by Tim Robinson
STATISTIC AND SENTIMENTAL TOURISTS
If the Islands of Aran had formed a portion of the Hebrides or Orkneys, or stood in view of any part of the British coast, they would, long since, have been made the theme of the statistic and sentimental tourist; but, though abounding with many particulars, valuable to the Antiquary, Historian and Philosopher, they have been hitherto neglected.
So begins John T. O’Flaherty’s “A Sketch of the History and Antiquities of the Southern Isles of Aran, lying off the West Coast of Ireland; with Observations on the Religion of the Celtic Nations, Pagan Monuments of the Early Irish, Druidic Rites, &c.,” published in Transactions of the Royal Irish Academy in 1824. Thus we have no Aran equivalent of the solemn organ-tones of Dr. Johnson treading Iona, “that illustrious island, which was once the luminary of the Caledonian regions,” or of Boswell’s irrepressible fife-music trotting after. None of the well-known eighteenth-century travellers through Ireland, from the spirituel Chevalier de Latocnaye to the dry and “statistic” Arthur Young, considered Aran worth the detour. Roderic O’Flaherty had devoted two dozen pages to Aran “as in a sea-parenthesis” to his West or H-Iar Connaught, but even that remained unpublished until 1846. So it is J.T. O’Flaherty (a member of a branch of the Connemara O’Flahertys who had removed to Kerry) who inaugurates the first re-imagination of Aran since the medieval vision of it in mystic constellation with Jerusalem, Rome and the Garden of Eden. The Romantic rediscovery of Nature sets the scene for his version of Aran:
The approach to the Isles of Aran presents a view awfully sublime. Elevated above a wide tract of deep and boisterous ocean, and opposing to the beating billows an impregnable and perpendicular barrier of massy and lava-coloured rock, several hundred feet high, one may easily associate with the sublimity of the scene, and its Alpine grandeur, something of the terrors of a Vesuvian eruption, or of that violent shock, which is supposed to have torn these isles from the neighbouring continent.
Something of the history of Aran was available to J.T. O’Flaherty—the traditional account of the Fir Bolg, then believed to be factual, a few names and dates of early abbots put together from the Annals by editors of lives of the saints, a few records of transfer of ownership gleaned from the History of Galway Hardiman had recently published. O’Flaherty recapitulates this stuff, but more importantly, in his “statistic” mode, he sketches the economics of the islands—an economics of modest sufficiency, not yet sapped into destitution by rack-renting and crop failure:
The prevailing crops are potatoes, rye, and a small kind of black oats, all of which ripen early, and are of good quality, and sufficiently productive. The islanders sow some small quantities of barley and wheat, and in that operation employ an increased amount of manure. They have also small quantities of flax. On the whole their harvest seldom exceeds domestic consumption; agriculture, however, is daily improving. Their pasture land is appropriated to sheep, goats, and a few small cows and horses, for which latter they reserve some meadow. The mutton is considered delicious; but their most profitable stock consists of calves, which are reputed to be the best in Ireland. The general longevity of the inhabitants proves the excellent temperature of the air. There is a late instance of an Aranite having died at, or about, the age of one hundred and fifty…. The frugal meal of the Aranite, and his active habits, secure to him those inestimable blessings, to which the pampered and the great are strangers—security of mind, good health, and green old age.
Fish, kelp, and yearling calves, are almost the only articles of traffic; Galway, and the surrounding country, the chief mart. There are belonging to the three islands about 120 boats, 30 or 40 of which have sails, and are from five to ten tons burden; the rest are row boats. The spring and beginning of summer are employed in the Spillard [i.e. long-line] fishery; here are taken immense quantities of cod, ling, haddock, turbot, gurnet, mackrel, bream, &c. and, in the season, abundance of lobsters, oysters, crabs, scollops, cockles, muscles, &c. They look much to the herring fishery, which sometimes disappoints, but generally gratifies, their best expectations. In May, the pursuit of the sun-fish gives employment to many. This rich supply of sustenance seems perfectly providential, when we consider the scanty soil and dense population of the islands…. These several islands are the estate of Mr. Digby…. His annual rental on the islands, is £2700.
This reads like a summary of on-the-spot enquiry, but unfortunately in treating of loftier matters such as Aran’s druidical marvels O’Flaherty abandons the “statistic” for the “sentimental.” He offers no enumeration or description of these “open temples, altars, stone pillars, sacred mounts of fire worship, miraculous fountains, and evident vestiges of oak groves”; his antiquarianism was not of the tedious measuring kind. For him, imbued with the enthusiasm for the Celtic of such turn-of-the-century antiquarians as Charles Vallancey, not only were cairns and cashels the fire-temples of druidism, which he equates with both Zoroastrianism and the ancient Jewish religion, but the “cromlechs,” now known to be Neolithic tombs, were druidical altars, while round towers, “if not themselves covered fire temples, were, at least, constructed, more or less, on the model of our minarets of paganism.
It is the solidarity of the islanders with their Celtic past that most excites his faculties of sentiment:
The Aranites in their simplicity, consider these remains of Druidism still sacred and inviolable; being, they imagine, the inchanted haunts and property of aerial beings, whose powers of doing mischief they greatly dread and studiously propitiate. For entertaining this kind of religious respect, they have another powerful motive: they believe that the cairns, or circular mounts, are the sepulchures, as some of them really are, of native chiefs and warriors of antiquity, of whose military fame and wondrous achievements they have abundance of legendary stories. The well-attended winter-evening tales of the Scealuidhe, or story-tellers, are the only historical entertainments of this primitive, simple and sequestered people…. In language, habits, and customs, they retain more of the primitive Celtic character than any of the contemporary tribes of that stock, at least, in this kingdom. Sequestered and almost unmixed as the Aranites have been for a long succession of generations, history has always considered them as full of that ancient spirit, which has been made elsewhere made to disappear by the force of revolutionary and colonial innovations…. Their immemorial traditions and practices may, without stretch of imagination, be viewed as the graphic annals of “olden” days.
However, even as the Aranites were being rediscovered in their Celtic Eden, rumours of the Fall began to circulate. The young painter and archaeologist-to-be, George Petrie, visited in 1821 (though his report on “Aran—character of the islanders” was not published until 1868):
I had heard so much of the virtues of the Aran islanders, of their primitive simplicity, their ingenuous manners, and their singular hospitality, that I could not help doubting the truth of a picture so pleasing and romantic, and felt anxious to ascertain, by personal observation, how far it might be real…. The introduction, a few years since, of a number of persons into Aranmore for the purpose of erecting a lighthouse, has had an injurious effect on the character of the native inhabitants of the island … and their interesting qualities have been in some degree diminished…. The proximity of the island of Innisheer to the Clare coast rendering an intercourse with the parent country easy, has long given to the inhabitants of that island a superior shrewdness, marked with an occasional want of principal, which causes them to be dreaded in their dealings, and in some degree disliked by the other islanders…. In the island of Innishmain alone, then, the character of the Aran islander has wholly escaped contamination, and there it still retains all its delightful pristine purity. Collectively, however, the inhabitants of the Aran islands may be said to exhibit the virtues of the Irish character with, perhaps, as lid of Innishmain alone, ices as the lot of humanity will permit. They are a brave and hardy race, industrious and intelligent, credulous, and, in matters of faith, what persons of a di
fferent creed would call superstitious; but being out of the reach of religious animosity, they are as yet strangers to bigotry and intolerance. Lying and drinking—the vices which Arthur Young considers as appertaining to the Irish character—form at least no part of it in Aran; for happily their common poverty holds out less temptation to the one or opportunity for the other….They are to be considered, not as a fair specimen of the wild Irish of the present day, but rather as a striking example of what that race might generally be, under circumstances equally happy.
These circumstances, one gathers from the glowing account of them that follows, consist in the patriarchal benevolence of Patrick O’Flaherty of Cill Mhuirbhigh, with whom Petrie lodged, and the sanctity of the parish priest, Fr. Francis O’Flaherty, both living representatives of the Celtic chieftaincy of old. Nevertheless, shadows of emigration, fever and hunger show here and there between the lines of Petrie’s sketch of this last sea-protected bastion of simplicity.
Petrie, unlike O’Flaherty, actually sought out and looked carefully at Aran’s ancient monuments, and it was his first-hand studies in Aran and throughout Ireland, that rendered speculations of O’Flaherty’s sort obsolete. In 1833 he wrote a paper, “The Round Towers of Ireland,” showing from both material and textual evidence that these towers were monastic appurtenances. This and his “Military Architecture in Ireland” of 1834 mark the introduction of scientific discipline into Irish archaeology. At this period the Government were undertaking the preparation of detailed maps of Ireland, primarily so that rates could be more equitably imposed. In 1835 Petrie became Director of what was called the topographical department of the Ordnance Survey, charged with compiling historical and antiquarian information, which it was hoped would be published in memoirs accompanying the maps. This department took on so vigorous a life of its own that in the end it was seen as a threat to the original purposes of the survey.
Petrie’s principal colleague was John O’Donovan, the foremost expert of his age on the ancient manuscripts of Ireland, and an incredibly energetic field-worker. For a decade, from 1834, O’Donovan travelled Ireland, recording place-names, local history and folklore, and describing antiquities; his Letters to the Ordnance Survey, written from the field to base, amount to a hundred and three large volumes—a vast mosaic of Ireland’s past as reflected in its ruins, lore and manuscripts, all held together as if by ivy, in a knotted and vivid account of his travels. Although the Ordnance Survey was eventually ordered by a parsimonious government to “revert immediately to its original object under the Valuation Acts,” and the topographical department was disbanded, so that O’Donovan’s vast corpus of work was left unpublished (as most of it is to this day), his informed enthusiasm for Aran would have fed back into the world of scholarship by numerous channels; for instance his memoirs on Aran and Connemara took the form of commentary on Roderic O’Flaherty, and were reproduced with very little alteration (or indeed acknowledgement) by Hardiman in his edition of West or H-Iar Connaught in 1846.
O’Donovan came to Aran in excited expectation that it would “afford a rich mine of ancient remains.” But his was an empirical and sardonic temperament. Had he condescended to notice J.T. O’Flaherty’s ideas on cromlechs and round towers, he would have applied to them the treatment recommended in his circle for refuting the Celtomaniac fantasies of Vallancey’s followers: “First, break into an immediate horse-laugh, and then suddenly altering from gay to grave, from lively to severe, with one immortal and terrific frown desire them to go to the devil for drivelling twaddlers.” Also, having been brought up on a little farm near Water-ford, attended a hedge-school and learned Irish from native speakers, O’Donovan was not such a naive enthusiast for the Irish countryman as O’Flaherty or even Petrie. Here is his arrival in Cill Rónáin with his colleague the artist William Wakeman, at three in the morning after a twelve-hour voyage in a Claddagh fishing-boat:
We climbed up the big stones of which the little quay of Kilronan is built, and finding ourselves on the solid rocks of Aran we proceeded by the guidance of the two Claddagh men, and one native Aranite, to the head Inn of Aranmore, in which being now chilly and fatigued, we were anxious to get our heads in, and lay down our heads to sleep for a few hours…. On arriving at the house, our sailors rapped at the door several times, but no answer was made, which made me believe they had brought us to the wrong house, at which the youngest of them pushed in the door! Immediately after this I observed a glimmer of light, and heard a voice inviting us in. The man of the house was drunk, and having been very unruly the evening before in quarrelling with his wife and all that came in his way, he was after getting a beating from the priest, who deemed it his duty to beat him into something like rationality. I heard a good deal about his history since, but I disdain to waste my time in talking about such a being.
The low life which in hovels grovels, novels May paint.
After a glass of “mountain dew punch” O’Donovan went to bed hungry and got a few hours fitful, feverish sleep; then after breakfast he set off for Dún Aonghasa. Wakeman describes O’Donovan’s ecstasy there:
A smart walk brought us in sight of the object of our day’s pilgrimage; and I shall never forget O’Donovan’s burst of enthusiasm when the old palace fortress of the days of Queen Maeve first met our view. He literally shouted with delight, and, after launching his umbrella a marvellous height into the air, threw himself on the ground, and shouted again and again.
They spent the day examining the fort, and walked back to the inn; O’Donovan later wrote that “I never felt so fatigued by any journey, having all day walked about on the solid rock.” The next day they visited Cill Éinne, and were disappointed to find the churches they had read about in Colgan nearly all destroyed. O’Donovan’s settled determination, during field-work, was to keep clear of the gentry; as he said of the Connemara landlords, “Any information they could afford me, would not be worth a pinch of salt. All a waste of time!” But at Cromwell’s fort he bumped into Martin O’Malley of the Hill Farm, “who told us that this fort had been built on the site of the castle of Arkin for the purpose of defending the Dutch fishermen to whom the English Government in the reign of William III sold the fisheries on the western coasts of Ireland. I did not feel inclined to believe this to be a fact.” On the other hand he was always anxious to search out the aborigines, as he called them, in whatever locality he was investigating, in order to hear their pronunciation of place-names and collect their folklore. The name of Dún Aonghasa itself was, he found, “now forgotten by all the inhabitants except one old man of the name of Wiggins dwelling at Killeany. He, though not of the primitive Irish race, but of a colony planted here by Cromwell, remembers that the old people were accustomed to call it Dun Innees, which is the true Irish pronunciation according to the Connaught accent. All the other inhabitants style it Dun mor, and in English the Big Fort.” Thus the crucial link with the Celtic past was preserved only by a descendent of the English garrison, an irony that probably appealed to O’Donovan’s humour.
O’Donovan spent just six days in this whirlwind rush from site to site throughout the three islands. Then, leaving Wakeman to sketch all the remains they had identified, he set off in a hired boat for Galway. His description of the voyage, during which they were blown nearly to Casla Bay, tossed for half an hour with the sails down through a fierce squall, and only reached Black Head by seven in the evening after countless tackings, slips in and out of colloquial Irish and even incorporates a parody of the Four Masters’ account of the shipwreck of a famous stiúrasmann or navigator of the O’Malleys off Aran in 1560; then:
I got into the forecastle of the boat to avoid the dashing of the waves which annoyed me not being able to bear much wet, but there I got quite sick from the smoak and the water dashing down the scuttle-hole which served for a chimney. When the storm had subsided a little, the sailors reefed and hoisted the sails again and found to their great satisfaction that during the squall the wind had veered about a little to the S. w
est at seeing which the Stiúrasmann cried out in Irish all is right now, thank God, we shall get to Galway now in a few half hours. In this, however, he was disappointed, for we did not reach Galway till 10 o’clock.
There O’Donovan settled down in Hardiman’s library to write up Aran, and over three weeks produced two hundred and forty pages, including lengthy transcriptions and translations from Roderic O’Flaherty, the Life of St. Enda, and other sources. (We nowadays can hardly comprehend the physical labour involved in scholarship before the invention of typewriters and photocopiers.) He begins his “lucubrations” with a line from the medieval poem in which Colm Cille bids farewell to Aran on leaving for Iona, “Ceileabhradh uaim-se d’Árainn,” and he ends them with some impromptu doggerel based on the same poem. I copy this curiosity (with an English version kindly done for me by Dr. Máirín Ní Dhonnchadha), as it has not been published before. The pun on árainn, meaning “kidney” (in certain sayings it is a seat of the affections, like the heart) is untranslatable. Nor can I explain the reference to “Áine álainn,” lovely Ann; perhaps there is some tender secret here, though it is scarcely conceivable that O’Donovan’s breakneck progress through the islands left time for romance.
Ceileabhradh uaim-se d’Árainn;—
A farewell from me to Aran
’se théidheas anun trem árainn
And to that which goes through my kidney
Scaramhuin leat a ghradh mo choim,
To bid farewell to you, oh love of my bosom,