Stones of Aran

by Tim Robinson

  A few yards outside the east gable is a pillar-stone, a limestone slab a few inches thick, about four feet high and fifteen inches wide, with an enigmatic combination of forms incised in the face turned towards the chapel. A cross is shown in outline, its shaft and arms linked by a double circle about its centre. The top of the shaft opens out into two little spiral curls, above which floats a double circle filling the width of the pillar, with a not-quite-vertical bar dividing its interior in two. The outer circumference of this circle is broken below and opens outwards into a pair of small curls that answer to and are poised between the pair on the top of the cross. Finally, above the double circle and just infringing its outer edge is a round hole piercing the slab, about two inches across. Westropp, who studied these ruins in 1878, was told by a fisherman that cloths drawn through this hole were used for curing sore limbs; and I have heard that people still come here, especially on August the 15th, the Feast of the Assumption, and make a wish by passing a handkerchief through the hole and walking round the stone nine times, sunwise. M and I usually improvise some such ritual whenever we visit. But these superstitious usages are minor mysteries compared to the lightly held balance, the sleep-walking sure-footedness, of the whole design. This is to my mind Aran’s quintessential stone; elsewhere, stone exuberates into rose windows; here, into this diagram of ascesis. But the archaeologists say that the hole probably held the gnomon of a sundial, in which case the circle would have had painted marks on it, and the appearance of the whole must have been very different. Its present timeless beauty was not part of its time-telling purpose.

  Another pillar, twenty yards west of the chapel, is just as beautiful—a single stone over nine feet tall and only nine or ten inches wide, with a rounded top. A cross is inscribed in outline on the face towards the chapel, with a small circle inside the crossing of the shaft and arms, and a semicircular cup-shape superimposed on the upper part of the shaft; the top of the shaft is finished off with an x, on which is balanced another cross made up of lines radiating from a small central circle, with cup-shaped terminals. Farther away in fields to the east and north-east of the chapel there are two smaller and rather rougher pillars, inscribed with crosses, and with slight bulges on either side as if the pillars themselves were thinking of assuming the form of crosses; in fact pillars of this sort are a link between the Early Christian cross-inscribed slabs and the Medieval high crosses. Near one of these, a few fields north of the chapel, is a little graveyard called Reilig na nGasúr, the burial-ground of the children, which was mainly for infants, and has not been used since about the 1930s. Most of the graves are marked only with boulders, but there are a few gravestones, including one of a John Burke who kept a school in Eochaill and died in 1828, and two or three fragments of early cross-slabs.

  The two main wells of the monastic settlement are fifty or sixty yards west of the chapel, in an open thickety patch of ground by the roadside, and in a minute field just above that. The roadside one is Tobar an Bhradáin, the well of the salmon, and its legend seems to have been quite forgotten by the villagers, who explain its name by means of the occasional exceptional runs of salmon which bring fish up into the most unlikely places. But in the Life of St. Enda we may read:

  And so, taking with him his holy followers, the man from heaven came to the island granted him, named Aran, and put into the harbour which is called Leamhchoill. For three days they were without food in that place, then God sent them a fish of amazing size, into the spring which is called the spring of Leamhchoill. From this fish the Almighty fed the one hundred and fifty who were with Saint Enda.

  “Leamhchoill” being an error for Eochaill, O’Donovan in his OS letters was surely correct in identifying this miraculous spring with St. Ciarán’s well, which is only a few yards above Tobar an Bhradáin. In fact since Tobar an Bhradáin has changed its position by a dozen yards or so within living memory—these limestone wells are flighty things, disappearing from one place and reappearing close by as the rock-fissures open or get blocked up—one could say that they are virtually the same well. Certainly only a miracle could have brought a huge salmon so far up this streamless hillside; I picture it leaping from the sea like the rainbow fragments I have described, following the arc of the ideal across the sky and plunging down into this well.

  Another remarkable fact about Tobar an Bhradáin I mention with reluctance, as it interrupts my mood—but such interruptions are part of the fabric of the island now, which this book must enact. After the drought of 1977 a concrete tank was built by the well to store its water, as was necessary for farmers with cattle nearby, and more recently a great circular storage tank of riveted metal sheets has been sited in a little hollow just below, to help cope with the hugely increased demand for tap-water throughout the island. These are the only ugly structures in this corner of the island, where natural and man-made beauty have had sanctuary for over a thousand years. Is it because we do not believe in miracles that we could not rise to stonework for the water of the miraculous salmon?

  Tobar Chiaráin, the saint’s well, is a little moss-lined hollow adorned by a splendour of Chrysosplenium or golden saxifrage, within a low U-shaped enclosure of huge limestone blocks, one of which is at least seven feet long and two-and-a-half feet square. It is still visited on the saint’s day, the ninth of September, and a small pile of pebbles for counting the “rounds” stands on a projecting stone at the open end of the enclosure; the pilgrim takes seven pebbles, walks around the outside of the enclosure saying the appropriate prayers, replaces one pebble, and so on till all are back in place.

  St. Ciarán mac an tSaor (i.e. son of the craftsman) is of course the founder of Clonmacnois, the great monastery set by a meander of the Shannon. His own biography, which dates from the ninth century, recounts many wonders concerning him, but it is only in the Life of St. Enda that we read of his novitiate in Aran:

  To this man of God came St. Ciarán, the son of a woodworker. He stayed for seven years, faithfully serving in the monastery threshing house. In those seven years, so diligently did he perform his duty as thresher that in the chaff-loft no stalk could be found which had its head. The walls of his threshing house on Aran remain to this day.

  Through miscopyings by Colgan, and misreadings compounded by forced interpretation by O’Donovan, this straightforward indication of the saint’s character has been contorted into a story of him threshing so vigorously that even the straw was left unfit for thatching, whence the island’s houses have had stone roofs ever since. Several other tales connect Ciarán with grain, including this, from the Lismore Lives of the Saints:

  This was the work that was entrusted to him, to grind at a quern. Then mighty marvels came to pass. When he went to grind at the quern it turned of itself, and did so continually; and they were the angels of the Lord who ground for his sake…. Once when he was in Aran drying corn in the kiln, Lonán the Left-handed was along with him, and he was always in opposition to Ciarán. And they saw a ship foundering before them. “It seems to me,” said Lonán, “that that ship will be drowned today, and that this kiln will be burnt by the strength of the wind.” “No,” said Ciarán, “that ship will be burned, and this kiln will be drowned with its corn.” And that saying was fulfilled, for the ship’s crew escaped, and the ship was cast ashore beside the kiln. The kiln caught fire and the ship was burned. But the wind blasted the kiln and its corn into the sea where it was drowned, in accordance with Ciarán’s words.

  When Ciarán was to make his profession of monastic vows, he wanted to remain under the protection of Enda in Aran. But Heaven signaled other intentions for him:

  After this St. Ciarán saw a vision which he took care to tell his master. One night he dreamed that he was near the bank of the great river which is called Shannon and that he saw a great tree bearing leaves and fruit, and the tree cast its shade over the whole island of Ireland. He recounted his dream to St. Enda, who said, “You are that fruitful tree, because you will be great before God and men. You wi
ll furnish the sweet fruit of your good work, and you will be held in honour throughout the whole of Ireland.” And St. Enda added, “Now go, then, and fulfilling the word of God, build a monastery there.”

  In another version, also given in the Life of St. Enda, the great tree grows in the middle of Aran, and Enda sees many men digging it up and carrying it through the air to the banks of the Shannon, where it takes root and becomes immensely high, its branches extending to the sea. Clearly, Aran was not to be the place of Ciarán’s resurrection; he was to go forth and found a monastery from which many other monasteries would sprout like the branches of a fruitful tree. On hearing this, all the monks, and Ciarán himself, wept bitterly. When his boat was ready for the journey, they all went down to the harbour to see him on his way, and returned to their monasteries in sadness.

  When, with the permission of the holy abbot, Enda, Ciarán had left the island, Enda saw, in spirit, all the angels who used to serve the food of the spiritual life to the saints of Aran leaving with St. Ciarán. This vision caused St. Enda to become sorrowful, thinking that the holy spirits would not return again. He gave himself to fasting and prayer beyond his strength, and the angel of the Lord appeared to him, saying, “Why are you sad, man of God, and why do you torment yourself so excessively?” Enda said, “The reason for my sadness is that all the angels have left us and gone with Ciarán.” The angel replied, “Since St. Ciarán is very dear to God, He has sent His angels to accompany him. So do not torment yourself any more, for they will return to you again. Therefore cancel your fast in the name of the Lord.”

  According to the Annals, Ciaran died in 545 at the age of thirty-three, only seven months after founding his church by the Shannon. That first humble building was probably of wood, for the tomb-shrine there now called St. Ciarán’s Church dates from some centuries later. His foundation prospered as Enda had foreseen, because it was sited at the natural crossroads of Ireland. The Shannon, the biggest river in Britain or Ireland, was an important route in itself, and near this point it was forded by the ancient east-west thoroughfare that followed the long glacial ridge of the Eiscir Riada across the central boglands. From its beginnings Clonmacnois had royal patronage. The prince who helped Ciarán set the posts of his church later became High King of Ireland; its famous Cross of the Scriptures may have been erected by another High King around 879, its cathedral contains the grave of the last High King, Roderick O’Connor, who died in 1198. For seven centuries, until it was sacked by the English in 1552, Clonmacnois was one of the most important pilgrimage centres of Ireland, celebrated throughout Europe. Its artwork—the hundreds of early cross-slabs, the richly carved high crosses, the illuminated manuscripts and the fantastically decorated “Crozier of the Abbots of Clonmacnois”—are still among Ireland’s cultural treasures. Such was the tree that we can imagine towering up from the rustling bushes and quiet meadows of Mainistir.

  AMONG THE THORNS

  Certain areas of Aran are so heavy with the presence of the past that to linger in them leaves one as enriched and as drained as can the contemplation of a work of art. The fields that tumble down the hillside west of Mainistir village have this quality, and also a faintly disquieting atmosphere of their own I have often tried to characterize more exactly than by the words that first present themselves: siógach, unheimlich, spooky. These fields are small, crooked, interlinked by gaps in odd sequences, full of little stone-ricks and the thicketed mounds of collapsed stone huts. The thresholds of the gaps are worn into hollows, the gullies are bridged here and there by stones thrown down so casually or so long ago that it is difficult to be sure they are not accidental assemblages. The age of such places is more palpable than are the many centuries archaeology attaches to certain identifiable combinations of stones—the chapels and beehive huts and ring-forts—for in fact all the stones here look not only as if they have been disposed and redisposed many times but as if their present order is very old. And since the land is less used than it was a couple of generations ago, it is true that these stones have not been disturbed for a long time; the one or two men I see making their familiar twice-daily way to the cow at milking-time have been doing so for fifty or seventy years, and their sons and grandsons will not be following them. Briars invade from neglected corners; the hazel bushes, in which one occasionally notices obliquely truncated stems where rods were cut years ago, are spreading out of the dells, for nobody comes for hazel-rods now. In fact no one apart from those old men visits these out-of-the-way corners at all. The stiles and stepping-stones that help them over the walls and clefts are so clearly intended only for the toe and heel of the men who made them that, when I use them in scrambling from field to field looking for clocháns or wild-flowers, I feel as if I had crept into someone’s house and am trying the armchairs, peeping into the books. This sense of intruding on a privacy makes one move quietly, furtively. On a silent summer afternoon, when one parts the bracken closing some tiny pathway, and suddenly a thousand bluebottles go up, one starts guiltily. Here one is in intimate contact with a world withdrawn into the past. Seeing it revealed thus in its obsessional finicky obsolete ways is touching, and at the same time illicitly exciting. If there is haunting here, it is not that some returned frequenter of these fields is peering into our time, but that I myself am trespassing back through gaps in walls of the past.

  This world protects itself with prickles, spikes, barbs. The Eochaill people’s land on the terraces running westwards from the old village of Mainistir is called An Sceach Mhór, the big thorn, probably from an old hawthorn under which a holy woman lies, a sleeping spiritual beauty. The brambles around St. Asurnaí’s grave and holy well, the inner sanctum of this thorny locality, are almost impenetrable, but the ruin of her little oratory nearby is welcoming, though few come there, as it is eremitically withdrawn from notice. A finger-post by the coast road directs one to it along a path that absolves one from insensitive intrusion. It leads first across a few fields or more accurately creagáin, patches of rock patched with grass, patches of grass patched with rock, and in spring splashed with primroses, celandines and daisies. Low blackthorn bushes lie along the walls, their dark, glossy twigs foaming with creamy blossom in April when they are still leafless. The hawthorns rooted in fissures of the pavement have been dwarfed by the prevailing wind into hummocks with their eastward rims spreading out on the ground; these limestone-warmed fringes flower earlier than the rest, so that the hunchbacked bushes trail lace-trimmed robes. Sharp eyes might notice that these grotesque perfumed exquisites sometimes wear tiny rings on their crooked fingers. Looking closely one sees that these are bands of minute brownish granules, the eggs of the lackey moth. When they hatch out the caterpillars spin themselves a communal web of silk that gradually envelopes several twigs. They take the sun on this web, twenty or thirty of them lying curved together in a velvet mat. After a shower, with a few raindrops glistening among their delicate blue-grey and orange stripes, the colony looks like a piece of barbaric jewelry, but when one bends to look at the gorgeous thing it stirs, breaks up, and creeps piecemeal into its foul tent.

  Farther up the hillside the bushes are higher, and in late summer are hung with heavy festoons of honeysuckle, each blossom a seduction of claret and oyster-satin. The path becomes almost a tunnel through the scented foliage where it climbs the first scarp. Look at the ground here: thousands of limpet-and winkle-shells are spilling out of it, detritus of long-gone generations’ ascetic and monotonous feasts. Such shell-middens are found all along the spring-line here. The narrow terrace above is what the islanders call sean-talamh, old land; fertile and well-watered, it never had to be reclaimed from the rock, or at least not in any period known to oral lore. The little oratory stands here, in the shelter of an ivy-covered cliff-face, above which are stonier reaches of the hillside.

  Teampall Asurnaí is tiny—just sixteen feet by twelve—craggily built, dumpy. Its side-walls are three feet thick and bulge like the sides of a boat. The gables stand to just above head-hei
ght; in the east one, above the altar, is the base of a narrow window-light, and at the south-east corner a projecting stone which would have supported the barge of the roof. The Office of Public Works, statutorily charged with the disenchantment of Ireland, has treated this chapel with a lighter hand than usual, and wild-flowers still flourish within and without. A plot of ground over a field-wall a few yards to the east, which used to be impregnably briary, has recently been cleared, revealing two prone cross-slabs and a broken quern-stone. To the west, in the next field, are the low remains of three-foot-thick walls outlining a rectangular building. The topmost stone of a window-light lies on one of these walls, which if it is from Teampall Asurnaí shows that it had a narrow slit window with an ogival point—fifteenth-century work, much later than the rest of the church. Under the cliff behind the church is a good spring. The cliff itself is full of interest. The gleaming, shadowy, face of the clay band from which the water oozes at the foot of the scarp is covered with golden saxifrage, as if with layer upon layer of burnished thumb-prints; this, and Tobar Chiaráin further east and under the same scarp, are virtually the only places in Aran I have seen the plant. A flight of small rough steps has been cut into the rock-face for bringing water up to the pastures above. Just to the west a natural recess in a bulge of the cliff has been closed up with stones to make a little sheep-fold; it is called Scailp Pháidín Uí Uiginn, Paddy Wiggins’ cleft, from a man who lived in it once after being thrown out of home by his wife. The wrinkled crag over it looks like a face, or an Arcimboldo painting of a cliff that looks like a face, a likeness of the disconsolate Wiggins himself perhaps.