Stones of Aran

by Tim Robinson

  Curiously, Aristotle is a well-known figure in Irish folklore, and the tale of his marriage used to be told in Aran. It seems that Aristotle “was very wise, very brainy, but he didn’t like women at all,” and he had a man to cook and keep house for him. This housekeeper often discussed his master’s peculiarity with a woman who used to come around the house, and they decided to trick him into marrying her. Aristotle always had breakfast in bed, and one morning the woman dressed herself in the housekeeper’s clothes and carried in the breakfast to him. As soon as she was at the bedside the housekeeper locked the bedroom door and ran for a lawyer, while she started to shriek that she was being kept in against her will. The judgement of the lawyer was that Aristotle would have to marry the woman or face a court case, and so he consented to marry her, on condition that he could put her from him if ever he found fault with her. She in her turn agreed to this, on condition that if he put her out she could take with her three loads of whatever she wanted from the house. So they married, and had a boy-child of whom Aristotle became very fond. But later he began to hate the woman, and to suspect she was too friendly with the housekeeper, and eventually he ordered her out. “Very well,” she said, “but remember our agreement, that if you put me from you I can take three loads of whatever I choose with me.” “In with you and get your three loads,” he said, “and get out of my sight for ever!” So she carried off the child as her first load, and left him in a safe place. Then she came back for the second load, and took away all the silver and gold and clothes she could carry. When she came back for the third time, she looked around the house for a while, pretending she was searching for something. Aristotle was standing in the middle of the floor, and she walked up to him and said, “I don’t see anything else I’d rather have than you, so up with you on my back!” “If that’s how it is,” said the great thinker, “wouldn’t it be as well for you to bring back the other two loads? We’d be better off staying here than anywhere else, and perhaps we’ll be more peaceful together in the future.”

  Climbing the hill, especially on steamer-days when everyone was on the road, used to be a social occasion for us; at home we led such a private, hermetic life that sometimes when I answered a knock at the door I must have appeared blear-eyed from sleep, love, sorrow or the written word. But on the open road we were more convivial; only rarely did we hurry or lag in order to avoid sharing the long ascent with someone dull or cantankerous. Beartla was always a good companion on the road, but others could be tiresome, and whenever I was cycling up the hill and nearing the point where I would have to stagger to a halt and start walking, having no gears on my old black Raleigh, I used to look ahead and see what company offered, for once one had fallen in with a person it was difficult to part from him or her before the top of the last carcair. Conversely, if one wanted to impose oneself on a reluctant companion, to make some point at length, for example, the hill allowed one to do so as if by chance. M used this enforced pairing very effectively with a neighbour who we suspected was avoiding us. The ground of the difficulty was this. Strolling by Port Mhuirbhigh one day I had met him filling a donkey-cart with sand from the grassy bank between the path and the beach; I stopped and chatted, and brought the conversation round, very subtly as I thought, to coastal erosion. If the bank was damaged, I hinted, the winter storms would break through to the path behind it; if the path went, then the wall of the sandy field called The Vinegar would be undermined, and if the Vinegar was blown away, all Kilmurvey House’s fine pastures would follow, and so on to Apocalypse. The man disagreed; the sea was always washing sand in and out of the bay, and there would be sand here after we were all dead. I returned the conversation to the fine weather and so on, and left him, as I thought, in perfect amity. Unfortunately a few days later official noticeboards appeared by the beach specifying the penalties for unauthorized removal of sand. The notices were soon thrown down, and it seems there was some muttering in the pubs that I with my privileged access to the ear of Government had been responsible for them. However, because we rarely met him on the road and he was not very forthcoming at the best of times, it was some months before we began to wonder if our neighbour Wasn’t Talking To Us. So when M one day saw him ahead of her pushing his bike up the hill, she strained every muscle to catch up, pretended to be overcome by gravity just as she was about to pass him, and then chatted with him on every topic but sand, remorselessly, all the way up the hill and two further miles back to the west, leaving him not merely mollified but cordial, confiding, entranced. (As to the beach, the sandbank is in tatters and the path has collapsed, but the Vinegar wall still stands. My certainties have suffered some erosion too, though; the storms of 1991 would have smashed the path with or without our neighbour’s help, and I am inclined to agree that there will be sand there after we are all dead.)

  The flat stretch of the road on a level with the black crag is only a couple of hundred yards long, and then begins another climb, Carcair Ghanly, past the opening of the side-road leading down to the village of Mainistir. Thomas Ganly, who came to Aran in the 1850s to oversee the building of the pier in Cill Rónáin and the lighthouse on An tOileán Iarthach, married a Mainistir widow; a year later she died, leaving him her cartúr of land, and he very quickly married the young daughter of the blacksmith Micil Riabhach, which caused a lot of talk. Thomas was from Antrim; his father was an Orangeman who married a Catholic and let his wife bring up the children in her own religion, but (as Breandán Ó hEithir puts it), some of the Ulster bigotry seems to have stuck to Thomas, for it is said he had to leave home after a row in which he broke a few Protestant skulls. He was no great farmer, according to family legend; once he saw some sheep grazing in one of his fields, and drove them down to the pound in Cill Rónáin, and then discovered they were his own and had to pay twopence a head to redeem them. Thomas’s offspring gave Aran plenty to gossip about. On the night a mainland suitor came looking for her hand, his sixteen-year-old daughter Maggie eloped with a penniless Fenian from Gort na gCapall, Mícheál Ó Flaithearta. One of Thomas’s sons, also called Thomas, was secretary of the Aran branch of the Land League. This Thomas and his brother-in-law Mícheál were arrested on suspicion of cliffing the Kilmurvey O’Flahertys’ cattle, but were released for lack of evidence. He also ambushed Ó hIarnáin the bailiff near the old quay in Cill Rónáin once, and fired a shot which grazed the man’s head and stunned him. When the bailiff came round, he saw a man called Kilmartin standing over him. The police searched Kilmartin’s cottage, which was close by, and planted a revolver and bullets under the newborn baby in the cradle, and arrested him. Thomas got away to Boston, but very soon fell ill with galloping consumption; on his deathbed he confessed that he had fired the shot at the bailiff, the priest sent word to Galway and Kilmartin was released. All this caused so much rírá that Thomas’s brother, the Rev. William Ganly, had to leave his curacy in Mayo and emigrate to Australia. A third brother, Pat, inherited the farm, was evicted, and reinstated in half of it, as I have told.

  We know so much about the Ganlys because of the word-spinning, word-hoarding children and grandchildren of Maggie Ganly and Mícheál Ó Flaithearta, who include Liam and Tom O’Flaherty, Breandán Ó hEithir, and some of the Aran people I most enjoy talking to, and who have given me many of these details of the family history. Tom O’Flaherty wrote that he preferred his mother’s side of the family, “the emotional, witty, storytelling Ganlys,” to the “harsh, quarrelsome, haughty, ‘ferocious O’Flahertys,’” and his favorite relative was his uncle Pat, “carefree and irresponsible … a great rebel, the best story-teller in Aran.” Anecdotes of Pat’s high-spirited antics are many. He was a hero of the skirmishing with the land-agent Thompson. Once when eviction cases were pending against some Cill Éinne tenants he made the doctor drunk, took the keys of the dispensary, climbed into its roof-space and from there into the agent’s office next door, stole the iron box containing the eviction notices, rowed out and drowned it in the sea off Straw Island, so that the cases had to
be dismissed. He was a “playboy” in the Aran or Syngean sense, always ready for fun, for running races and jumping, even when he was old, and it is from him that the carcair has its name, for he used to sit on a boulder beside it, on sunny days a hundred years ago, exchanging badinage with the passers-by.

  In fact Carcair Ghanly is one of the most joyous places in Aran. As one climbs, at whatever the cost in breath, the whole eastern end of the island falls away into a vast perspective with the other two Aran Islands and the hills of Clare beyond—but I will devote a chapter to this view when we reach the top of the hill—and if, having come from the western villages in the lee of the island’s central ridge, one is swooping down it on a bicycle, here for the first time ocean appears to the south as well as to the north, and one is suddenly balanced on two immense blue wings. The most mundane errands are uplifted by this hill, even the week-in week-out delivery of goods from the steamer visible in the harbour below. Séamas complains about the sclábhaíocht, the slavery, of his coal business, but when grinding up the hill on his tractor towing a trailer heaped with sacks, he radiates power, and noise, and grimy nods. Stiofán with his vanful of Calorgas bottles salutes the other Stiofán with his vanful of Kosangas bottles, unprescient of the merger of Calorgas and Kosangas even then being planned out in the big world, and the slight contretemps which will ensue when it turns out that those Robinsons, with that British sense of fair play so much admired at least by the British, have been dealing with both of them. And here comes Robinson himself, sailing down the hill with a squeak of his old bike, a packet of fifty maps of Aran (1982 price £1.58 + 15% VAT, wholesale terms 33% off) bouncing around in a sally-rod basket on his handlebars, for delivery to the steward of the Galway Bay—“I’m telling you, that fellow has his fortune made with them maps!” Yes, we all have our ad-hucksterish ways of living off the stones of Aran, and it is a good thing we have the daily bread of nature’s beauty to supplement them for they all involve a bit of sclábhaíoch: but they give us identities too, they validate our going up and down the hill in the eyes of society. Before I produced the map, it was a mystery to our neighbours what we were living on; one man said to me, “We thought you must have money in rubber-mines or something.” But now I have an island nickname as definitive as those of the buyer from the seaweed factory in Connemara, who is Fear na Slataí Mara, the searod-man, and the representative of the Department of Agriculture, Fear na bhFataí, the potato-man: I am Fear na Mapaí, the man of the maps, and that is why I am on this hill.

  Just one more steep bit, and we are there—Carcair Chlaí Chox, the slope of Cox’s wall. Who Cox was nobody remembers, nor which wall is his. The only notable wall here marks the boundary between Mainistir and Eochaill villages; a little more robust and ivy-clad than the other field-walls, it threads its way between the handful of houses that have been built here in recent years, each one trying to steal the view from the last. The carcair becomes rather abrupt in its last few yards, as old Beartla points out every time we climb it. He was employed in building this stretch of the road many years ago—he remembers sitting with the gang of men by the roadside breaking stones with a hammer all day—and he told the young engineer in charge of the works that the slope should be graded a bit more, “But he had a college education and holive oil on his hair, and he wouldn’t listen to me!” So, even if we have made a mighty effort and cycled all the way up to this point, we are defeated at the last moment and wobble to a stop within sight of level going.

  If we have forgotten anything from the shops in Cill Rónáin, this is where we will think of it. If there is a stylistic trick to round off this hill of anecdotes, this is when I must invent it. But what is style, compared to all that substance? Merely the complacent wave of the downhill cyclist to those pushing up.

  BREATHING SPACE

  Pausing to draw breath at the top of the road from Cill Rónáin, one looks round, and sees the earth drawing its breath too. From here the liquid Atlantic is hidden behind the long ridge rising behind Eochaill village, but the Atlantic of vapour it continuously exhales rolls around and over the island to fill a vast bowl of vision in all other directions, and suspended moisture in the distances between the eye and its objects makes the distances themselves visible. In the deepest south of this aerial ocean there are often the ghosts of blue whales: Mount Brandon in Kerry, and sometimes a lower profile beyond it I used to name confidently as the Great Blasket, but which, checking with a map, I realize is Mount Eagle near the head of the Dingle peninsula. We wonder at these appearances, faded and reduced to two dimensions, not for what they are but for how far away they are, thinking of the precarious journeying and near-drowning of the light that reaches us from them, the dilution almost to extinction of the warm tones issued from those Old Red Sandstone hills, in the scattered blue of sunlight astray among infinitudes of floating water-molecules.

  The island chain itself—the eastern part of Árainn falling away from this height, the long grey back of Inis Meáin with that of Inis Oírr appearing above it, a paler parallel—is shown by this vaporous perspective to be rooted in the mainland beyond, the greater parallel of the Burren. Close at hand the stones of the walls and the wayside weeds are presented in detail by the high light-levels; in broader terms one can follow the complex argumentation of the middle-distant land with the sea—the broad tract of the bay ceded right up to the thresholds of Cill Rónáin, the varied points asserted beyond Cill Éinne—but then the progressive indefinition of the other islands reunites them with a background that looks as if it has been laid down by the rain itself in layer upon layer and frequently merges upwards into stratified mists. On occasion, though, when a general smother of cloud is driving over the islands and the wind tears a hole in it behind us to the west, a shaft of sunlight picks out some fragment of the mainland and holds it up for close examination; the Burren is a blue-black mystery, but suddenly the dome of Black Head terminating it to the north is spotlit—x-rayed, one might think, its rock-structure is so clarified—or the Cliffs of Moher appear above the south of Inis Oírr as a long line of stiff-folded gold-brocade curtains drawn against the darkness.

  The rest of the ever-changing panorama this high point of the road offers swings into place as one turns to walk on westwards. Across the North Sound a vista of Connemara hangs before Aran eyes, a perpetual seductive dream of elsewhere. (In my first volume I expressed the wish for another decade in which to explore that “as-yet hardly described land of marvels” as quittance for my decade of work on Aran; and in gratitude to life I hereby acknowledge that the wish has been granted.) Meteorology has ten miles of water on which to inscribe itself between the island and the mainland. Halfway across are two reefs, An Bhrachlainn Mhór and An Bhrachlainn Bheag, the big and little breakers, which remember a storm for days after it has died, throwing up great hills of smooth water that swell, blaze into foam, and sink back into calm again as they process to the east. Even in settled high-summer stillness the idle air stirs a little of the milky sky into the waters; a currach picking its way across the pallid meanders stands out like an insect on a pond. As full of ungraspable forms as the transitions between deep sleep and wakefulness, this wide separation of the two heartlands of my life does not look as if it could be crossed by any means of reality, and even the regularity of the high-speed ferries that now shuttle in and out from Ros a’ Mhíl does not abridge its visionary potential. Sometimes dolphins briefly accompany these boats as if in empathy with our linear lives, before turning away into their own fluid dimensions. I remember, on one of these crossings, looking back along the white road of the wake, and an image forcing itself upon me of a dark shape on it, following and steadily overhauling the boat; as it came nearer I saw that it was a man on horseback, galloping. He swerved to overtake us, and, leaning from the saddle, threw a packet to me—a bird with bound wings, which broke loose as it fell into my hands and flew away, to Aran or to Connemara.