by Tim Robinson
Uair duit-se námá ádhroim.
For it is you alone I adore.
A sherc mo chroidhe ’s mo árann,
Love of my heart and my kidney,
A thréig mé a n-inse Arann
Whom I abandoned in the isle of Aran
Soraidh uaim chugat gach luan
A blessing from me to you each Monday
Uair duit-se námá adhroim.
For it is you alone I adore.
Go dtigid each die Sathrainn
May they come to you each Saturday,
De nimh chugat a n-Arainn
From Heaven to you in Aran
Aingil mhóra ag cantain ceoil
Great angels singing music
Ad’ bhenncadh a Áine Álainn.
Bestowing blessings on you, lovely Áine.
Finally, O’Donovan made a pilgrimage to the ruins of the house at Park, a few miles west of the city, where Roderic O’Flaherty had spent his last years in studious penury, having failed to regain the lands of which his father had been robbed by the Cromwellians. O’Donovan was deeply indebted to O’Flaherty’s Chorographical Description of West or H-Iar Connaught, which was written at Park in 1684, apparently in connection with Sir William Petty’s “Down Survey,” a cartographical summation of changes in land-ownership during the Cromwellian interregnum and the Restoration. But Roderic used to be better known as the author of a chronology of Irish history, Ogygia: seu Rerum Hibernicarum Chronologia, published in Latin in 1685; its mysterious title alludes to the fact that:
Ireland is justly called Ogygia, i.e., very antient, according to Plutarch, for the Irish date their history from the first oeras of the world: so that in comparison with them, the antiquity of all other countries is modern, and almost in its infancy!
In his day the penniless O’Flaherty was regarded as inheritor of this antiquity compared to which all others are in their infancy, and it was as an awe-struck disciple that O’Donovan came to the tomb of the scholar he calls “the Ogygian”:
I never felt so much moved, as when I sat on the little hill … a low rock covered with mossy sward, commanding a panoramic view of the sea, the three islands of Aran and of a considerable extent of the northern coast of the Co. of Clare, on which the historian is said to have spent a great part of his time in the summer season, studying and enjoying the beauty of the prospect before him….
How genuine O’Donovan’s emotion sounds, after the vapourings of his predecessors! And he must have felt he had earned the right to share the Ogygian’s view of the Aran Islands from that hillock.
A web of cultural nationalism was being spun in those middle decades of the last century; Aran was involved from the start. The career of Samuel Ferguson—a Belfast Protestant, in his early days a supporter of Young Ireland, called to the Dublin bar in 1838, a poet and re-teller of old Irish legends, author of a scholarly work on ogham inscriptions, centre of the most entertaining and cultured circle of like-myriad-minded men and women, later Sir Samuel, and President of the Royal Irish Academy—draws together many of its threads. In 1852 he visited the three Arans, and found that:
The people themselves, so fine-natured, genial, and intelligent, are more worthy of regard than all their monuments from the fifth century downwards…. They are a handsome, courteous, and amiable people. Whatever may be said of the advantages of a mixture of races, I cannot discern anything save what makes in favour of these people of the pure ancient stock, when I compare them to the mixed populations of districts on the mainland. The most refined gentleman might live among them in familiar intercourse, and never be offended by a gross or sordid sentiment…. To see the careful way in which the most has been made of every spot available for the growth of produce, might correct the impression so generally entertained and so studiously encouraged, that the native Irish are a thriftless people. Here, where they are left to themselves, notwithstanding the natural sterility of their islands, they are certainly a very superior population—physically, morally, and even economically—to those of many of the mixed and planted districts.
A few years later, in 1857, Ferguson and his wife were of the company on that pinnacle of antiquarian passion for Aran I described in Pilgrimage, the banquet in Dún Aonghasa. On that glorious occasion, it is clear from the official chronicle of the excursion, every detail of Aran was bathed in the light of enthusiasm. The seventy Members and Associates of the Ethnological Section of the British Association, led by William Wilde of the Royal Irish Academy, had sailed out from Galway on the steam yacht Vestal on the previous day, when “the Excursionists were in the best spirits; and it was evident that a keen anticipation of something of more than ordinary interest had been excited in the breast of all.” Coming ashore at Cill Éinne, they found the inhabitants of the village, in their picturesque costumes, had crowded to the shore to see them.
Mr. Wilde’s duties as cicerone now commenced, and piping all hands with a small whistle…. he explained in a few words the origin and character of the old walls of Arkin; and, observing that they were only a Saxon, and comparatively modern innovation, he sprang over a neighbouring wall, and away went the whole bevy of ethnologists, old and young, learned doctors, reverend divines, eloquent men of law, profound science scholars, artists, naturalists, enthusiastic archaeologists, and all, over innumerable walls … surmounting every obstacle, and anon clambering up the sides of the rocky hill, to the utter amazement of the poor natives, who looked like people who had passively abandoned their island to invaders.
The only shadow on this summer’s day of archaeological bliss was the degenerating condition of the monuments; Dr. Petrie remembered that the round tower in Cill Éinne had been much higher at the time of his earlier visit, and Mr. Wilde found the stone huts in Dún Dúchathair greatly delapidated since he first saw them ten years previously. On the way from that dún to Cill Rónáin they paused at a square, flat-roofed clochán while Mr. Wilde addressed them upon the structure and formation of such early buildings; an islander “afforded the foundation of a facetious story” by saying he had built it himself as a donkey-shed a year before, but fortunately the Ordnance Survey map made in 1837 and 1838 was on hand to prove the man lied. In general it seems the natives were not treating their heritage with sufficient respect, and a principal theme of the speeches at the banquet next day was the damage being done to the ruins by lads hunting rabbits. Nevertheless, as the Vestal left Cill Rónáin, firing a last salute, the excursionists felt that Mr. Wilde’s stated objective, “to render Aran an object of attraction, and an opposition shop to Iona,” had been “crowned with a glorious success.” Petrie and some of his eminent colleagues stayed on in Aran, in an ecstasy of enthusiasm, as he later described to a correspondent:
How happily those days were spent you may easily imagine, when I tell you that I had for my companions, my beloved friends, Dr. Stokes, and his son; Frederick Burton, the painter; Samuel Ferguson, the poet and antiquary; and lastly, Eugene Curry, the Irish Shannachee!… The weather was glorious; and we scarcely left a church, or grave, or cloghan, a Saint, or a Dun of a Firbolg, in the three islands unvisited or unexamined.
Before long the islands were in a perpetual state of being investigated. A natural-historical expedition followed a similar course in 1864; two professors, Melville and Cleland, from Queen’s College, Galway, and George Kinahan of the Geological Survey, chartered the Galway Bay steamer Pilot, and shepherded a group of students around the island, “shooting and studying some of the rarer wildfowl,” and viewing the antiquities. Once again Dun Aonghasa was the culmination of their visit:
Prof. Melville assembled the group at the centre of the fort, and it being the anniversary of Her Majesty’s birthday, called for a cheer for the Queen, which was responded to with such a good will that the very puffins forsook their native cliffs in sheer fright.
Botanists had visited the islands long before this, the pioneers being Edward Lhwyd in about 1699, and in 1806 J.T. Mackay of TCD’s newly founded botanic garden. In
the middle decades of the century a number of botanists, mainly Scottish and English, published accounts of their “rambles” in Aran: J. Ball in 1839, W. Andrews and L. Ogilby both in 1845, D. Oliver in 1851 and 1852, J. H. Balfour in 1853 and D. Moore in 1854. Between them they recorded fifty-four species, but did not aim to be exhaustive. Then in 1867 Professor E.P. Wright of Dublin University published a list of 159 species from Aran, being, he claimed, “all, or nearly all, the species to be met with in the month of August,” and the discoveries made by H.C. Hart in 1869 soon doubled that number. This was hard-won knowledge; Hart complains about the interminable and disheartening obstacle-course of the field-walls, while Wright suggests that the botanist would do well to bring with him
… a few creature comforts to supplement the meagre fare of the place; and above all … a store of good candles. The sufferings that the writer endured while trying to investigate with a half-inch objective some gatherings made near the Holy Well at Kilronan, were indeed great, the only choice of light being between a farthing dip-candle of the worst description—i.e. with the thickest possible wick and the smallest amount of tallow—and a slender cotton thread lying in a saucer of fish oil.
Meanwhile the islanders themselves suffered scientific identification for the first time. A Dr. Beddoe came to Aran in 1861, and later wrote in his book The Races of Britain:
The people of the Aran Islands have their own strongly marked type, in some respects an exaggeration of the ordinary Gaelic one, the face being remarkably long, the chin long and narrow but not angular, the nose long and straight and pointed, the brows rising obliquely outwards, the eyes light with very few exceptions, the hair of various colours but usually dark brown. We might be disposed, trusting to Irish traditions respecting the islands, to accept these people as representatives of the Firbolgs, had not Cromwell, that upsetter of all things, left in Arranmore a small English garrison who subsequently apostasised to Catholicism, intermarried with the natives and so vitiated the Firbolgian pedigree.
This question of the racial purity of the islanders was to trouble many minds, as the ideological significance of the Aran Islands ramified over the next half-century, and still excites undue curiosity today. In the 1950s the conclusions of a blood-group survey of the islanders were much more widely commented on than would have been the case for a similar investigation on the mainland; there is a fear that facts might “vitiate” the dreams that enchain us with the primeval. (This study in fact showed that the blood-group frequencies of Aran differed sharply from those of adjacent mainland areas and were more like those of the east of Ireland or even the north of England where Gaelic and English stock have mixed. Such findings prompted a Dublin magazine to tease nationalists and “nativists” with a cartoon of Aran islanders playing cricket.)
There was a lull in the scientific investigation of Aran, perhaps due to the depressing and disturbed state of the country, during the Land War, but two legal gentlemen connected with the sittings of the Land Court in Cill Rónáin in the mid-1880s published accounts of the islands. James G. Barry’s “Aran of the Saints” was a brief paper largely devoted to the monuments recently restored by the Board of Works, but with a few interesting details of land-divisions not available elsewhere. Oliver J. Burke’s The South Isles of Aran, published in 1887, was the first book devoted to the islands. Much of it rehashes J.T. O’Flaherty, O’Donovan’s Ordnance Survey letters and Hardiman’s appendices to West or H-Iar Connaught, but it also contains the first critical assessment of the economic state of the islanders and suggestions for its improvement. This book must have helped to disabuse many subsequent visitors of romantic notions about the noble peasants and their even nobler masters.
Thereafter the islands continued to attract an extraordinary number of enquirers. In 1895 there were mass assaults by archaeologists and by natural historians. The Royal Society of Antiquaries of Ireland arrived on the 4th of July, most of it by the SS Caloric having sailed north-about from Belfast and visited Tory Island, Inishmurray and High Island en route, while a hundred or so more came out on the SS Duras from Galway. Among the excursionists were the Provincial Secretary for Connaught of the Society, Edward Martyn of Tullyra Castle in south Galway, and the leader of the party was Thomas Westropp, who had been visiting the islands since 1878 and was later to publish detailed studies of its forts and stone huts. The Caloric moored off Cill Mhuirbhigh, and getting ashore was not so easy:
A few corraghs at once put out from shore, and in an hour there must have been more than twenty at the ship’s side. Many of the natives came on board, and some of them sang Irish songs, and danced jigs remarkably well…. The corragh … is very buoyant, and can be rowed with great rapidity. They contain no seats except those for the rowers. This makes them inconvenient boats for passengers, who are obliged to accomodate themselves on the bottom of the boat sometimes in not very comfortable attitudes; while many carry away on their clothes reminders that tar takes some time to dry. They are excellent seaboats, however, riding over waves which would swamp a heavier boat, and with any reasonable care are perfectly safe. One accident only occurred during our stay—an accident which might have led to very serious consequences but for the gallant conduct of the first officer of the ship. This accident was caused by an act of great carelessness on the part of a young boatman.
In fact two of the party were nearly drowned by this drunken currachman; the Society’s later official reprint of the original account in the Belfast Newsletter glosses over some of the upsets of the expedition.
Next day the party landed in the bay of An Gleannachán, on the advice of the Rev. Mr. Kilbride, who was a member of the Society, and visited most of the island’s great monuments. The following day was spent in the two smaller islands, and they were outraged by the womenfolk of Inis Meáin who stretched a rope across the entrance to Dún Chonchúir and tried to levy a toll; some paid, some refused, the police were called, but came too late to be of help. However they were well satisfied with their finds, which included bronze pins and two “methars” or large cups. The archaeological account of the three islands that Westropp had prepared for this occasion remains a most useful summary guide.
This influx almost coincided with the visit of a hundred or so naturalists, the members and friends of members of the Belfast, Dublin, Cork and Limerick Field Clubs, brought together by a joint conference in Galway. They had already toured Connemara and the Burren, discussing and studying their numerous discoveries over dinners at the Railway Hotel, and had taken afternoon tea with the President of Queen’s College, Galway. The trip to the Aran Islands on July the 16th was another day of vigorous tramping and close observation, and was “in every way successful.” Their leader was the Secretary of the Irish Field Club Union, the indefatigable Robert Lloyd Praeger:
Punctually at 5.30 A.M. the Secretary’s shrill whistle called members down for an early cup of tea. A prompt response was made, and at 6 o’clock sharp the SS “Duras” cast off her moorings…. A heaving tide-run off the shore of Aranmore proved disastrous to some of the naturalists, but they speedily recovered as the steamer dropped anchor at Portmurvey…. The members who visited Dun Aengus—the larger proportion of the party—were amply repaid for their exertion…. Floating on the Atlantic swell far below, a keen-eyed member descried a fine specimen of the Great Sun-fish, which considerately remained in full view for a length of time. On the vegetation here and elsewhere many observers noted the great abundance of the handsome rose-beetle (Cetonia aurata). The presence of this species—so rare on the Irish mainland—was a great surprise to the entomologists. A small flower-beetle (Meligethes rufipes) new to Ireland, was found, as well as a minute spider (Micariosomia festivum), also apparently new to the Irish list….
On the beach at Kilronan, Miss Gardiner had a sumptuous tea prepared, to which the members did ample justice; after which, undeterred by frequent showers which now began to fall, a numerous party started southward to visit the primitive church of St. Eany, &c., and to attempt
further discoveries among the fauna and flora. The botanists were well pleased to find, at the last moment, that very rare Irish grass, the Wood Rush, in one of the two Aran stations given by Mr. H.C. Hart in his paper on the botany of the islands, and in the fading light a hasty return was made to the steamer, which left at 8 o’clock punctually, and the hotel in Galway was once more reached at 11.0.
Praeger returned to the island a few days later with a few colleagues, and went over it with his usual thoroughness. The floristic result of this excursion was an additional twenty-three new records. (A few other botanical visits brought the total of reliably recorded species up to 408 by the end of the century, and the present known flora numbers about 450 species.)
By the 1890s hundreds of day-trippers were disembarking at Cill Rónáin in the summer months. A pleasure-boat service to the islands from Galway had been initiated as early as 1863, and the paddle-steamer Citie of the Tribes, so called from an old appellation of Galway, had begun its long career in 1873. Mary Banim’s Here and There through Ireland has the first account of Aran from this new age of holiday-making, of people coming as she did, to enjoy “a mitigated Robinson Crusoe life.” She had read much about Aran’s saints, prehistoric monuments and wild-flowers, and above all about the charming innocence of the islanders. To avoid corrupting this last, she had left behind her an appendage of her travelling suit, the “dress improver,” four iron bars that gave a skirt a fashionable outline; and when she found, hanging behind the door of her room in the Atlantic Hotel, a feminine costume with the same unmistakable bulge in its skirt, she felt the shock Crusoe suffered on seeing the footprint in the sand. More seriously, she was also shocked to find that the natives of this delightful holiday-resort were hungry: