Stones of Aran

by Tim Robinson

  The only physical trace of the Franciscan monastery, Tobar na mBráthar, the well of the friars, is reached by a little dog-leg track running westwards past the hayfield with the fragmentary high cross in it, behind Cill Éinne village. It is a round, stone-lined hollow with the remains of steps down into it, waterless, full of the long pointed fronds of hart’s-tongue fern. O’Donovan said that the Franciscan monastery was to the south of it and that the older monastery’s churches were to the north, but on what evidence he based this one does not know

  Leaving these dry speculations and the Franciscans’ dry well, by following the crooked boreen for a few more yards to the west and climbing with it up the first scarp, one attains to a more heaven-inspired level. To the right, the terrace above the scarp continues around the curve of the hillside like a broad grassy promenade overlooking the back-gardens of the village; this is Cosán na nAingeal, the path of the angels, where it is said that St. Colm Cille used to stroll every day with celestial acquaintances. To the left is the stub of the round tower, and straight ahead, against the next little rise, is St. Enda’s holy well, with a roughly built stone altar beside it. The “well” is only a dry hole in the ground, but an old lady of the village told me it was a spring, until someone stepped into it wearing his boots, whereupon it dried up. (Holy wells are touchy things and stories of their withdrawing themselves when insulted are widespread.) Its name is Dabhach Éinne, a dabhach being either a deep pool or a barrel, and former generations regarded it as that very barrel in which the seed-corn came sailing to Aran from Corcomroe, leaving a wake of perpetually calm waters, by the ministry of angels and to the consternation of the pagan Corban, who was persuaded by this miracle to make over the island to St. Enda. Barren women used to sleep by this well, in hope that the saint might ease their condition.

  The tower was known as Cloghas Éinne, Enda’s belfry (but in today’s Cill Éinne Irish it is simply an Rountower), and there is a tradition that the saint’s “sweet-toned bell” is buried somewhere near his holy well. O’Donovan in 1839 “made every cautious enquiry about the tradition preserved amongst the oldest inhabitants,” and learned that the tower was once five stories high; my own enquiries, less cautious, in Fitzpatrick’s bar, tell me that its top was level with St. Benan’s chapel on the hillside above. Like most of the extant towers of Ireland, this one was no doubt slightly tapered, with a slit window on each storey, a door fifteen feet or more above ground-level, and topped by a conical roof of corbelled stonework. But before investigating the tower further, which is a matter of sounding the great well-shaft its absence sinks into the sky, it would be wise to finish with the material remains of the monastic complex, by ascending to this little ruined chapel, a hundred feet or so higher up.

  Teampaill Bheannáin is its proper name, the church of Benan, which the lazy centuries have reduced to “An Mionnán,” and since one sense of mionnán is “a goat-kid” some locals will tell you it is “the kid’s chapel.” Indeed there is something goatish in its horned and shaggy outline and its sure-footed stance on the very edge of the skyline, looking down into the green crescent of monastic fertility around the base of the hill, alert and frisky, as if at any moment it might take itself off into the stony hinterland of the plateau behind it. O’Donovan found that it was also called The Hermitage, “from some modern Maniac who took up his residence in it.” Nothing is remembered of this man—perhaps a scapegoat from the village below or from that outer world whose hilltops, visible from here, stand around a vast three-quarter-circle arc of the horizon. Perhaps it was this “maniac” who left a clay pipe found here recently, with a cock stamped on its bowl and the legend WHILE I LIVE I’LL CROW.

  Watchfulness must always have been the keynote of life on this perch. Sixty yards to the north-north-west, on a small, crudely revetted, terrace on the verge of the steep drop to the village, are the confused remains of a stone hut known nowadays as The Watchman, from which I am told would-be pilots used to look out for sailing ships that might be persuaded they needed guidance into Galway harbour. The archaeologists who studied Teampall Bheannáin in 1984 also ferreted into this “subrectangular drystone structure of indeterminate plan,” which it turned out was originally a little square hut with a window to the north, later enlarged to the east and wrapped around with another wall against the weather; all had long collapsed, and odd corners of it been resurrected as goat-pens. As well as shards of nineteenth-century crockery, residue of merry picnics perhaps, two lead musket-balls were found on its rock floor, suggesting that it started life as a lookout-post connected with the Cromwellian citadel below. Another ruined hut just a few paces north of the chapel itself, of which two walls are the living rock of a right-angled nook of the hillside, looks as if it must have been the ideal anchorite’s troglodytic nest, half burrow, half eyrie; however, the rubbish found under its fallen-in stones was all seventeenth-century or later.

  Teampall Bheannáin stands only a couple of yards from the edge of a natural shelf of the hillside, which has been supplemented by a bit of drystone terracing to the east, to make up a little walled enclosure, scraps of which can be traced around the south and west of the chapel. The building is tiny, just ten foot nine inches long by seven feet wide inside. Its long axis runs almost north-south, parallel to the major fissuring of the bare rock it stands on. If this basic structure of the site helped to determine this very unusual orientation, the prevalence of south-western and western winds must have supplied stronger arguments; the little building confronts the worst of the weather with solid masonry, the door being in the north gable-wall, while the one little window, unexpectedly but logically, is in the eastern side-wall. This window is a round-headed slit twenty inches high and only four inches wide on the outside, slightly narrower at the top than at the bottom, and splaying generously inside; there was no doubt originally an altar below it. The side-walls are over two feet thick, and they lean inwards slightly as if hunched against the elements. Some of the blocks of the western wall look like the work of giants, one of them being over four and a half feet square, but they are in fact rather thin slabs set on edge and do not make up the full thickness of the wall. The roof is missing; it was presumably of timber, and it must have been very steep, for the gables rise to fifteen feet even though they have lost their finials, making the little building about as tall as it is long. There may well have been corbels projecting at the bases of each gable, as in a similarly primitive chapel in Inis Meáin, but some masonry is missing or has been replaced at each of these points. The door is only five foot six high and tapers upwards in harmony with the side-walls and the slit window, from one foot nine wide at the bottom to six inches less than that at the top, so that it seems to crouch under the five-foot-long block above it. Such flat-lintelled doors with inclined jambs are characteristic of early stone churches, as are those putative corbels and the masonry of slabs set on edge.

  As to dates, the only firm evidence is from radio-carbon dating of charcoal in its mortar to about the eleventh century. The only inscription is the word CARI running down a quoin-stone at the south-east corner, which it seems is uninformative even to epigraphists. Dates and names recently scratched by brats from the village do not fall under the notice of archaeologists, and nor does the huge footprint in the bare limestone a few paces west of the chapel, which an old islander tells me was made by the saint himself. Neither can the name of the church help, for St. Benan or Benignus is supposed to have been St. Patrick’s disciple and successor at Armagh, where, if there is any reality in the chronologies of the medieval annals and the Lives of the early saints, he died in 467, at which date Enda perhaps had yet to set eyes on Aran; and so it was not he who founded this church.

  For some unknown number of centuries, then, an unrecorded succession of anchorites stood at the altar in the vertical blade of dawn from the east window, and by craning their necks this way and that could have squinted at the round tower, perhaps co-eval with this hilltop oratory, and the populous confusion of bu
ildings around its base, until first St. Enda’s churches and then the Franciscan abbey were left unpeopled and finally demolished in favour of Caisleán Aircín. “Soe all-devouring time ‘Diruit, aedificat, mutat quadrata rotundis,”’ sighs Roderic O’Flaherty, recounting this matter thirty years after the Cromwellian catastrophe by which he too had been pauperized. But for long after that, the headless trunk of the tower would have still dominated the scene of desolation, for according to Petrie it stood eighty feet high, having lost only two storeys to the Cromwellian delapidators, until it was struck by lightning and collapsed early in the nineteenth century. O’Flaherty’s Horatian tag about Time which destroys, builds and makes what is square round, reminds one to ask what became of those hundreds of splendid blocks cut to the curve of the tower’s wall? According to the invaluable Fr. Killeen, whose manuscript history shows that he was one of those who hearken to such reminders, these stones went into the foundations of the quay in Cill Éinne, the quay called Céibh an Rice because it was built by men working for payment in rice, during the famine of 1822.

  What stands today of the tower is a stone drum about fifty feet in circumference and twelve feet high, on a plinth that forms a little kerb around its base. The masonry, of large, closely fitted and mortared blocks, is time-scarred enough for one to be able to scramble up and lean across its four-foot thickness, and look down into the interior—empty, and pungently carpeted with the white flowers of garlic mustard. The circle of stone is uninterrupted, for the threshold of the doorway would have been higher up the shaft and reached by a ladder that could be pulled up in times of danger. Most round towers date from the late eleventh and the twelfth centuries, and it has been suggested that they were a response to the pilgrimage frenzy of that period, that as well as being belfries and symbols of heavenly aspirations, they served as beacons to guide the distant traveller, and that the monasteries’ greatest attractions, their sacred relics, were displayed to the multitudes from their high doorways.

  But the round towers were also refuges, invulnerable to anything less than prolonged siege or the fire that could turn them into crematorial chimneys. The Cill Éinne tower could have seen the unheralded horizoning of sails in 1334, when Aran was one of the places plundered and burned by Sir John D’Arcy, the Viceroy, working round the coast of Ireland with fifty-six ships. This was perhaps in response to the revolt of the de Burgos, the Anglo-Norman lords of Connacht who in the previous year had renounced their allegiance to the Crown and adopted Irish dress, language and titles, so that he who had been Sir William de Burgo now was the Mac William Eighter (lower), and pronounced himself Lord of Galway. The town soon disengaged itself from this rebellion, but the O’Briens of the Clann Thaidhg, who held Aran at the time, may well have been supporters of the Mac Williams, and the abbey of Cill Éinne suffered for it.

  Thinking now of how this invisible tower sings in the winds of history, in a spacious antiphony with those other towers—on the limestone plain of Kilmacduagh, reflected in the Shannon at Clonmacnois, floating above the rooftops of Kells—of the monasteries founded by alumni of St. Enda’s foundation, I do in imagination what I never did while living in Aran—climb down into that stone drum, lie there among the herbs, looking up at swallows darting through the vanished rooms piled above me, and try to remount the cloudy centuries, from the last known abbot of Aran back to the coming of St. Enda himself.

  No names of the coarbs or successors of St. Enda, as the abbots were called, are known from a period of over two centuries before 1400, the date Roderic O’Flaherty gives for Donat ua Laigin (he Latinizes the name as Donatus O’Leyn), the last of them of whom he could find record. The silence of history may convey the somnolence or exhaustion of the religious impulse of Aran, which was only briefly to be reawakened by the Franciscans for a few decades before the suppression of the monasteries. The great years of Cill Éinne were much earlier. From 1167 (two years before the Norman invasion of Ireland) back to 654, the obits of the successors of Enda stand in the Annals of the Four Masters. Solemn bell-strokes, recurring with long intervals, their names:

  Giollagóri hUa Dubacán (†1167)

  Maolcolaim Ua Corbmacáin (†1114)

  Flann hUa hAoda (†1110)

  Mace Maras Ua Caomáin (†1095)

  Fland Ua Donncada (†1011)

  Eccnech, Bishop and Anchorite (†916)

  Maoltuile mac an gobann, Abbot of Ára Airtir (†865)

  Gaimdibla (†755)

  Saint Nem Mac Ua Birn (†June 14, 654)

  The most recent of these, Giollagóri or Gildegorius, would have heard of, perhaps even witnessed, the assembly of kings and bishops at the consecration of Mellifont, the first Cistercian monastery in Ireland, in 1157, and the synod of Kells in 1152, at which Ireland was divided up into episcopal sees grouped into four archbishoprics—events that signalled the end of the old order in which his own title of Comharba Éinne, successor of Enda, carried such weight. The Diocese of Kilfenora, corresponding to the old territorial unit of Corcu Modruad (Corcomroe, in Clare), was amongst those brought into existence by the synod of Kells, and later documents indicate that it included Aran. Maolcolaim, the predecessor of Giollagóri, had become abbot on the death of Flann, just before another great synod presided over by the High King and the bishop of Armagh, at Ráith Bresail near Cashel in mi, at which the first division of Ireland into bishoprics had been undertaken. These three abbots, then would have been able to read the message of the horseman on the new-style high crosses being carved in their own monastery workshops, which perhaps forebode the decline of their authority.

  Mace Maras is the only abbot of Cill Éinne the manner of whose death we know; the Four Masters’ entry for 1095 reads:

  There was a great pestilence over all Europe in general this year, and some say that the fourth part of the men of Ireland died of the malady. The following were some of the distinguished persons, ecclesiastic and lay, who died of it …

  and Mace Maras Ua Caomáin is in the death-list.

  Mace Maras probably saw the last Viking raid on Aran, in 1081 according to the Annals of Inishfallen. The long gap from his entry back to that for his predecessor Fland in 1011 (the Annals say 1010 but O’Donovan identifies this as an error) represents some loss of information, pages torn out of manuscripts, perhaps, or minds knocked out of skulls, for the Four Masters tell us of Viking raids in 1020:

  Ard-Macha was burned, with all the fort—and the old preaching chair and the chariot of the abbots, and their books in the houses of the students, with much gold, silver and other precious things. Cill-dara, with its oratory, was burned. The burning of Cluain-Iraird, Ara, Sord, and Cluain-mic-Nois.

  while the Annals of Inishfallen record plague in Aran in 1019 and another Viking attack in 1015—one year after the Battle of Clontarf, popularly supposed to mark the end of Viking power in Ireland. The stone oratories such as Teampall Bheannáin and the oldest part of Teaghlach Éinne, and the round tower itself, may well have been raised during this violent century.

  Almost another century is unrepresented in the Annals, from Fland back to the death of Eccnech, Bishop and Anchorite, in 916; what desolations, what rebuildings and replantings, what forbodings and forgettings, filled those blank decades is a field for guesswork. And it is unlikely that Aran was not raided by the Vikings in Eccnech’s time, for the ninth century saw the repeated plundering of the sea-monasteries from Iona to the Skelligs in Kerry, the bishop driven out of Armagh, a Viking king’s fleet on the Shannon, and, it is said, that king’s wife uttering pagan oracles from the high altar of Clonmacnois. Ireland was at that period a chaos of petty kingdoms warring among each other and ready on occasion to ally themselves with the Norse settlers. The dominant sept in the south were the Eoghanacht of Cashel, whose circle of influence covered Aran, while the most powerful northern line was the Uí Néill of Tara. In 908 the High King of Tara, Flann Sinna, defeated the Eoghanacht in battle, and the King-Bishop of Cashel was among the slain. Eccnech would have mourned t
his scholarly churchman, Cormac mac Cuilennáin, who loved Aran and had written of it:

  There are four harbours between Heaven and Earth where souls are cleansed, the Paradise of Adam from which came the human race, Rome, Aran, Jerusalem. No angel who ever came to Ireland to help Gael or Gall returned to Heaven without first visiting Aran, and if people understood how greatly the Lord loves Aran they would all come there to partake of its blessings.

  There must have been substance to this vision of Aran, despite the Annals’ catalogue of disasters. Each winter, armouring the islands with breakers, must have offered months of security from marauders, and in any case the storms of swordsmen probably swept through Aran only once or twice in each abbatical reign. There were occasional summers of angels’ breath playing around the islands, as there are still, and long uninterrupted sequences of the annual cycle of the liturgy. But anything that was easily portable, precious, or fragile of the material product of those pious and laborious times in Aran is gone, and lies unfound in Viking graves or unidentified in museum cases, or was smashed or burned or lost at sea. The elusive playful mystery of crosses and circles on a few grave-slabs alone remains. Of all the millions of words spoken or written out of the passionate meditations of generations of monks, almost none but that mysterious one, cut into stone on Teampall Bheannáin: CARI, to the beloved.