Stones of Aran

by Tim Robinson

  If in the layout of the cottage the distinction between north side and south depends on the wind, east and west are sharply differentiated:

  Our house had two rooms when it was built, but later on it was altered, and it had three rooms in my own time. When you came in at the door you would be in the kitchen. The kitchen was in the middle of the house, with the “big room” (seomra mór) on its west, behind the chimney, and the “little room” on the east. There were two beds in the little room, and not much room for anything else. The kitchen was about twelve feet square once the little room had been cut off it. That left it cramped enough, I suppose, but as the old man who lived with us used to say to anyone who came to the door, “Come in, if we’re cramped we’re not unwelcoming.”

  There was a door by the chimney, the door of the big room. Above this door, next to the chimney and under the scraws of the thatch, was a way into the “small loft,” which was over the big room. It was a dark hole with no light but what leaked in from the kitchen past the chimney. It was a place for storing things, or of course for hiding them.

  On the east of the kitchen above the small room was the loft, which compared to the small loft was spacious and well-lit. It was open to the rafters. It stuck out a couple of feet over the wall of the little room to make it deeper. There was a beam running across the house under this edge of the loft. Many a pig or beef carcass was hung from “the beam of the loft” in its day. Fishing gear, baskets of salted fish and so on were kept in the loft. People would put turf up there. Often when something couldn’t be found, they would say “I don’t know where it is, if it isn’t at the back of the loft.”

  The kitchen was the main room, and the hearth was the heart of the kitchen, but the big room had its own importance. In our house two generations came into the world in it. Two generations died in it. Many a person breathed his last in it. There was a fireplace in it; we called it the little chimney, and it was at the back of the main fireplace in the kitchen wall. It had a wooden mantelpiece, plain but well finished. There was a press or cupboard set into the wall near the fireplace; muifid we called it. Any ornaments in the house would be kept there, and medicines, and perhaps a drop of the hard stuff. There was a big feather bed, and a coffer or chest which was their bank.

  Dóite brúite suas amach

  Bhfuil aon duine ag dul an bóthar

  A chuirfeadh an chóra mhór amach?

  [Broken up burnt out, is anyone going the road who would put the coffer out?] That’s what the old man said when he thought the house was on fire.

  Thus the hearth is central, what is to the east is merely functional, and the west is heavy-laden with consequential matters. The uncanny sometimes taps on the western gable. When I happened to learn that a fairy path runs just west of a certain house, I was asked not to tell the young wife who was moving into it, lest she become anxious and start imagining things. (I only mention it now because I know she has long since bravely faced down what seemed indeed to be an initial spitefulness of the place.)

  The bygone Iaráirne one can sense beneath the present layout dates, it seems, from the early nineteenth century, for the census of 1812 names all the fourteen villages of the island except this one, implying that there was not enough of it to be worth discriminating from Cill Éinne, whereas the census of 1821 lists eight households and sixty-one inhabitants here. (The population-figures for the island as a whole were 1785 in 1812 and 2285 in 1821; the first census may have been inadequate, but in any case this was a period of very rapid growth, for by 1841, shortly before the Famine, the figure was 2592.) Seven of the heads of Iaráirne households in 1821 were farmers with holdings of a quarter to one and a half cartrons (a cartron being a nominal sixty-four acres), and one was a labourer; two of the farmers and a few others of the menfolk also made kelp or were “boatmen,” probably employed in carrying kelp and seaweed to the mainland. Among the womenfolk three were wool-spinners, two flax-spinners, and one a stocking-knitter. Nobody is listed as “fisherman” (in contrast to Cill Éinne, a village of fishermen, net-makers and so on with no land), but no doubt most of the men fished for breams and rockfish from the shore. This was a self-sufficient community—self-insufficient, perhaps, for the famine known as the Famine was not the first—and not even a track linked the settlement to Cill Éinne until some time after the turn of the century; the wide open spaces of Na Muirbhigh Móra and Máirtin’s rambling róidín took it wherever it wanted to go: to the well, the crags, the shore.

  In that census of 1821 a seven-year-old schoolboy, Edmund, is listed among the sons of a John Flaherty of Cill Rónáin. Ned Sheáin, as the child was called, later settled in Iaráirne, and from him are descended Muintir Neide, the Neds. Some generations later, probably in the 1930s when land-holdings were being rationalized, a Land Commission official came out to arrange for Muintir Neide to exchange their bit of land in Barr an Phointe near Cill Rónáin for a share of Iaráirne territory. He and Beartla, the Ned of that era, ascended to Carn Buí, the rocky knoll on the ridge-line behind the village, and surveyed the dreary plateau foundering seawards beyond it. “What’s out there?” he asked, waving his arm to the south-east. “Rock,” replied Beartla Neide. “Then you might as well have the lot!” said the official. So it comes about that today my friend Pádraicín Neide farms over eighty acres, much of it indeed rock, but with enough grassy little glens hidden among the crags for him to be able to sell off four two-year-old cattle each year. His farming is done before and after his day’s work as a builder, and so when I arranged to meet him, to hear how it is with the Iaráirne of 1993, it had to be late in the evening.

  It was the end of June; the days were at their longest. At half past nine when I knocked at his door he was not yet home; his young daughter Cathy led me across the village, hopping over low walls and cutting through enclosures I don’t know whether to call fields or back-gardens, and pointed out his bent back showing like a boulder above the dense green foliage in the further corner of a big potato-plot. Pádraicín is a blocky, vigorous man in his early forties; he climbed out over the field-wall, slightly glistening in the last of the sunshine, all ready to fill me up with facts and opinions. As we strolled back to the house he told me what the other Iaráirneans do for a living nowadays. There are four fishermen, one working out of Cill Éinne harbour and the others out of Ros a’ Mhíl and Cill Rónáin. (The more recent, eighty-foot, trawlers of the developing Aran fleet cannot berth at Cill Rónáin, and in any case Ros a’ Mhíl, the designated fishery port of the area, has the ice-plants, auction halls and processing factories the industry depends on, which unfortunately leads to fishermen’s families leaving the island either temporarily or permanently for houses on the mainland.) The huge growth in tourism of the last few years is transforming even Iaráirne. A sparklingly white bungalow with its coign stones painted blue and scalloped beige blinds showing in its big windows belongs to the owner of some of the eleven minibuses that carry visitors up and down the island. Another villager hires out bicycles in Cill Rónáin; there are a thousand bicycles on the island now. However, apart from Ard Éinne, which is technically over the border in Cill Éinne territory, Pádraicín’s is the only Iaráirne house to keep guests in the summer. There are also one or two old-age pensioners, a teacher, a “retired Yank” (that is, an islander returned from the States), and a Dubliner whose wife stands in for the island doctor now and again.

  Back in the big kitchen built onto the rear of his house, Pádraicín’s wife Nora broke off from cajoling the children into bed to make us sandwiches and tea. An eight-year-old daughter, Caoimhe, appeared in her nightdress and twisted up her foot to show him the progress of a white lump on her sole. While he filed away at the verruca and dabbed some medicament from a tube onto it, he talked about children. Four households here have clutches of three to five, whereas other villages have few or none coming forward to the primary schools. But fifteen of the nineteen children from Iaráirne and Cill Éinne starting school next year are girls. (“The nights
weren’t cold enough!” said an Cill Rónáin man to whom I mentioned this odd fact the next day—which seems to imply that only great hardship drives Aran couples to the comfort of sex with the extra application necessary to create the male.) And since on finishing school girls leave the island more readily than boys, taking jobs in shops and offices, this is not a reassuring statistic. Every year the Vocational School organizes a survey of population that is less subject to chance distortions than the official census, and in 1992 for the first time the number of people living in the big island dropped below eight hundred.

  Pádraicín is keen on sports and coaching the island children. There used to be a football field or at least a pair of goalposts on the muirbheach below the village, but when the thin sward was worn through the wind quickly excavated a sandpit there and exposed bare rock. What he had done to stop further erosion was, he told me, “unsightly but effective.” His youngest son Aodhán had silently added himself to our conversation, so Pádraicín scooped him into his arms and we went down to look at these works. The piles of old fridges and other rubbish he had brought with his tractor from the dump behind Cill Rónáin a year or two ago to plug breaches in the fringe of dunes around the beach still showed in one place, but in others they seemed to be trapping and stabilizing the blown sand and were already covered. We discussed coastal defences, a topic forced upon the community by the storm of January 1991 which, in near conjunction with a spring tide, ripped away the shore road or heaped it with boulders in various places, so that at Port Chorrúch and Cill Mhuirbhigh big concrete sea-walls are now in building. Was that storm a fluke? Are we squandering money on defences which will never be tested or which are quite inadequate to what is in store for us? Is global warming angering the earth against us, are we outstaying our welcome here? On this calm midsummer evening still redolent of disseminated sunlight, it was difficult to feel so. We walked eastwards towards Port Daibhche to see how the marram grass was doing, where during that storm the waves almost broke across the neck of the peninsula. It was too dark underfoot for me to be able to point out the purple milk-vetch, the great rarity among the many unusual plants making up this smooth flower-spangled sward. I remembered uneasily almost stepping on a lark’s nest here once, a cupful of life. A few years ago it was proposed to make Na Muirbhigh and part of Barr na Coise into a golf-course; when I heard of it I had hastened to inform the main proponent of the scheme, a Connemara-based politician, of the existence of the purple milk-vetch, and he was less than delighted to hear of it. The proposal was not pressed forward at that time, partly because it seemed no grants would be forthcoming for such a development in the habitat of a legally-protected species and an officially-designated “Area of Scientific Interest,” and also perhaps because some of the twelve commonage holders were unpersuaded that either they or the island in general would much benefit. But the idea is still in the air, and there are powerful arguments for it: the prospect of increased “quality” tourism, more jobs, more amenities to keep the young at home. When I talk to some of the islanders who are in favour, and try to explain why I think that area should be preserved inviolate, I find myself using wooden language: that “machair” is a rare landform, vulnerable to touristic developments such as caravan parks and golf-courses; that we must conserve biotic diversity not just in the rain forests but at home too; and so on. But if I suggest they read “Sand in the Wind,” Stones of Aran, Vol. I, for my deeper feelings about this little wilderness, I am in difficulties, for those pages seem to show that I was lonely and mournful out there, and that nothing would have taken me out of myself better than a game of golf.

  By the time we reached the eastern shore, stumbling in the rabbit-holes—though the rabbits are gone; someone introduced myxomatosis, it seems—Aodhán was fast asleep in his father’s arms. We sat among the tussocks of marram above the empty curve of the beach, and Pádraicín told me about the days of his own father, when Port Daibhche was home to eight or nine currachs belonging to Cill Éinne and Iaráirne men. They used to row twice a day out to Na Carracháin off the southern cliffs after bream, and when they were seen coming back up the channel the children would rush down from the village on donkeys with pannier-baskets to carry up the catch. The bream were gutted, filleted, salted and laid out flat in the sun on the walls of the fields to cure. When they were hard as boards they were tied up in threes—an undersized fish could be passed off sandwiched between two big ones—and a “hundred” threes, that is three hundred and sixty fish, would buy a boatload of turf from Connemara. Hard-working times—those fishermen were also farmers with cattle and potato-fields to tend, and they kept their children busy every hour they were not at school.

  What changes in the island since Pádraicín’s childhood! His worries about his own children in these strange times, he told me as we made our way through the twilight back to the village, are those of a city parent. Drugs are coming into the island; young men coming in for the summer season are sniffing something—he doesn’t know if it’s cocaine or crack or what, but it’s not snuff!—and sharing it with local lads; the gardaí are said to be “watching the situation.” Children might be visiting certain homes where they are allowed to watch who knows what sort of rubbish on videos. Pádraicín often supervises the Hall in Cill Ronáin when there is a dance, and afterwards has found teenagers hanging around in the street at two or three in the morning. With thousands of tourists pouring in during the short season, some islanders are so busy they have no idea what their kids are up to; they throw them the most expensive presents to be bought in Galway—but what those children are not getting is love.

  Pádraicín, hunched over his burden, was breathing heavily as we climbed the path to his house. Love! It was as if at the very threshold of home he had stumbled on the word we had been searching for through the gathering dark. I could have founded this chapter on it, had I known it was going to turn up.

  THE FITZPATRICKS

  As one walks the road from Iaráirne towards Cill Éinne, the old farmhouse known as Killeany Lodge comes into view on the hillside above the harbour. A pair of tall monuments on a rocky terrace below it attracts the attention, obviously with the intention of making a public statement. But it is not easy to get close enough even to gather the nature of this statement, for they do not stand by the present way up to the Lodge, nor indeed by the older way shown on nineteenth-century maps, and when one has scrambled across field-walls to reach them one finds that they are sited so close to the brink of a scarp that viewing the inscriptions on their northern, and clearly frontal, faces, is awkward. They stand a few yards apart like huge gateposts, but there is no easy access to the past through them. However, the name “Fitzpatrick,” repeated in the inscriptions, catches the eye; clearly these are cenotaphs to people of consequence, who presumably lived in the Lodge or some predecessor of it.

  The two monuments are rectangular masonry pillars with pyramidal caps surmounted by stone crosses, about twenty feet in overall height and eight by five in plan. Each has four plaques lettered in bas-relief, one set into each face. A few yards to the east is a much smaller monument not noticeable from the distance, with just one plaque.

  PRAY FOR THE SO VL OF IOHN FFITZPATRICK WHO DYE D THE 3 DAY OF FEBRUARY ANN OD 1709

  So one is bidden by the front of the tall cenotaph on the east. Its back says:

  PRAY FOR THE SO VL OF SARAMSW EINY WIFE TO IO HN FITZPATRIC K WHO DIED THE 5 DAY OF NOVEMBER 1709

  The left and right sides ask one to pray for the souls of a Florence Fitzpatrick who died in “Iannary” of that same year, and a Rickard Fitzpatrick who died in 1701. Two of the letters “Z” are back to front.

  The western cenotaph has rather more elegant lettering, in which the uprights of the letter “H” in the words “THE” and “THEIR” also serve as uprights for the T and E, and the spaces between the words are marked with a small diamond-shaped point. The front and sides commemorate three Fitzpatrick men who died young: Dennis died in “Disember” 1753 aged 23, J
ohn died in “Ianvary” 1754 aged 25, and Peter died in March 1754 aged 17. And on the back:

  PRAY • FOR • PATR ICK • FITZ • PATRICK • & • HIS • WIFE • MARGRETT FITZ • PATRICK WHO • ERRECTED • THIS • MONNV MENT • IN • THE • YEARE • OF • OUR • LOR D • 1754 • & • THEIR • POSTERETY

  Surely it must have been the loss of three young men over the winter of 1753–54 that prompted Patrick and Margrett to build this memorial. (A local tradition, that is perhaps no more than an old speculation, is that the three died of typhus.) And perhaps the opportunity was taken of commemorating the loss of an earlier generation at the same time, for the two pillars are so nearly identical, apart from the lettering of the plaques, as to suggest that they were built as a pair.

  Having puzzled out this much, one turns to the smaller monument, which has just one plaque. Above the inscription is an incised motif like a downward-pointing arrow, which I take to represent the three nails of the Crucifixion with their points together below. The inscription itself is illegibly worn, and only by taking a rubbing does one find, disappointingly, that it duplicates the inscription to “SARAMSWEINY” on the taller monument beside it. (Uncrabbed, her name must have been Sara Mac-Sweeney.)

  But how can one pray for a soul of whom one knows so little? Only a believer in a vast essentialist bureaucracy of the hereafter can send up a prayer labelled with a name and a date of decease, and be confident that it will be credited to the right account. The secular equivalent is more difficult. These people, Sara, John, Patrick and the rest, have gone beyond hearing; they will not answer to our historical echo-soundings, and the pious best we can do—for ourselves, not for them—is to inform ourselves enough to understand something of them and their times, and so, by reflection, of ours.