by Tim Robinson
Of course almost the only visitors who do stray from the boreens, the walled paths between the fields, are those with some botanical, archaeological or geological drive, and in the scientific literature there are many complaints about these walls. H.C. Hart, who made the first careful botanical survey of the islands in 1869, writes feelingly on the subject:
These barricades are erected with no consideration for the shins of scientific explorers. It seems unfair to kick them down, as the natives do in the most reckless manner, whether crossing their own or their neighbours’ lands. If you adopt the alternative of climbing, which is often an operation of considerable difficulty, it is most probable that your descent will be followed by an avalanche of loose stones—still, as the wall falls from you, this is safer than to kick it down in front, where there is a great risk of the stones falling towards and laming you. I found the safest plan was to climb up the wall with the utmost delicacy, balance yourself on the top, and then jump. It will be seen, however, that the frequent recurrence of such jumps for a long day’s work is a mode of progression that may prove both wearisome and slow.
A few years later the botanist Nathaniel Colgan took a bolder line:
My first day’s work among these stone dikes was so tedious and disheartening that on the following days I engaged a stout native boy who proved very useful, rather as a dilapidator than as a guide and porter. He carried my camera and vasculum, and cheerfully threw down with a push of his shoulder any uncommonly difficult or dangerous wall that happened to lie in our path. I should have hesitated to do this for myself; but the young islander, with an adroit touch of flattery, gave me to understand that though the natives would be loath to take such a short method with the walls for their own convenience, they would never dream of objecting to its use on behalf of a distinguished stranger.
These imperial modes reveal a blindness to the “native” and his ways. To cross a wall without bruising one’s shins or jolting one’s spine, one should look for stones that run right through the wall and stick out on either side, and step up and over on these as on a stile, refraining from leaning out from the wall and clutching at the topmost stones to lever oneself upright, but keeping one’s centre of gravity as close to the wall and as low over its top as possible. Araners learn this as part of learning to walk. I have seen an Aran father stand back, watchful but not interfering, as a toddler heads up a six-foot wall. If that child does not leave the island he or she will grow up able to cross walls with such fluency one cannot see how it is done. I remember an old man leading me across his land; before my eyes he repeatedly made the transition from being on the near side of a wall to being on the far side with no noticeable intermediate stages, complaining all the while of his rheumatism. A ghost’s proficiency in passing through walls would seem to be only the natural result of such a lifetime’s apprenticeship. But I suspect that that child will leave Na Craga to the old men, and the old men are already leaving it to its ghosts.
The range of rectangularity held up for inspection by the facets of individual stones in these walls, from dog-eared squares to thin bony oblongs, images the variability of the field-shapes; one could imagine that each wall is a map of the terrain it hides. The flaw in this fantasy is that whereas the partitioning of the land into fields is virtually complete and every square yard is appropriated with what comes to seem like a miserly and obsessive clutch or a scholarly fussiness over definitions, the stones in a wall are usually not tightly packed and admit a modicum of empty space, slippage and instability. An individual wall’s degree of compaction depends on its function, the sort of stone to hand, and the skill and taste of the builder. On exposed terrain like Na Craga an open-work wall will dilute the gale more effectively than a solid one which would merely provoke the wind to hammer down onto the ground a few yards to its lea side. Sunset skies often show up a wall like a lace trim to a horizon, a filigree of light and dark. In certain areas, for instance to the south-west of Túr Mháirtín, the loose stone on offer consists of shaggy crusts or scales two or three feet across like battle-hacked shields, and the field-boundaries there are scrawled in leap-frogging triangles made by leaning these shards together at capricious angles. Elsewhere, and especially along waysides, the walls are sober and solid uncoursed masonry-work of well-adjusted blocks; the more substantial “double wall” has two faces of carefully set blocks, bound together here and there by through-pieces of longer stones, and with a filling of small stones between them. To enclose a vegetable plot with some hope of excluding rabbits a claí fidín (which one could translate as “fragment fence”) is used; this consists of a row of pillar-like uprights (clocha mháthar, mother-stones) set two or three feet apart, the spaces between them built up with small stones carefully packed, and the whole finished off with a row or two of weighty blocks. A visiting preacher once took this type of wall as a metaphor for slipshod construction on inadequate foundations, thinking that the word fiáin sounded disparaging; let ye not be a claí fidín of the faith, he urged the congregation, but rather a soundly built wall. However, since the claí fidín is a highly regarded wall that demands care and patience in the building, his rhetoric fell flat. Some goatish spirits among his hearers might even have wondered if faith is better represented by those walls I mentioned south-west of the tower, which incorporate a lot of nothing by artful adjustment of non-sequiturs, the more economically to hem in the flock.
Some of the purposes of this vast communal construction will have emerged from what I have said about its structure. Since grass is scarce, especially on the crags used as winterage, cattle have to be confined to small areas so that they will eat up the less tasty herbage as well as the choicer stuff before being allowed into other fields. The walls give shelter to stock and crop, and loose stones littering the ground are piled along the tops of them—although excess stone is more easily stacked into ricks, and in many fields one sees a little ziggurat of stones standing on a rock outcrop. Virtually all the appurtenances of the field system are of stone. Occasionally one comes across a small stone-built barn, usually roofless; though near Iaráirne two or three of them still have a decrepit thatch held down by ropes or bits of fishing net to pegs under the eaves. There are little stone hutches too, for goat-kids, and many walls have lintelled openings at ground-level, about two feet high, easily closed with a few stones, for letting sheep through. A more developed-looking item of field-furniture is the water-trough fed by the run-off from a slanting surface of stone or concrete. Springs are very few on the plateau, and in the old days there was a constant coming and going of women and children carrying water in small wooden stave-barrels to the cattle, until, it is said, these troughs were invented by a Cill Éinne man about a hundred years ago. While it may be true that this individual—a Roger Dirrane, whose dramatic contribution to island history I shall be recounting later on—brought the troughs to a standard form and propagated the idea, one finds on the open crags and in the fields examples from every stage of what looks like a long evolution, from natural basins improved with a dab of cement and filled by rainwater trickling down a shelving rock-face, to the roughly rectangular Dirranean trough of mortared stonework with a tilted surface like a draining-board of smooth and carefully pointed flagstones built along one side of it, or modern versions of this in concrete, grant-aided by the Department of Agriculture, with precisely squared and rimmed catchment-surfaces several yards long. These are the only signs of innovation on Na Craga, where no implements are of use other than the spade, the sickle and the scythe, and a granite boulder to sharpen them on.
Coming across such structures in rambling across this rather inscrutable terrain, one feels reassured that the field-system has or at least had its uses. But after an hour or two of struggling in its toils, the endless proliferation of walls seems inordinate to any practical requirements; one is forced to read it as the expression of an urge to control space for its own sake, to hug and hoard and hide away the land in minute parcels. In fact these walls are the fossilized
land-hunger of the “Congested Districts,” of the Land War, of the Great Famine and above all of the century of population growth that preceded it. As such, they do not necessarily express bitter competition. A farmer in an equally subdivided tract of the Burren once told me about two brothers who inherited a few tiny fields there some time in the famine century. One of them was married, and it seemed the only future for the other was emigration. But on the eve of his departure the married brother said suddenly “Don’t go!”; and they took the wooden yardstick the wife used for measuring her homespun, and divided each plot equally, marking a line down the middle with small stones. The mearing-stones of brotherly love must have divided Aran’s fields as well and have been built up into walls between later generations grown apart. Down to the present day, the nuisance of holdings in scattered lots and acrimony over rights of way to them are part of the island’s patrimony. Having produced a map of Aran, I came to be regarded as a semi-official cartographer, and as I was almost the sole guardian of such occult lore as:
30 ¼ square yards = 1 square rod, pole or perch
40 square poles = 1 rood
4 roods = 1 acre
which I found in an old pocket-diary, I was often called upon to measure and divide land. Once I calculated the areas of no fewer than twenty-six patches broadcast over the hillsides of Cill Éinne for a man who was sharing the inheritance of them with his cousin in America, and found myself drawn into conniving with him in dividing them so that access to the absentee’s portions would be across my client’s land, putting him in a strong position to persuade the other to sell out. I took no money for it, I was paid as usual in place-names, in which these subdivisions are most prolific; nevertheless I am implicated in the peasant cunning of these crooked walls, and the devil has me in their net.
DISCREPANCIES
If there are only fourteen thousand fields in Árainn, it would not take a lifetime to explore them, devoting a day to each. I have probably looked into the majority of them in my obsessive coursing about the island. On the lower levels many fields are so overgrown they defy inspection, but on Na Craga they exhibit their little economies of grass as resignedly as nineteenth-century objects of charity. In one field there may be nothing but a grey, taut-looking sheet of rock crossed by a few shaggy lines of tufted, wiry stuff rooted in fissures; in the next, a hollow filled like a pool with feathery grasses and meadow flowers, with the stones that have been dredged out of it piled in cairns around its brink. The walls are all shifts and accommodations too; swerving from their rectilinear principals to incorporate a boulder too big to be removed or a heap of masonry that some residual use-value or superstitious regard has preserved from centuries ago. In spring and summer and autumn each field is a sample garden of flowers and butterflies so specific to the season that one could tell the date to within a week or two by them; in winter they are as cryptic as a jigsaw puzzle all made up of missing bits.
In exploring this terrain it is best to let oneself be led by its inbuilt directionality. A few fields in the possession of a single household will be linked into a sequence, nearly always running north-south, by gaps closed with stones if there are cattle to be confined and otherwise left open. It is often stated that the Aran farmer lets his cows into a field by knocking down a length of the wall and rebuilding it after them. This misconception arises from the fact that when the gap is closed with stones it looks superficially like the rest of the wall. However, this is an illusion, as was revealed to me by a rain-shower that briefly wiped across the island one day when I was wandering on Na Craga. The limestone, both of the ground and in the walls, was left black with wet, and took some time to evaporate back to pale grey when the sun came out again. But dotted all over the landscape around me were what looked like brightly glinting doors in the dark walls—the gaps, all filled with granite boulders. This focused my mind on the question of gaps, and after some research I wrote the following little treatise:
The Aran bearna or gap is no mere hole blocked with a loose assemblage of stones, but a specialized and adaptive structure. It is usually two or three feet wide, with an upright stone on either side, and often these jambs slant apart slightly so that the stones piled between them are held in the wedge-shaped space. The granite erratics brought over from Connemara by the last Ice Age and strewn here and there on Aran’s crags are preferred to limestone for filling the gaps, because they are naturally ovoid and very tough, so that the gap is easily “knocked” by tumbling the stones aside, and they do not crack up after repeated use. The Aran farmer and even his child can “raise up” such a gap in the time it would take an outsider to bruise his or her fingers arranging the first few stones of it. This temporary fence is unstable, and often a short length of briar or a blackthorn branch is wedged among its topmost stones to discourage cattle or horses from nosing it down. Clearly, the gap is not the place to climb the wall since it is built for collapsibility, but somewhere close to it will be a stile, or at least a through-stone or two adequate to the practised foot of the landowner.
Having thus formulated the Aran gap, I wandered out to have another look, eyes sharpened by theory. And behold! Every conceivable ad hoc concoction of concrete blocks, thornbushes, driftwood, worm-eaten oars, carcases of oildrums, iron bed-heads, complicated pipework looted from wrecks, bicycle-frames—anything and everything redundant and outworn will serve to stop a gap just as well as the granite boulder. So it is at least around the fallen world of houses and roadsides, but up on Na Craga, closer to the Platonic ideal of Aran, the classic gap exists, as theory prescribes.
But I see these things all wrong. It is the world of Na Craga that is outworn and redundant. I remember coming across an elderly man harvesting a rye-field in a sheltery glen up there. In fact I heard him long before I saw him, for when the straw is wanted for thatching, the rye is pulled up by the roots and the harvester slaps each dornán or fistful against his boot or the wall to knock the soil off it, and the spacious, lazy rhythm of this sound is characteristic of hot July and August days in the fields. It is sweaty and tiring work, and men hate it; the endlessly repeated, quietly vicious slaps sound out against themselves, against the walls that bind their lives. And yet every stage of the harvest is visually charming—the area of stubble or bare ground, decorated with the lines of fistfuls, slowly widening through the day as the standing crop dwindles, the sheaves each belted with a twist of straw, the plump stacks of sheaves topped off with an upside-down sheaf like a huge sun-hat, the donkey waiting to carry the stacks one by one to the outhouse. On Na Craga that day I learned the arithmetic of straw:
Cúig cinn de dhornáin a dhéanas punnán
Punnán ’is fiche a dhéanas beart
Ceithre bheart a dhéanas teach
—five fistfuls make a sheaf, twenty sheaves and one make a load (i.e. what can be carried roped together on one’s back), four loads make (that is, thatch) a house. My instructor, who had learned the hard way, added a footnote, that fifty fistfuls make a half-load. So the extra sheaf, the extra five fistfuls in the full load of a hundred and five fistfuls, is like the extra twelve pounds in the so-called “hundredweight” of a hundred and twelve pounds, and whether it is to be regarded as generosity or extortion depends on the perspective of power relations. For once, this man, who had no doubt always been at the thin end of that perspective, found that he had something of value to impart, his multiplication table, and extorted a little money from me. He was uneasy about it, simultaneously ingratiating and brazen; his earthworm-sad features told me he needed the money for drink. I imagine his daughter is one of the smart young women I see driving into Cill Rónáin as if they were on a freeway to a shopping mall, slamming themselves through the island’s spaces, trading them in for time; she runs a chilly, hygienic, tourist-board-approved B&B, and hardly tolerates her father in the back kitchen. He is a discrepancy, the old reprobate of Na Craga; he whines like a dog left behind as our world drives off into the future. I am, I know, less interested in the concerns of the
forward-looking generations than I should be (perhaps because they are so tediously universal); my sympathies hang around with those trapped in or fascinated by the fading mazes of the past. Not all of these are old and despairing; they include, in Aran, some joyously creative souls. But all I can do for my man of straw is to reveal him in his predicament, while hiding away his identity in my cryptographic reconstruction of his island.
DWELLING
When the mind begins to weary of the intricacies of Na Craga and the body to balk at walls, one naturally welcomes any sequence of gaps that tends in the general direction of the inhabited, northern side of the island. And usually this homing instinct is rewarded, for it is the daily coming and going of farmers between house and field that have written those ways into the palimpsest of walls. There are two or three such escape-routes from the terrain west of Túr Mháirtín; they lead up the gentle rise of the back of the island to the ridge line and connect with narrow, walled paths on the steeper, north-facing escarpment, which in turn are gathered up by a wider track running across the slope, and so crookedly down to Iaráirne.