Stones of Aran

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by Tim Robinson


  Off she went. I think two of the sons were at the fireside, whether the third was there or not, and a long time later in the evening she came to the door and she ordered them to shut it firmly behind her. And she went to the fireside, and her two feet were nothing but blood, cut by briars when she was walking in the dark. After a bit she said “Well now, when dawn comes, be looking out, and you will find that beast in the back corner of the Crogán. And in the other place there is a hollow” she said, “and there is enough earth in it to cover a good bit of the crag. And drag it to that spot, and bury it there. It is dead.”

  And indeed it was. They went back there in the morning and they found the heifer dead, and they dragged it across, and they had never known of such a hollow in that little craggy field. And they dug out the earth from it and threw the beast in and covered it over.

  And they say that that land never had a good day ever after. The man who lived there had no luck with cattle or anything, but beasts dying on him, dying in strange ways.

  There are several stories of Nell’s ability to foresee the hour of birth or death; when a man came from one of the western villages to tell her his wife was in labour, she sent him away, saying “I know the time to go west.” In Mainistir once she saw some men making a coffin, and asked who it was for. The men told her that an old man of the village was nearing death, but Nell replied, “He will live. The one who will go into that coffin is still alive and running around.” And indeed the old man survived, while a young lad who was out hunting rabbits on the cliff tops at the time fell into the sea and drowned, and was buried in that coffin.

  It is said that Nell knew of a death-curse, but there is no memory of her having used it. However, in the following tale there is a hint that it was wise not to cross her:

  A man in Eochaill was very ill and his family sent for Nell. She looked after him for a bit, until he was thought to be well again. Then the family were not willing to pay the amount of money Nell asked them for, and after an argument she took whatever they gave her.

  Not long afterwards the man fell ill again and the wife told the son to go and tell Nell. “Do you think she’ll come?” he said. “Well, try her anyway,” said his mother. The son went east on his horse, and she said she would come. He told her to ride pillion, but she told him to go on and she would be able to come by herself. He rode off west. When he was nearing the house he saw her sitting by the road, and he asked her how she had got there before him. “Don’t mind that,” she said, “I’m going back east.” “Were you down at the house already?’” he asked. “I was not,” she said. “He’s passed on already, and there is no need for me to go down.” And away she went.

  As it happens, we have a precise date for the most famous illustration of her powers of second sight:

  A man from Bun Gabhla, one of the Ó Tuathail family, was out on the crags one day. He came across a flagstone and he turned it over. Whatever was under it, a horrible smell came up from it. A weakness came over the man and he went home. He got dizzy then and he had to go to bed. He was ill, and Nell an Tower was sent for. She came, and spent a long time working on him. In the end she cured him, with some herb, probably. She went to bed herself then, exhausted.

  In the morning the family were up when Nell an Tower suddenly opened the door and shrieked “My son is killed! What shall I do without him?,” and started to weep and wail. The people of the house tried to find out what was wrong or what had happened to her, but she ran out of the house and eastwards towards Cill Éinne. It was on that same morning that her son was drowned at Aill na nGlasóg, and fourteen others with him, on the fifteenth of August, 1852.

  Most islanders today, if asked about the truth of such stories, would reply, “You wouldn’t know!”—an answer at three subtle grammatical removes from either asseveration or denial. The stories I have recounted here are often told, but rarely nowadays in the detail of these versions, which I have translated from the Irish given in Ruairí Ó hEithir’s treatise. He recorded them in about 1980 from his grandfather Pádraic Ó hEithir, who had come to Aran as a schoolteacher in the 1920s and married a daughter of the most genial of Aran families, the O’Flahertys of Gort na gCapall. For Pádraic, the zest of Aran life was its speech, the oblique sayings, the bizarrely comic anecdotes, in which Araners are so profuse. He would have relished the juxtaposition of the weird and the homely in these stories, picked up in those days when the long evenings took their moods and rhythms from the blazing or smouldering of the turf fire. But however much he appreciated their native savour, the literate and sophisticated teacher would not have wasted much time on their truth-value, any more than would his grandson the Dublin University College graduate, forty years later. For a less sophisticated, older contemporary of the teacher’s, Pat Mullen, it was important explicitly to discount the reality of such incidents. Nell of the Tower is an important character in his novel Hero Breed, published in 1936, in which the hero himself comes to live in Cill Éinne and falls in love with Nell’s beautiful daughter. Here he questions his future mother-in-law about her powers:

  “Nella, why is it that you pull your herbs at night? Wouldn’t the daylight do just as well or better?”

  “It is this way, Avic: half the power of my medicines is the belief by the person who takes them that they will cure. It is in daytime that I pull them really, but if people saw the herbs I pull they would soon lose faith in my powers of healing, because some of those herbs are weeds and are considered good for nothing by the islanders. On the other hand, by making the people believe that I pull them at night I bring an air of mystery over my work…. Of course there are herbs that must be pulled before sunrise because their medicinal properties are much better when they are gathered in the freshness of the early morning dew. What knowledge I have of herbs and medicine has been handed down in our family for more than a thousand years. Lots of witchcraft stories have also been told about me, but the one Orla and I laugh at the most at is the one about the Iararna man who galloped his horse five miles to Kilmurvy to bring me to his house when his wife was nearing her confinement….”

  —and she continues with an unquotably lengthy account of how this man left her to make her own way to his house while he went off for a sup of poitín, and then pretended to be amazed that she had arrived before him, and said that she must have crossed the Black Crag by witchcraft. For the purposes of his plot Pat Mullen brings Nell fifty or sixty years nearer our own time, so that she is still flourishing during the modernizing of the fishing fleet in the 1890s. But there is a deeper anachronism in this collusion between character and author in turning out the dark side of her work to the light of common-sense. Mullen’s Cill Éinne is brimming with life—the novel is hardly more than a succession of vividly physical episodes, stick-fights, feats of sailing, rowing, horse-riding and weight-lifting, interspersed with the materials of a manual of nineteenth-century fishing techniques—but it has no shadows, it is all lit by the solar vigour of his protagonists. The real Nell an Tower picked her herbs beneath the moon because, like the society she was born into, she was groping among the ultimate mysteries; scepticism, like sanitation, was still a hundred years away. She shared the common belief in the powers of her own charms, in those times that offered no other recourse apart from the priest’s equally incomprehensible rites, because they seemed to work often enough to offer a fingerhold to hope. At the very least they had that sometimes curative ingredient: care, the human touch. As for her moving through the island as swiftly as rumour, as disease, as death itself, there are in fact certain shortcuts, only known to those who have reason to use them, by which it was possible to go from village to village with surprising speed even at night, as I shall reveal in the right place; there is even one across An Chreig Dhubh, the “Black Crag” of Mullen’s novel. But for the moment I leave Nell an Tower her mystery, which was necessary to the only angel serving those benighted dwellers among stones hallowed by saints, cursed by Cromwell, and bled dry by landlords.

  MEMENTO
S OF MORTALITY

  Most of Nell’s contemporaries are buried in the old cemetery by the sea with St. Enda and his hundred and twenty companions, where the rain is washing the names off the limestone slabs lying on their graves. Some of them, however, are also commemorated by vertical inscriptions, and therefore more lastingly, on monuments standing in rows along the road north-west of the village. The lettering on these is still legible, especially when a westering sun cuts its shadows deeper, and I have screwed my eyes up into an antiquarian mode and puzzled out all the inscriptions, and published them in a book, so that the names of Patrick Flaherty, Peter Wiggins, and three dozen others, together with their meagre life-data, will last as long as such books do.

  These cenotaphs are stout squarish pillars rather higher than a man (islanders like to cod visitors that people are entombed upright inside them), about four feet broad across the sides parallel to the road and a little less the other way, flat-topped, and surmounted by a stubby cross carved out of a single piece of stone. They are built of natural limestone blocks carefully fitted together with a little mortaring, and nearly all have two plaques with incised inscriptions, set one above the other in the side facing the road and framed by dressed stones; one inscription names the person commemorated and the other the person who raised the monument. The first such monument one meets as one walks out of Cill Éinne stands in a field on the left-hand side; one can lean over the roadside wall in front of it, and let the tall stony presence address one directly:

  This monumet. erectd. by his Wife Ann Fla herty ~ Als. Wiggins ~

  Lord have Mer cy on the Soul of Patrk. Flaherty who died in the 33 yr of his age 1830

  The little letters above the lines are hard to decipher among the blotches of lichen. The cross on top is no longer standing but lies propped against a small stone. As one moves on from monument to monument—there are eight in a row here, a few yards apart—one becomes aware of more regularities in their structure and repetitive oddities in their orthography, and of the haphazard effects on them of time. The top half of the next has collapsed, and its upper plaque lies in the grass at its foot:

  This Monu ment erectd. by his Wife Cathe rin Wigginns

  O Lord have Mercy on the soul of Petr Wig gins who Deptd. this life in the 68 yr of his age 1826

  Then comes one crowned with a rather fine cross leaning askew, with rounded arms and head, and a shallow square recess in its shaft—a feature an archaeologist tells me derives from the form of glass-fronted shrines for the display of relics. A coping on the top of the monument projects a few inches all round immediately above the upper plaque, and the base is a little wider and thicker than the rest of the pier, giving a narrow ledge around the sides and back just below the lower plaque. Ivy obscures one side of the monument but on the other one can see how the stones framing the plaques are dressed, with inch-wide chisel strokes all round their margins and the central areas lightly pocked with a punch. The plaques themselves have neoclassical sunburst motifs in each corner and margins of a lozenge pattern. The inscriptions are more elaborate than the norm too:

  This Monument

  Erectd by order of their

  son and his wife Patk. &

  Cathern. Dirrane to perpu

  ate their Memory ~

  The Lord have

  Mercy on ye soul

  of Michl. Dirrane ~

  died in ye 119 yr of

  his age 1817 ~

  & his wife Cathern

  Dirrane Als Coneely

  died in ye 97th yr

  of her age 1817 ~

  And so the mournful litany goes on. After these eight, and a gap of a few hundred yards, comes a group of five, one of them reduced to a mere stub a foot high, close together by a cottage on the right of the road; then an isolated one on the right, and another on the left which serves a house as a gatepost. This last has an extra plaque lettered in block capitals in memory of a Peter Gill, died 1892; this is the latest inscription in the series, and is clearly an insertion into a monument which the main plaques show to date from 1840. Not far beyond this point the road descends a steep scarp to shore-level by An Charcair Mhór, the big slope, and so leaves Cill Éinne territory. There are no such monuments in Cill Rónáin, but ten more are scattered along the road through the western villages from Eochaill to Eoghanacht; there are none in the other Aran islands.

  These rather forbidding structures address one with questions both historical and mortal, and even the former, easier, sort, cannot be answered with much conviction. Counting one which has totally vanished but is mentioned in a late nineteenth-century source, and two of which only the plaques survive, set in a wall, there are twenty-eight in all, with dates ranging from 1811 to 1876. Individually they are not very different from sundry eighteenth-century memorials, mainly to individuals of the landlord class, to be seen, for instance, near Cong and in other places north and east of Galway city, but as a series the Aran roadside monuments are unique, in their number, in their late date, and in the fact that they concern ordinary members of the tenantry. There is nothing like them in Connemara or the parts of County Clare the islanders might have visited. What suggested the building of such elaborate memorials, in a time of such want? Their only local forerunners are the Fitzpatrick cenotaphs of 1754, looking down on Cill Éinne from the Lodge; but why should the tenants start to “trot after the gentry” two generations later?

  There was in Aran a humbler funerary custom that both predated and outlasted the era of these monuments. At certain traditional points along the route of a funeral procession, the coffin would be set down while a few of the relatives put together a little cairn from the loose stones of a crag by the road. Dozens of these survive in the west of the island, and I believe there used to be some at the top of An Charcair Mhór. Some consist merely of three or four long stones leaned together, while others are neat conical piles several feet high. Also, in the fields below An Charcair Mhór there is a cairn rather nearer the inscribed monuments in bulk and form; it even has a stone set vertically on it which with a little imagination can be seen as almost cross-shaped. It stands by an overgrown boreen running below the scarp, northeast of the road, that I am told was a long time ago the main way to Cill Éinne. If the anonymous stone-heaps evolved into the highly formalized inscribed monuments, with promptings from the Fitzpatrick cenotaphs, the process included a sudden leap of invention. This characteristic assertion of human creativity (characteristic also in that it was then followed slavishly) was perhaps taken by a relative of one of the two people whose plaques bear the earliest date, 1811. Unfortunately this cannot be ascertained, for neither of these plaques (one in Eochaill and the other in Eoghanacht) is in its original position and we do not know what shape their setting took.

  That English should be used in these inscriptions is less surprising than would at first appear. The very possibility of writing in Irish was little known outside of scholarly circles until the spread of the language revival movement in the 1890s. Also, limestone Aran, being largely composed of potential tombstones, used to export them to granite Connemara, and these slabs were inscribed and decorated by island craftsmen; so the island had the set phrases of funerary English off by heart—or, as some of the plaques on the roadside memorials seem to show, copied them, mistakes and all, from example to example. Mortality and error being two related universals of the human predicament, the latter acquires prestige from the former; the curious abbreviations and corrections by means of superscripts became part of the rite of inscription, arcane but reassuring, to be reproduced as carefully as the architecture of the whole. In fact the dignified parade of these monuments along that outer reach of communal survival represented by Aran in the mid-nineteenth century, asserts a companionship between the living and the dead. But who is escorting whom, in this petrified funeral procession?

  “These monuments of the dead have by moonlight a ghastly appearance,” wrote one of the first visitors to describe them, Oliver J. Burke, in 1887. This is still tru
e despite the increasing suburbanization of their setting; not night alone but fog and rain and wind, in making it impossible to connect them with imaginable individuals, turn them into looming frights. On a fine day, however, one lingers and notices their individual quirks and stances; they have the air of men breaking off from work in the field for a chat with the passer-by. In the west when you pass someone at work you say “Bail ó Dhia ar an obair!”—“God bless the work!” What work is being done by these monuments, that concerns us? I gave my little monograph on them a seductively lugubrious epigraph from Sir Thomas Browne, who in his Urn Burial explains that it was the Roman practice “to bury by highways, whereby their monuments were under eye;—memorials of themselves, and mementos of mortality unto living passengers; whom the epitaphs of great ones were fain to beg to stay and look upon them.” The commerce between those of us still on the road and those who have gone before is two-way; the departed remind us of death, the inexorable general condemnation to oblivion, and at the same time demand from us an attention to the particulars of their epitaphs, as if hopeful of their own case for exemption.

  Synge saw the roadside monuments on his first day in Aran, and in his book merely mentioned them as part of the grey waste of stone and rain he depicts, to throw into relief the vitality of the girls who hurried past him “with eager laughter and great talking in Gaelic, leaving the wet masses of rock more desolate than before.” But in his pocket-book he scribbled a thought about them:

  The idea is that passers by seeing the inscription should offer a prayer for the soul of the deceased and thus alleviate his portion of purifying flames. A similar notion is seen in most of the old Celtic inscriptions which run usually thus “a prayer for the soul of—” with the name given in full.

 

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