Stones of Aran

by Tim Robinson

  When O’Donovan saw this chapel in 1839, there was “a small apartment adjoining the east gable called St. Soorney’s Bed, in which people sleep expecting to be cured of diseases, and about 20 paces to the east … a holy well called Bullaun na Surnaighe.” However there is little trace of the apartment now, and whatever rites took place here have long been neglected. The bullán, presumably one of those stones with a hollow originally used as mortars, often found near monastic sites and regarded as holy wells, must have been in the little grave plot. But the Bullán Asurnaí and Leaba Asurnaí known to the villagers of today are on the terrace below the chapel, about a hundred yards away to the northwest. From above it is easy to see a hawthorn tree taller than the rest which marks the spot, but it is still not easy to get there, for the obsessively detailed subdivision of the land makes every traverse into a succession of moves on a Lewis Carroll chess board, and rampant growth turns every fence into a quandary. A faint path runs down the hill on the further side of the next field-wall west of the sheep-pen, crossing the low, mounded remains of walls much more ancient even than the ivy-knotted antiquities that serve today, and ends in a field where a large glacial boulder sits on a little hummock. The well and the “bed” or grave are within a few yards of this landmark, and yet one may fail to find either, for the place has nodded off in a torpor of neglect. Massive moss-covered walls and heaps of stone, the remains of another wall long-removed, have been welded together by the overgrowth into a little oval precinct around the grave, the entrance to which, disguised by nettles, is in the south-east corner of the next field to the west. The grave is obliterated by thorns (as de Sade wanted his to be), and is indicated only by a slim finger of stone sticking up through the brambles, about three feet high, with the faintest suggestion of a cross rubbed into one face. Although it has not been the object of a turas or pilgrimage for generations now, with imagination one can make out the trodden path of the “rounds” about the knot of briars. Another gap in the circle of mouldering stone opens westwards into a small pasture, and the “well,” a granite bullaun-stone usually holding a bit of rainwater, lies half hidden by leafage on the left of this entrance. Above it is the big thorntree, bent like an old woman; perhaps this is not the original holy bush, which the 1898 map marks a little further west, but simply the oldest surviving tree in the vicinity, and therefore inheritor of the title.

  The stories I have collected about this fane are various, odd, and tantalizing. The bullaun of course never goes dry even in the droughtiest weather. People from Connemara used to come here to be baptized—“but that was back in the pagan times.” The field by the bullaun has good soil—it is under a scarp with a clay-band at its foot—but it has never been dug; its owner once decided to set potatoes in it, and came with a load of seaweed on his horse, but the horse refused to carry it into the field. Finally (and this is true; I heard it in Evelyn’s shop in Eochaill village), somewhere the cult of St. Asurnaí still lives, for in 1978 a young Australian came enquiring for the place, spent a day trying to find it and got terribly scratched, but failed to obtain what he had been told to bring home, two pounds of thorns from St. Asurnaí’s bush.

  What recluse lies here, though, after what purifying or stultifying life? St. Asurnaí is supposed to be the nun to whom a church is dedicated at Drumacoo in south Galway, but according to Fr. Killeen the latter’s right name was Sarnait. O’Donovan suggests the church is actually called Teampall na Surnaighe, the church of the vigils. In Archbishop O’Cadhla’s list of Aran churches we have:

  The church called Tempull-Assurnuidhe, which is said to be dedicated to St. Assurnidhe (or, perhaps, Esserninus), and this church is held in the greatest veneration among the islanders.

  Esserninus was one of St. Patrick’s bishops sent to Ireland in 438, long before the foundation of Cill Éinne, and nothing connects him with Aran. If the matter was obscure when the archbishop wrote three hundred and fifty years ago, it seems likely to remain so. I will scratch myself no longer on the thorny question.

  Turning away from the saint’s grave, my eyes adjusted to shadows, I look deeper into the bushes, searching under them for the modest heaven of flowers to be found on the dark earth: the damp lilac silk tags of wood-sorrel in summer, or sanicle with its little spherical clouds of minute flowers like puffs of hoar-frost; in the very early days of spring, often nothing but celandines. In such a place I once saw a single yellow celandine blossom, its eight glossy petals sharply separate and spread as if it were straining to grasp as much definition for itself as possible out of its penumbral bower. It hypnotized my memory, so that I had to return the next day with a camera. But then I saw that the dim perspective of twigs I was looking through was as precise in its enmeshed tonalities and interpenetrating articulations as the star of hermetic knowledge shining in its depths. No camera could encompass this microcosm, and I came away with renewed respect for the eye, leaving the flower to the perverse purity of self-perfection.

  LIGHTS IN THE DARKNESS

  In the days when the only chapel in the island was at Eochaill, it would have been natural for funeral processions coming up the long rise from Cill Rónáin to pause at the top while the men carrying the coffin got their breath back, and no doubt mourners used these moments of rest to pile up little memorial cairns on the crags by the road. That, I imagine, is the reason why there are four of the well-built and lettered cenotaphs I have described, which probably developed out of the humble analphabet cairns, spaced out along the roadside on the right just beyond the brow of the hill. Because the ground slopes away behind them to the north shore, these tall square pillars, rigidly formal and surmounted by crosses, stand dramatically against the vast vague gulf of air rimmed on the far side by the Connemara skyline. Their inscriptions suggest that all four were built between 1863 and 1876, but on one of them is a plaque commemorating a Bridget Dirrane who died in 1811, the earliest date to occur on any of the roadside cenotaphs. Since the workmanship of this plaque is much more skilled and sophisticated than that of any other, I think it must have been imported, and perhaps it was exhibited elsewhere before being incorporated in this monument erected to commemorate a Dirrane of a later generation. On another of these four pillars, an immeasurably more ancient creature has been accidentally memorialized: a brachiopod, whose fossil shell, embedded in one of the plaques, gleams like a crescent moon in the grey limestone. This ghostly sign, positioned like a footnote-mark at the end of the inscription, refers one to the superstitious tremors these monuments used to cause in passers-by on the deserted road at night, aftershocks of which one or two islanders tell me they still feel, even though there are now a few houses nearby, and electric light showing in windows.

  A little further west, there was worse to fear than ghosts. Where the road slants up a little scarp, there is a spring among the hawthorn bushes in the hollow by it, called Tobar na nAdhairc, the well of the horns. A lady of Eochaill whom I met on the road by the well told me, euphemistically, that “His Excellency” once put up his head there. Funnily enough, while she was speaking, a brimstone butterfly arose from the bushes hiding the mouth of the pit, distracting me and indeed tempting me into a little sin of egotism, for it was, I believe, the first of this species to be recorded from Aran.

  The inextinguishable desire to see and be seen has assembled miscellaneous structures, now all in ruins, around the highest point of the island (a modest 406 feet above sea-level), south of Eochaill village. From the main road just beyond the well a boreen follows the line of sight up towards three of them that show on the skyline: the drab, flat-topped cylinder of a lighthouse, next to it a square signal-tower, and to the east the slouching coil of a great stone cashel. A fourth is hidden from below and in fact can hardly be seen until one is standing on it. When I first came across this last, obscured by low heathy growth in a field on the left of the boreen, I became excited, and started footing out what appeared to be the foundations of a rectangular building with labyrinthine corridors and cells, and traces of
a small oval enclosure and a crooked wall just outside it to the south. Then the incomprehensible interior suddenly spelled out the word EIRE, and the curves outside it formed the numerals 50 below it, as if the level ground had swung up to present itself like a placard before my eyes. Later I learned that this sky-sign was built during what is known (in the bit of Ireland labelled Éire) as “The Emergency,” to proclaim the neutral territory to stray aircraft. Since then I have come across a similar sign with the number 51, on the island of Leitir Mealláin in south Connemara. The naval reservists of the Coastwatching Service who kept up the whitewash on this peaceable message had “a little houseen” nearby, I am told; I could find no trace of it, but no doubt it was like the lookout-post partially surviving on Leitir Mealláin: a concrete box consisting of a small three-windowed bay with just enough of a room attached to accommodate a fireplace and a door—a snug, with Atlantic view. There are in fact about a hundred of these lookout-posts, each identified by its number; the first is at Dublin and the sequence runs clockwise round the coast to Donegal. Apparently when the existence of these signs was first reported by British aircrews it was thought that the mysterious numbers indicated radio frequencies, and Winston Churchill spoke angrily of Mr. de Valera’s treacherous communications with the Hun.

  The dead lighthouse, together with its roofless single-storey living quarters and the old signal-tower, is surrounded by a high wall in which a rusty iron gate opens onto the boreen. It was built in 1818, by a man called Yorke, who it seems married the daughter of the family, Wiggins, he lodged with in Aran, later set up in business on the Long Walk in Galway, and owned two or three ships trading to Boston, which in their day carried a number of Aran emigrants to America. Yorke himself is now forgotten in Aran (those details of his life were noted in a copy of the census of 1821 by an amateur historian of Cill Rónáin, Colie Folan, two generations ago), but the gigantic stallion he brought in to cart blocks of limestone up to the site—they say it could drag a load of one ton—so impressed the islanders and their little Connemara ponies that “Stail Yorke” is still a byword for strength here.

  The other workers on this project have their memorial in the writings of Petrie:

  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. Their unsuspicious confidence and ready hospitality were frequently taken advantage of and abused, and their interesting qualities have consequently been in some degree diminished. Till that time robbery of any kind was wholly unknown in the island…. Several petty thefts have occurred, and though they have uniformly been attributed by the islanders to the strangers lately settled among them, it would perhaps be rash to conclude that they themselves have hitherto wholly escaped the vicious contagion.

  And since Inis Oírr had long lost its innocence through proximity to the Clare coast, according to Petrie, only Inis Meáin still preserved its “delightful pristine purity.” J.M. Synge would have read this passage in his youth, and it probably helped to determine his preference for Inis Meáin—and so perhaps we owe the most luminous of Aran books to the darkening of Aran by its lighthouse eighty years earlier.

  It was not only mainland viciousness but the mainland language that was brought in by the lighthouse builders. An absurd little anecdote from this period of immixture of English is still current. Once when the lighthouse roof was being repaired, the overseer set an islander called Conneely to melting the tar in a big cauldron over a fire. Conneely soon wandered off, leaving another man to keep an eye on the tar, and when he came back the cauldron was ablaze. As the two islanders were considering this phenomenon the overseer ran up, yelling “Quench it, Conneely!” Conneely’s reply was, “Whoever las it, let he múch it!” (whoever lit it, let he quench it)—a formula that has the status of a classical tag on the island to this day.

  In its time, according to Lewis’s Topographical Dictionary of 1837, the lighthouse exhibited “a bright revolving light from twenty-one reflectors, which attains its greatest magnitude every three minutes and may be seen from all points at a distance of twenty-eight nautical miles, in clear weather.” O’Donovan in his Ordnance Survey letters of 1839 ran amock over it: “The Aran lighthouse shed such a stream of light as astonished me. It is a revolving light, and while it remains in view it looks like a meteor. It sheds such a flood of radiant light upon the welkin, the sea, and the eyes of the spectators, as apparently to put out the nocturnal lamps blazing in the firmament (as a tasteless poet would say).” But as a lighthouse rather than as a spectacle it was never satisfactory; it gave no indication of the length of the island chain, and being a mile inland it was invisible to boats near the tall cliffs to the south. In 1857 it was superseded by the present North and South Aran lights. Dilapidation soon followed, no doubt. At the height of the Land War controversies in 1880 Thompson accused the villagers of Eochaill and Oatquarter of taking stones from the lighthouse, and fined them five shillings in the pound on the rateable values of their holdings. The curate, the Rev. Daniel McLoughlin, denounced the agent for this as “a public, infamous and scandalous liar.” On the other hand, in Pat Mullen’s Hero Breed we are told that the windows of the hero’s cottage had been stolen from the buildings around the lighthouse. My judgement is that, while the curate had right on his side, the agent had the facts on his. Nevertheless, William Thompson will find no forgiveness in my book, for if he acted according to his lights, like Matthew Arnold’s philistines, he did not take sufficient care that his lights were not of darkness.

  Nowadays all has long been derelict on the hilltop. The staircase leading up through the lower three levels of the lighthouse has been ripped out, and the octagonal light-chamber stares blindly around the island. But one memento of its history, which I was told about when I lived on Aran but could never locate, has since come to light; on a recent visit I saw that someone has picked out in whitewash the inscription on a stone in the west wall of the boreen, just twenty yards up from the road: Lt RW—and below that a date of which only the last numeral, a “9,” is legible, and which must be 1819. In Pilgrimage I looked into the life of Robert Wilson, half-pay Lieutenant of Marines and lighthouse keeper, and, having then projected this man onto the field of my imagination, it was almost disconcerting to find he had impressed himself so definitely upon reality; I felt an interior rotation, like that of the plan of the sky-sign turning itself into a word, as Wilson’s plane of existence turned to accommodate this material trace.

  Wilson and his wife and daughters, and the Under Lightkeeper Richard Kelly, lived in the old signal-tower next to the lighthouse, according to the census of 1821, so perhaps the single-storey living-quarters had not yet been built. Despite its medieval appearance this tower dates only from the invasion scares of the Napoleonic wars; it had been completed in 1805, the year of the Battle of Trafalgar. During the earlier war with the French Republic, the appearance of their fleet off Bantry Bay in 1796 and General Humbert’s landing at Killala in 1798 had shown the Government that the west of Ireland was the Kingdom’s naked back, and when war was renewed in 1803 it was realized that the advance guard of any French force landing in Galway Bay could be bombarding Dublin within six days. So a grand scheme of signal-towers, martello towers and gun batteries was drawn up, and in 1804–5 fifty or so signal-towers were in construction, lining the coast from the Pigeon House at Dublin south and west and north again, to Malin Head in Donegal. Paul Kerrigan, a historian of military architecture, succinctly describes the operation of these towers:

  At each station the signal mast was set up close to the tower; it consisted of a ship’s topmast of fifty feet, with a cap and crosstrees to secure the thirty foot flagstaff above, while below the crosstrees was a thirty foot long gaff or inclined spar. A similar arrangement can be seen at naval establishments and yacht clubs today. Signals were made by showing the Union Flag, a blue pendant or long triangular flag, and four black balls (hoops c
overed with canvas) in various combinations on the flagstaff and gaff; communication was with ships of the Royal Navy offshore and between adjacent signal stations along the coast.

  When Wellington made a tour of inspection of coastal defences in the south and west in 1806, he noted that one of the Kerry towers was superfluous as its neighbours on either side could see each other’s lights; so it seems that lights were used for signalling by night. The Aran tower too would have been able to exchange signals with quite a number of others: one at Hag’s Head in Clare, another on the highest point of Inis Oírr, and three more spaced out along the south Connemara coast, at Ceann Gúlaim or Golam Head, Cnoc an Choillín near Carna, and Slyne Head. The towers were all of a standard pattern, thirteen or fifteen feet square inside, about thirty-four feet high, with two stories, the walls sometimes slated against the weather. Their defensive features give them an antique look: the door, in the upper storey, was reached by a small ladder that could be quickly hauled up (as in the monastic round towers), with a bartizan—a balcony supported on corbels with an open floor through which assailants could be shot at—above it, and other bartizans at the rear corners to protect the side and back walls. Such a tower could defy any attack short of bombardment with cannon. Defence of the towers seems to have been in the hands of a body called the Sea Fencibles, a naval reserve of fishermen and merchant seamen set up in 1803, who manned hired vessels fitted out with 18-pounder guns and carronades and were stationed at such likely invasion sites as Killala, Galway Bay and the Shannon estuary. The Lord Lieutenant’s reports to London show some anxieties about the loyalty of these volunteers, who might well have sided with any French expeditionary force and turned their guns against the English authorities. One imagines that the signal crews—perhaps just a midshipman and a couple of signalmen—had uneasy nights in such towers as this in isolated and disaffected Aran, listening to the wind battering at the door and shrieking around the parapets. After only a few years most of the towers were left unmanned, and in 1809 the Government announced that those from Eochaill to Horn Head in Donegal were to be abandoned. After its second brief life as housing for the lightkeepers, the Eochaill tower followed the lighthouse into dereliction, and now it is a mere shell, its floors and ceilings gone. Patches of blueish weather-slating cling to its walls like fish-scales here and there.