a hillside like that leading up to St. Gregory’s tower (through which I am feeling my way into the matter of Aran) one sees the geometry of limestone exposed in black and white. Because this rock originated over a period of millions of years as the layered sediments of a sea that changed in depth, turbidity, temperature and living contents, its strata vary in their chemical and physical constition. Hence such a slope, carved out of a succession of almost horizontal strata of differen
t resistances to erosion, consists of a number of more or less well-defined terraces separated by vertical “risers” of anything from a few inches to twenty or more feet. As one climbs, the rim of each step or cliff running across the hillside ahead shows up against the sky. Here, because of the particular direction one takes in coming up from the beach, these successive horizons have an extraordinary appearance that reveals another, vertical, set of divisions in the rock. Each rim, seen from below, has the profile of a row of blocks with gaps of a few inches between them; where the gaps are very close together the blocks are reduced to mere blades an inch or two thick, and the hillside looks as if it were built out of arrays of knives set on edge. These fissures are the surface expression of a system of cracks or “joints” cutting vertically through the limestone, the result of tensions in these strata caused by movements in the earth’s crust at some period after the Carboniferous. Rainwater has eroded out these hairline cracks into fissures of various widths and depths on exposed surfaces of the limestone; once opened up, the fissures receive all the run-off from the level rock-sheets and channel it underground. In the curious international jargon of geology such a fissure is a “gryke” and the flat rock-sheet is a “clint”—Yorkshire dialect-words, adopted because such formations are best known from limestone areas like Malham in Airedale. A limestone terrain with subterranean drainage, as here and at Malham, is called a “karst,” a term equally expressive of stony barrenness, borrowed from the name of such a region in the former Yugoslavia. In this particular corner of Aran the grykes are generally only a few inches wide and a few feet deep, but in other parts they are sometimes over two feet wide and ten or more feet deep. The principal set of grykes runs with amazing parallelism across the islands from a few degrees east of north to a few degrees west of south. This happens to be the direction in which one climbs towards the tower, so here the hillside is sliced before one’s eyes by the brightness of the sky.
This dissection of the rock not only underlies the detailed accidentation of the coastline, as I have shown in my first volume, but it orders many aspects of life, including that of humans, in the interior. Because of the general nakedness of the terrain, it immediately provides two contrasted environments for lime-loving plants. The differences between the “microclimates” of the flagstone-like ground-surface and the grykes are as sharp as those between two climatic zones hundreds of miles apart. In the shady water-gardens of the clefts the maidenhair fern can enjoy a mild, moisture-laden, Gulf-Stream ambience without the concomitant gales; a few inches above, the merest skim of soil provides for plants adapted to extreme exposure, good drainage, heavy grazing and high light levels. Because of this rare conjuncture of oceanic climate and karst topography, the maidenhair can survive so far north as to consort with plants that are equally far from their headquarters on mountain and tundra, here at sea-level in the ultimate west.
Thus the block of stone allots its frugal abstractions of horizontal and vertical to separate plant-communities, neither of which would prosper in fatter conditions. And each contributes to the support of a scavenging fauna. When Synge first stayed in Cill Rónáin in 1898 he walked out to the east end of the island, and on his way back two little girls followed him for a while:
They spoke with a delicate exotic intonation that was full of charm, and told me with a sort of chant how they guide “ladies and gintlemins” in the summer to all that is worth seeing in their neighbourhood, and sell them pampooties and maidenhair ferns, which are common among the rocks. As we parted they showed me the holes in their own pampooties, or cowskin sandals, and asked me the price of new ones. I told them my purse was empty, and with a few quaint words of blessing they turned away from me and went down to the pier.
Similar accounts by other visitors make one wonder how the maidenhair survived the Victorian passion for fern-collecting. Fortunately Aran’s human children no longer need to exploit this particular ecological niche, and one can still find its delicate, exotic, charm enfolded in the rocks.
SERMONS IN STONES
In climbing past the ruined tower and onwards to the crest of the hillside one has to clamber over a few loosely built drystone walls, or diverge from one’s goal to find gaps in them. But when the summit is attained (a mere hundred and forty feet or so above the shoreline) the eye is totally beset by walls. The plateau that comes into view here, slightly tilted southwards towards the Atlantic cliff-tops, and stretching, with just two interrupting lowlands, for eight miles along the island, is a walled landscape, uniting the monotonous grandeur of the desert with the petty territorialism of suburbia. This uninhabited back or dip-slope of the island escarpment is referred to as Na Craga, the crags, although most of it is less craggy and more grassy than the areas of bare limestone pavement on the terraces along the northern coast. The first section of it stretches away to the west-north-west for over two miles; then, beyond a valley invisible from here, the higher, central, section of the plateau forms a long, straight horizon declining very gently from north to south, blocking off the further half of the island.
Balancing on top of the nearest sound-looking wall to scan the disconcerting vista, one makes out that the pattern, for all its countless haphazard irregularities, is dominated by walls roughly parallel to that north-south horizon, and since the controlling direction of this volume is westwards, it is clear that progress is going to be problematic. The waist-high or head-high walls are so close-set that from this low viewpoint they hide the ground between them as if the better to conceal their purposes; they constitute an obstacle not merely to the body but to the understanding. The network seems too vast and repetitious to be the product of human intentions; the decisions of an individual brain in this transcendental structure are as the gropings of a coral blob immured in its reef. Usually nobody is to be seen in this desolation; if anything is being done or suffered here the act is hidden in the obliquity of the grille. If labour reveals its presence at all it is by sound, and almost solely by the clank of stone on stone. One hears how, over centuries, this landscape was created by the placing of stone on stone, how it is nowadays barely maintained by replacement of the fallen stone, and how it will lapse into rubble, stone by stone.
I have tried to reduce this inordinate perspective to arithmetic and geometry. The Ordnance Survey map at six inches to the mile shows the field-boundaries as an eye-tormenting tangle of fine lines. By superimposing a square-inch grid on the map and counting squares and bits of squares, I find that the thickly walled areas of Árainn total ten and a half square miles. (Another one and a half square miles, comprising commonage and big unenclosed crags, may be omitted from the following calculation as they contribute comparatively little to the results.) The number of fields in thirty randomly selected squares averaged thirty-seven. (In several squares that fell near villages there were over seventy fields, giving an average area of field of only 1240 square yards, i.e. typically thirty-one yards by forty.) Hence there are about 14,000 small fields, of average area 2300 square yards or just under half an acre. A random sample of twenty individual fields measured on the map suggests that their average perimeter is 233 yards. (NB: Sampling by such methods as dropping a pencil onto the map will produce a misleadingly large proportion of the comparatively big fields, and it is not easy to avoid this effect.) Since nearly all walls separate two fields, the total length of wall is 928 miles. Adding a bit to allow for irregularities that do not show up on the six-inch scale, and for some nests of small fields in the generally open areas omitted, and rounding off, I think it is not wildly inaccurate to say that there are a thousand miles of wall in Árainn. Inis Meáin and Inis Oírr would add about 300 and 200 miles respectively, giving a total of 1500 miles. So the islanders exaggerate when they say that the walls of Aran, put end to end, would stretch all the way to Boston—but that is understandable, since it is to Boston that so many of them have fled, rather than be sucked dry as dead flies by the economics of this stone web.
As to the general pattern of this fie
ld-system, it is clear that something so regular over such large areas, even if riddled with inconsistency and wilfulness, is structured by overpowering natural phenomena. In fact two elemental strengths have laid the foundations for this labour of generations. First, the cracking of the limestone by earth-forces acting on a continental scale. There are two principal sets of vertical fissure-planes or joints, the more fully developed one being oriented roughly north-south. (The bearing is about fifteen degrees east of north, but I will say simply “north” rather than “approximately north-north-east.” In fact, since the bearing is much more fundamental to Aran geography than true north or magnetic north, I could call it Aran north.) The other set is at right-angles to the first, and on certain levels of the islands a third, oblique set appears, confusing the pattern.
The second elemental force is erosion, which has been guided by the joint system. The small-scale effect of rainwater, widening the cracks into little canyons and dividing the surface into rectangular flags or long strips, has already been mentioned. Vastly greater was that of the huge thicknesses of ice pushing across this region of Ireland for a period of perhaps ten thousand years, ending about fifteen thousand years ago. The glaciers ripped out strips of blocks to create valleys of all sizes, from the sea-ways between the islands and the wide depressions that almost divide the big island in three, to narrow ravines and little glens, all oriented to Aran north. It is difficult even today to override this impressed topography, and in the past the currents of life had to flow with it. An oblique walk across an area of open crag is a continuous struggle with little cliffs and ridges and gullies, with no two successive steps on the same level, whereas if one follows the direction of the jointing, smooth flagged paths seem to unroll like carpets before one. Inevitably, walls accept these natural ways, and many of them spring from the natural pedestals provided by long unbroken ridges of rock. East-west walls often have to clamber down into narrow glens and then clamber out again, and tend to do this by the shortest way, confirmed in this labour-saving intention by the bearing of the minor set of fissures. Hence the fields tend to be rectangular and elongated north-south, especially on the plateau where the schema has room to spread itself. It is as if the walls make explicit the nature of the rock; the geometry that could be stepped over and disregarded underfoot is erected into barriers before one’s face.