Stones of Aran

by Tim Robinson

  Having walked the intricate southern coastline of Connemara when mapping it some years ago, it is curiously fascinating now to retrace that walk in the edgeways-on view of it from Aran, as I can after rain has freshly washed the air. When raked by a westering sun, every rooftop glitters on the peninsulas and archipelagos that stretch out towards me, terminating in the little copper stud of the old watch-tower on Golam Head; I can identify the houses of people I met, name the granitic hillocks in the bogs and even some of the offshore rocks marked by patches of surf that look from here like white butterflies alighted on the sea. Behind these low-lying forelands stands the long precipice wall of Cnoc Mordáin, on which the afternoon sun hangs cloud-shadows, and to the west a distant obliquity makes a range out of scattered hills, from the ragged, arched back of Errisbeg near Roundstone, to a tiny knob almost isolated on the beginning of the Atlantic horizon, Doon Hill, which is the stub of an ancient volcano. The deepest recesses of Connemara float above Cnoc Mordáin as a third step into absolute distance, the long turf-brown plateaus of the Joyce Country to the east, and to the west the Twelve Bens’ closely grouped cones of glinting quartzite. When we in Aran see the valley between these two mountain ranges seething like a cauldron with dark cloud and pallid streaks of hail, we bless the fact that the islands are not high enough to trip the heavy skies hurrying over them to spill the ocean they carry onto the streaming hillsides of Connemara, swelling its bogs and brimming its hidden lakes.

  Tracking the passage of bad weather across the sound and away to the mainland is one of Aran’s pleasures. During stormy winter days when the low sun, hidden behind the island, is being switched on and off by a succession of thunder-clouds coming in on the gale, the abysmal darkness of the northern sky is background to an intermittent rainbow of wonderful brilliance, forming and reforming in the same position. The perfect circle is so rare in our natural experience that, apart from the disc of the sun seen through mist, the iris of the human eye, and the ripples spreading from a disturbance in still water, it is difficult to think of other examples. The rainbow—not a complete circle, though sometimes from a height like the top of the climb here, a vague sketch of most of the lower arc of it is discernible in the mist drifting through the fields below—is so accurately drawn, as if by cosmic compasses, that it impresses upon some temperaments a certainty of its spiritual significance, and on others the question of its material mechanism. A ray of sunlight enters a raindrop, is reflected off the inside of its surface, and exits again, at some angle to its original direction. There is a particular angle at which the reflection is at its most intense, easily found by simple calculus to be about 42 degrees; I did it at school and have long forgotten how. The exact answer depends on the colour of the light, since rays of different wavelengths, corresponding to different colours, are bent by slightly different amounts in entering and leaving the medium of water. The sun’s rays contain all colours, mixed together into white; they are reflected back to the eye from falling rain at haphazard angles, but at those certain calculable angles the various individual colours will be predominant. Thus the rainbow forms an arc at about 42 degrees to the continuation of a line from the sun through the eye of the observer. This arc, given the position of the sun and the eye, is fixed in the sky, a perpetually present geometrical abstraction, the Platonic idea of a rainbow, waiting only for the presence of raindrops to bring it forth in all the colours of the visible. Hence arises a lovely phenomenon I have often seen from Aran when an isolated squall is travelling along the North Sound. As the narrow column of rain passes across the arc of the potential rainbow, it makes each point of it manifest in succession. The effect is that a short sector of rainbow comes into existence apparently down near the waters of the Sound or out in the Connemara hinterland, and rises smoothly along its predestined curve, passing across the northern sky and descending again to extinction as the squall moves on. An iridescent dolphin, or perhaps a salmon, leaping in some solemn mystic time-scale up out of nothingness through our world of vapours and down again into nothingness. The mechanism of the apparition is clear; its meaning is open to our determination.

  Above and around all the vast circus of the elements one commands from the top of this climb is the protective envelope of sky, the delicate, translucent skin of the globe. Its depths are of many intersuffusing layers, visible and invisible; the tenderness of its bending down to and wrapping over the horizon is often clear to the feeling eye. Sometimes dull, bruised by departed gales, sometimes glowingly reminiscent of kind weather, it embodies Aran’s short-term memory, as opposed to the ancient lore condensed in the stones. Also it is an arcanum of high predictive signs: storm-dogs, mares’ tails, rings round the sun, cirrus-cloud brush-drawings of tomorrow’s winds. Sometimes it is all contradictory; urgent and vociferous here, sullen and opaque there; one doesn’t know whether they refer to the past or the future, these clouds out of which one might expect hot snow or black lightning, these mist-banks full of mermaid ova and the dandruff of drowned sailors …

  But what have we done to this hilltop, this calm and attentive brow with which the island gazes upon the weather of the world? From where I stand in the road I can count no fewer than fifty poles carrying electricity or telephone wires. The delicate continuities are splintered. The mountain ranges are scratched, as if a vandal had scrawled on a painting with a nail. Even the sky is shoddy, defaced with graffiti. We must be blind, to let such things be done! Our blindness is that of grubs in the Apple of Knowledge.

  MAINISTIR

  Eochaill townland has four villages: Mainistir, Eochaill itself, Baile na Creige and Corrúch. The last three of these and the newer houses of the first lie ahead to the west, but to visit the old part of Mainistir one leaves the main road at Carcair Ghanly and follows a boreen that drops northwards towards the sea. After crossing quarter of a mile of rough fields and patches of crag it zigzags down two lines of low cliffs separated by a narrow terrace, the rim of a bowl of greener pastures around the bay and shingle beach of Port na Mainistreach. The lichen-grey ruins of St. Ciarán’s church are under the second scarp-line, to the east, and the almost depopulated settlement stretches along a path to the west on the terrace. The two inhabited cottages, well cared-for and freshly whitened, separated by dark, roofless ruins, stick out like the last teeth in an old jawbone.

  Once upon a time people here used to complain of the fairies—Pat Ganly’s house was badly infested, I am told—but now they grumble if one mentions such foolishness, and I once overheard a priest who was living on the island being scolded for referring to the steep, overgrown path that shortcuts the bends of the road down the scarps as Róidín na Sióg, the little road of the fairies, instead of Bóithrín an Teampaill, the boreen of the church. Those electricity poles have denatured night as well as day; nowadays light is cheap and convenient, and spills plentifully from windows and torches and headlamps, whereas before it was used very sparingly. On moonless nights perfect blackness pressed close around the houses, and immediately outside the door was a realm of stumblings and strayings and mis-identifications, of pranks and mischief and spying too. Or were moonlit nights more frightening—the luminous rock-sheets riven with abysses, the birds and animals restlessly astir? Sometimes in the dark all things reveal the secret we keep from ourselves by daylight and lamplight, that below the skin of what we see of them they are fathomless pools of potential appearances; it is as if other creatures’ deeper vision of them takes priority and forces itself on our own eyes. And we too are objects of those alien visions; our self-recognitions are shaken. On Hallowe’en, the eve of the ancient Celtic feast of Samhain at the beginning of November, the children put on masks and go from door to door; one plays at pretending not to know them and trying to guess who they are; but in those last real Hallowe’ens we experienced before electricity came to the island, the children from a few hundred yards up the unlit road would arrive at our gate in such a panic of doubt about their own identities that they would be shrieking out as they rushed
up the garden path, “It’s Gráinne! It’s Clodagh!” The older boys, two by two, used to hobble in, dressed and masked as very old couples, and sit by the fire in silence, occasionally rapping on the floor with their sticks in a slow, solemn, almost unnerving rhythm; we understood that they represented the recently departed dead, who on that evening, which was like an imperfectly sealed gap between two seasons, have leave to revisit the earth. There was a faint threat of mischief, which never came to anything, though I remember reading of some lads who didn’t get the welcome and the drinks they were expecting from an old man in Bun Gabhla, and stuffed a billygoat down his chimney so that its head appeared upside down in his hearth, the Devil himself, horned, hairy, hell-blackened—but that was in the Dark Ages fifty years ago.

  The other creaking hinge of the year is May Eve, Oíche Bhealtaine, which together with Hallowe’en defined the two seasons, winter and summer, of the ancient Celtic year. On these nights, it was believed (and is still, to a degree), the fairies change quarters from one side of the island to the other, and it was not good to be out because they resented being seen. And just as the beginning of winter is threatening on this little island naked to the forces of nature, with the sudden encroachment of night on day and the first storms closing the seaways, so the beginning of summer is disturbingly full of challenge, especially for the young, with the scents and sounds of passion in every bush, and anguishing in another way to those who no longer feel that the challenge is meant for them. Night and lonely places fill with the shadows of these uncomprehended fears and longings; ghosts, fairies, the púca, the mada mór or big dog that has been seen at Carcair Chlaí Chox, the unidentified dark thing in the shadow of the thornbush, are born of the coupling of chthonic and psychic unknowns.

  Mainistir, hidden under the hill, off the track to and out of sight of all the other villages, was particularly haunted by such creatures, and in some islanders’ minds still is. An Oatquarter man told me he wouldn’t live down there for a thousand pounds a month; he remembers that an old man coming home from a wake saw fairies making a coffin; one of them looked like the devil, and the long glowing nails were flying into the wood from all directions. The hauntings of the Ganly house were inconsequential vague shoutings at night, harmless poltergeists’ practical jokes. When the Ó hEithir family left the teachers’ residence in Cill Rónáin and built themselves a new house by Carcair Chlaí Chox, the nine-year-old Breandán was told by a local woman that they had chosen a bad site, for everyone knew that the fairy host who lived up on the crags at Carcair na gCat used a path close by when they wanted to go west. And a neighbour, Máirtín Breathnach, walking into Cill Rónáin at dawn, had seen a man come out of Róidín Chlaí Chox and turn down the hill ahead of him; Máirtín tried to catch up with him, but although he walked fast, and then trotted, and then ran as fast as he could, the figure remained the same distance ahead. Going down Carcair an Aill Bhriste, Máirtín, who had not been afraid of the Black and Tans, was in a cold sweat of fear. The man turned the corner at a leisurely walk, and when Máirtín ran round after him there was nobody to be seen. That wasn’t the end of the woman’s stories; she still had a trump to play:

  She lowered her voice and put me under the seven warnings not to tell it to any living creature, but—my aunt had been seen near that place more than once, soon after her death. That put a new complexion on the story. This aunt had died in childbed when she was only a young girl. It was clear from old photographs and also from village tradition that she had been beautiful, and the tragedy had added to her beauty.

  Oddly enough I kept these horror-stories to myself for a while, but they slipped out one evening when we had music in the house and I said that that should drive away the ghosts and the fairies. Unluckily my mother was present, and since she had not the least belief in fairies or superstitions I thought I would get a couple of “salamanders.” But she only burst out laughing when I told the woman’s first two tales. I had made up my mind to keep my aunt’s ghost to myself, but after this success I decided to spill the lot. My mother listened quietly, and when I had finished all she said was “Poor Julia!” and left it at that. The story was never seriously mentioned again, but I often remembered it, especially when I had to go to the well under the cliff and it was necessary to pass the spot where people thought she had been seen.

  Whether poor Julia’s child was born alive or not I do not know, but if not, it is likely that it was buried with many other tragedies in the mysterious hillock by the seashore, a little east of the foot of the Mainistir road, called An Atharla, the burial ground. The top of this is a roughly rectangular plot about forty yards long by ten wide, enclosed by a slightly-built field-wall, which appears to be standing on the decayed remains of an earlier wall and from a distance looks like a little ring-fort. It is difficult to make out if the unusually steep-sided mound is all natural or if it has been built up to some extent; there is talk of a buried doorway in its southern flank, but that seems structurally unlikely. Within the enclosure is a set stone just over two feet high on which is carved a Latin cross. Almost hidden in long grass are three even smaller stones on which one can just make out shallow grooves forming simple crosses, and a few uninscribed boulders. The crosses look like Early Christian work, and connect the site with the monastic settlement from which Mainistir has its name. The Ordnance Survey map of 1898 marks it as an “Infants’ Burial Ground,” which implies that it was used for the burial of unbaptized babies. Up until two or three generations ago it was thought that the souls of stillborn children or those who died before baptism would go to Limbo and continue a nebulous existence, neither enjoying Heaven nor suffering Hell. The sorts of places they were buried in—often surreptitiously and by night—share the same ambiguous status, and in Aran it was usually under a “meering” wall between one person’s land and another’s, as if to avoid or dilute responsibility for their resting-places. In the Burren, children’s burial grounds are often in a lios or “fairy fort” which probably originated as a cashel wall around an early chapel, and which, while not consecrated ground still has some lingering association with sanctity. Most Connemara villages have a small overgrown plot with a clutch of unmarked stones tucked away somewhere obscure, often on a townland boundary or on the no-man’s-land of the seashore, unvisited and overgrown nowadays and forgotten by all except the very old, some of whom still have bitter reason to remember them. Nowadays neither Pope nor peasant would deny what comfort the proper graveyard can offer such failed scraps of life or their grieving parents, and the children’s burial grounds with their evasive theology are abandoned to the grass and briars and whitethorn bushes of reconsecrating nature. They are, though, “sheeogy places” still; the sióga or fairies make themselves felt there, brushing the hair on the back of the passer-by’s neck. At twilight the Mainistir burial ground, rearing up gaunt and angular right next to the unfrequented road, nudges one with a thought of all the tormented circumstances buried in the phrase “unbaptized infants.”

  The name “Mainistir” itself is a ghost. Among the churches listed by Archbishop O’Cadhla in the 1640s is

  The church called Mainistir Connachtach, that is, the Connaught monastery, in the place of which being afterwards demolished was built a chapel dedicated to Saint Ciarán.

  According to an inquisition of 1581 the territory of the islands then was comprised in three divisions, anglicized as Treumoynagh, Trueconnaght and Trueenagh, which obscurities one can puzzle out as follows: Trian Muimhneach, the Munster third, would have belonged to the O’Briens and presumably included Cill Éinne where their castle was. Trian Connachtach or the Connaught third, perhaps dominated by the O’Cadhlas and later the O’Flahertys from Iar-Chonnacht, included the Mainistir area. Trian Eoghanachta belonged to the Eoghanachta Ninussa and later the Corcu Modruad of what is now County Clare, and included the westernmost townland of Árainn, still called Eoghanacht. Mainistir Chiaráin must have ceased to exist by Elizabeth’s time, for its land was among the properties of th
e monastery of Annaghdown (north of Galway city) which came into the Crown’s possession on its dissolution, and even before Elizabeth took the islands out of the hands of the rivalrous O’Briens and O’Flahertys she was making grants of “a ruined chapel and land in the island of Aryne.” This titbit was dispensed in 1566 to a Florence Lylly, chaplain; in 1570 to the Earl of Clanricarde, who built up a huge estate out of former monastic lands; and finally in 1578 to the Wardens of Galway.

  Under the cliff that wraps this anciently-chosen spot away from the Atlantic winds, there are several springs, which keep its meadows green. Around the ruined chapel walls tall pillar-stones inscribed with crosses stand watch, the most patient of herdsmen, over ruminating cattle; they probably used to mark the “termon” limits, within which there was a right of sanctuary. Some of the field-boundaries are underlain by the mounded remains of a cashel wall, not easy to trace in the ranker grass and briars. The chapel itself, one of the loveliest of the island’s antiquities, is rather later than the Cill Éinne oratories. Its undivided interior is about thirteen gravelly paces long, half that in width, and open to the heavens. The oldest-looking part is the flat-topped doorway in the west gable, about three feet wide, the jambs slightly inclined so that it is a little narrower at the top. Having entered, stooping a little under the lintel made of a single five-foot-long stone, one confronts the east gable-wall, which is of a wonderfully simple and uplifting design. Its slim round-headed light, nearly ten feet high and only five inches wide on the outside, has an internal splay of finely fitted masonry, smoothly finished, lighter in tone than the rough stonework of the rest of the wall, opening out to a width of five feet. A moulding outlining the round head of the splay is borne on little corbels decorated with plant forms (the books say these are grotesque carved heads, but if so I cannot make them out). Another moulding embraces the bottom of the splay, passing under it like a sill and up either side of it to a third of its height, and then steps away from it on either side towards the upper corners of the gable-wall, so that it seems to hold the whole window aloft with a priestly gesture above the simple stone altar. This is late Romanesque work, as is a smaller window in the south wall. A late medieval doorway in the north wall has a simple Gothic arch of two curved pieces of stone, and in the same wall, nearer the altar, is a square window with a low opening below it. Knee-high remains of walls outside the chapel at this point give the impression of a small building, perhaps a vestry, built very close to it, which has a flag like a grave marker or part of a pillar-stone lying in it. There are also traces of larger rectangular foundations, presumably of monastic buildings, immediately to the north, and also to the south-east, under the sheltering cliff-face.