Stones of Aran

by Tim Robinson

  The day before the ceremony I was sent down to Cill Mhuirbhigh to help Beartla freshen up the house. We swept and painted and laid linoleum; I condemned the rotting tea-chest on which his gas-ring stood, and fetched the similar but green-vinyl-covered tea-chest from our own kitchen. Beartla exhumed from an outhouse a large, peculiarly long-legged table his father had made, to serve as an altar; he tied a rope around it and carried it to the house on his shoulders, struggling over the back wall rather than bringing it round by the gate in view of the neighbours. In the middle of all this the priest’s big car drew up before the house; I had just time to swoosh the dust out of the back door and slap the green tea-chest into place before he was upon us. Everything passed muster; his only question to Beartla was as to who would be making the tea, and when he heard that it would be M, he looked taken aback for a moment, but raised no objection.

  When the rough work was done, M appeared at the door with a sentence that had caught her fancy in one of Séamus Ó Grianna’s Donegal-Irish novels; “An bhfuil rud ar bith le déanamh anseo ar fearr fhoireas lámh mná dó ná lámh fir? (“Is there anything to be done here better suited to a woman’s hand than a man’s?”) She prepared the breakfast table in “the room,” decked the altar, which was in the kitchen, with the stiff embroidered linen Beartla produced out of an ancestral coffer, polished up the two brass candlesticks, and laid out the ritual items according to Beartla’s directions—water to be blessed, in a plastic milk-can, a saucer of salt, two towels. The next day we were down there early in the morning, wrestling with the worn-out wicks of Beartla’s kerosene stoves, trying to take the chill off the house without filling it with fumes. Then the people started to arrive, M withdrew to the room, and I hopped over the back wall and wandered the crags with the dogs until it was all over. About twenty people attended, and one of the rascal lads whom Beartla often chased off his property materialized in spotless white as altar-boy. After Fr. Moran had given a brief homily in Irish he came into the room (flushing out M) to hear confessions; people went in and out at a great rate, she reported. Then he celebrated Mass with the close-packed congregation standing in the kitchen; there was only one chair, for an old lady from across the street. Everyone shook M’s hand as they filed out.

  Afterwards M served tea and the bread rolls she had made for the occasion to the priest and the curate, declining their invitation to sit down with them but standing with Beartla at the end of the table. The meal concluded the event with decent simple formality. Once the clergy had gone, Beartla and I fell on the remaining bread rolls. He was joyful and amazed; “If Anyone had told Me!” he kept saying, “that an English Woman! Would be serving breakfast to the Priest! In my House!”—and we were not less amazed and pleased.

  Later that morning Dara the postman came up the path to our door with more than the usual impetus. “Is it true that the missus was bean a’ tí at the Stations?” he asked as he handed me the letters. “It is!” I replied. “Well, it’s all over Cill Rónáin that you’re ‘turning’!” he said.

  No, we are not turning. But we are glad to feel that the Church’s monopoly of ceremony does not exclude our participation. Indeed we assert by our presence on such occasions, that Catholicism, that Christianity in general, is a dialect of a universal language. This is Aran’s view too. (One inquirer into our religious affiliation, when I told him we were atheists, looked troubled for a moment, and then said as if to comfort himself and us, “Ah well, it’s all the same God really.”) Of course there are difficulties in it, passages of the rites during which we just have to keep a low profile, not kneeling but not defiantly sitting back. I know that their religion has an eternity in pickle for such as us, but no islander has ever expressed disapproval of our stance. In fact the Aran woman who notes out of the corner of her eye how we slip into the back pew or stand just within the porch for the baptisms, weddings and funerals of those whose comings, pairings and goings concern us, probably murmurs a prayer that at the last we may be found, similarly discreetly, in heaven. And I thank her for her orisons.

  A FOOL AND HIS GOLD

  A hundred yards or so west of the chapel one leaves Eochaill village for Baile na Creige, the village of the crag—but only a native of one of the two villages, or an obsessed topophile, would know that fact, for the irregular scattering of dwellings along the roadside gives no indication of a boundary. Among the cottages of Baile na Creige is one, long reduced to the status of outhouse or “store,” which was formerly that palace of fantasy, the home of Micilín Sarah. The window at the back of it, through which the fairies used to come and go, is blocked with stones. Stains visible on its gable-wall are the remains of inscriptions daubed by the lads who used to play handball there: one in Irish, “Go mbeannaí Dia de Valera agus a gComrádaithe” meaning “God bless de Valera and his comrades,” and one in English, “Come and consult the famous alchemist.” Micilín the cliffman, crippled with cramps from nights on the spray-souzed ledges, who swore to widow the raven, and was brought to court on the evidence of the beaks and legs of eleven score cliff-birds found around his cottage, has been met with in Pilgrimage, and I now turn to his inland activities, which were very various. He was not only republican patriot and alchemist, but packman, selling needles and threads around the villages, and ragman, collecting big sacks of rags to ship to Galway, and medicine man, having learned about herbs, it was said, from Red Indians during a spell in the States; also cobbler, dog-fancier and archaeologist, and in virtue of this multiplicity of minor roles, “a sort of a king in Baile na Creige.” His mother’s maiden name was Gillan; she and her brother came from Leitrim and she married a Mullen. She must have been a more remarkable person than her husband since it is her Christian name rather than his that is preserved in the familiar name of their son, but I have only heard one odd little tale about her. The blacksmith of Oatquarter was digging in a little field one day, when he overheard someone saying “Forus, forus” (the word used for calling pigs). Looking over the wall, he found Sarah in the act of luring his pigs out onto the road. He jumped over the wall and sent her on her way with his spade, for it seems she was addicted to denouncing people to the police for letting their animals stray on the King’s highroad.

  Micilín himself is profusely remembered, and his house was the gathering-place of talkers and listeners. He had “a sort of imagination on him” that the sparkling bits in granite boulders were diamonds, and used to try to chip them out. He would show visitors gold and fossils and radium in the stones he had brought back to his cottage; “I suppose there’s but half an ounce of radium in the world,” said my Baile na Creige historian (who himself dated from the age of that dated metal), “but Micilín Sarah thought he had some radium.” He also treasured old coins worn faceless; “That’s Queen Elizabeth’s coin, a bhuachaill!” he would say, a blackish disc in his palm. (He used to say “a bhuachaill,” “my boy,” to everyone; he would have said it to the King of England, I am told.) Once he showed such a coin to a group of Dublin girls who had come to giggle at the famous alchemist; one of them turned and picked an old shoe off the dunghill, saying “I wonder now, is this Queen Elizabeth’s shoe?,” and then fled from under his curses.

  Royalty was much in his republican mind. Having eaten a peculiar fish he’d caught one day—perhaps it was a young porpoise—he pushed back his chair and said to the children who used to gather in his cottage, “Well, I have my dinner eaten, and a nourishing dinner it was. But if it was known of, it would cost me dear, for the sturgeon is the property of the Royal Family and every one that’s caught must be sent over to them!” Adults gathered around him too, expecting to be amazed. Once he drank off a half-pint mug of seal-oil, just to amaze old Dr. O’Brien. The fairies were his regular visitors, coming in through the back window to eat their meals at his table while he sat by the fire—and beautiful women among them, according to Micilín himself. And if he saw them going out leaving the dishes in a mess, he would swear at them and tell them to come back and clear up, which th
ey would do, for it seems fairies are frightened by big oaths.

  Over my years in Aran I noted down much hearsay of the famous alchemist, and often wondered why I was hoarding it. Even now, having chipped these few glinting facets out of the inert lumps, I catch the cryptic mica scraps exchanging winks over my own alchemical delusions—that the old shoe on the dunghill can be turned by the furnace-breath of my assertion into the shoe of the crazy queen-mother of the craggy village, and that those crooked pennies can be brightened, dated and rendered unto the bent and salt-blackened little king whose image they bear. Sometimes I fear that all the stones of Aran do not equal one flower-carved finial of Venice, or an uneven paving-stone in San Marco. Perhaps there is nothing here but dull limestone and lumpy granite, foolish reminiscences of ridiculous old men, faded writings, blocked-up windows, a marginal and ineffectual history that does not feed the present, drossy stuff that chokes my flame.

  IN SEARCH OF WASTED TIME

  On the plateau above the villages west of the chapel, hidden from them by the skyline as if thrust to the back of their collective mind, is an area of many obscure ruins called Baile na mBocht or Baile na Sean, the settlement of the poor, or of the old. The latter name reflects or perhaps suggested an idea I heard from an Eochaill lady, that people too old to be of use around the house were packed off up there to live in stone huts and eat shellfish, in the hard old times. The other name is old; in the form “Balleneboght” it occurs in an inquisition of 1581, in which it seems to denote a much larger portion of the island than it does today, and to include “Monasterconnaght,” i.e. Mainistir. Unfortunately there is a logical contradiction in the specification of these lands, making it impossible to equate some of them with today’s territorial divisions. Consider these three propositions:

  The land of Balleneboght and Monasterconnaght meares the sea on the South and North, on the East the land of Balleconnell and on the West Creagherie.

  Balleconnell adjoins Creaghcappell on the South, Ballemegan on the East, Cloghan-eprior on the West and Killenan on the North.

  Ochill adjoins Killenan on the South, the sea on the North, Monasterconnaght on the East and Onaght on the West.

  The proof of their mutual inconsistency is left to the reader, as the textbooks say. This is not the only cul-de-sac one gets into, in exploring Baile na mBocht.

  In fact this central plateau must have been populous and productive, at some unknown but probably pre-medieval period (the ruins, mainly collapsed clocháin or beehive huts, are not of types that can be dated by inspection, and have not been examined in this era of radio-carbon dating), but its remains are so decrepit, overthrown and half-buried as to accord with the suggestion in its names of callous rejection and neglect. Like the other stretches of Na Craga, it is a peculiar and disconcerting terrain, unfrequented for most of the year, monotonous and sometimes depressing especially on a dull day, silent except for the rattling alarm of the stonechats or the occasional melancholy “weep-weep” of a lapwing. The dolomitized limestone of these higher strata supports a dry, grudging, heathy pasture used as winterage, minutely subdivided by walls, quite unlike the open acres of bare pavement on the lower terraces. The plateau tilts slightly southwards to the cliff-tops, beyond which the sea-horizon stands paradoxically tall; nothing is to be seen in any other direction but vistas of walls, terminated by bare rigid skylines. Because the Ice Age has gouged channels across the plateau along the jointing of the rock, many of the little fields are narrow rectangular gullies, hard to climb in and out of over the walls perched unstably along their steep flanks. Everywhere are old structures reduced to stone-heaps by the gravity of centuries.

  The ruins of Baile na Sean were first recorded by Aran’s antiquarian rector the Rev. William Kilbride, who showed some of them to a visiting geologist, George Henry Kinahan, in 1866; Kinahan was a man of many interests, including archaeology, and he read an account of Baile na Sean to the Royal Irish Academy in December of that year. As his diary shows that he only spent one day or part of it “out with Kilbride looking up Cloughauns,” and later corresponded with him on the topic, the detail of his account, which lists thirty-one monuments or groups of monuments, is clearly due to Kilbride’s pertinacity. In Kinahan’s paper the monuments are sorted into various categories, some of them familiar to archaeologists, such as “doons,” “cahers” and “cloghauns,” and others tending from the ambiguous to the bizarre: “cnocáns,” “fosleacs” and “ointigh.” These latter are probably terms Kilbride acquired from local Irish-speakers. The literal meaning of cnocán is a hillock, but Kinahan explains that he is applying the term to “beehive stone cells covered with clay.” The implied distinction between a cloghaun and a cnocán then is not obvious to the eye when the thing has lain in ruins with brambles growing through it for centuries. A “fosleac” is, he says, a cell of flagstones set on edge and roofed with flags; the word obviously involves the Irish leac, flagstone, but I haven’t found it in the dictionaries or in today’s Aran Irish. One of his fosleacs he says could more accurately be called a “ligaitreabh,” which in a later paper he defined as a fosleac with its cover-stone supported on two or more pillars, the spaces between which are built up by small stones. The word clearly derives from liag, pillar-stone, and áitreabh, habitation, and Kinahan seems to have regarded all these structures as habitation-sites; in fact, though, his “ligaitreabh” is a megalithic tomb. The most recalcitrant of these terms is “ointigh,” meaning, according to Kinahan, a stone hut not having an arched roof. No such word is known to the Irish language, but a later researcher of Baile na Sean, John Goulden, has solved the mystery: it is áit-tigh, house-site, pronounced in the nasal Corrúch accent. The whole terminology is as ruinacious as Baile na Sean itself, but it has its savour, for the amateur of ruins.

  Goulden was a high-school teacher and occasional archaeologist with some experience of excavation. Under licence from the Commissioners of Public Works he investigated three sites in the summers of 1953–5, depositing minor finds with the National Museum, but never publishing the results of his excavations. His diaries, photographs and preliminary reports have recently been examined by Prof. Waddell of University College Galway. Goulden’s site “Oghil I” was one of Kinahan’s “ruined cnocáns,” an oval, grass-grown cairn with mounds of stone at either end and a pile of bigger blocks in the middle, about fifteen metres long and with a maximum height of 1.2 metres. Removal of heaps of broken stone mixed with chopped and broken bones and quantities of seashells revealed a roughly flagged floor bounded by a low wall, and some small cist-like structures of standing-stones, all so ruinous that the site’s function remained uncertain. The only artifacts were two limestone discs 62 and 45 mm across, and a bit of deer-antler with perforations through it. Oghil II was more informative. This was another of Kinahan’s ruined cnocáns, a mound with a depression in the middle like the last, crossed by a recent field-wall. Excavation revealed the lower levels of what Goulden interpreted as a circular stone hut about 6.4 m across inside, its wall faced internally and externally with masonry and filled with rubble, and within it a smaller and more recent hut, with a lintelled door so low it would have had to be entered on all fours. Apart from the usual limpet-shells and animal-bones he found a perforated stone of the type used as spindle-whorls, a double “bullaun” (a stone with hollows used as mortars), a stone axe and a stone hammer, and, according to a report in the Irish Times, “the small shells which are always found attached to the dileasc and which convinced him that the islanders had been deriving comfort from the soothing weed for many centuries.”

  Finally Goulden investigated what Kinahan had described as “a group of three mounds, which appear to be the relics of a compound Cnocán.” By degrees a habitation-site appeared from under the piled debris, consisting of a circular room 7 m across inside, with a narrow lintelled entrance only 60 cm high to the west, and a larger east entrance, having two much smaller circular huts adjoining it on either side, from which a paved way ran eastwards for about 10
m. A large triangular area had been removed from the rock floor of the big room, and reflagged; Goulden considered this to have been the basis of a tripod supporting a thatched roof. The smaller chambers, he thought, had had corbelled stone roofs, and in one of them were found two sandstone rotary quern-tops, which he thought might have been used to hold the pivots of a door. Other finds included some shards perhaps from a small tub-shaped pot, some fragments of iron, large pebbles used for pounding, half a small lignite or jet ring, part of a bone knife-handle, a fragment of polished stone axe-head, etc. Goulden concluded that these houses dated from the Iron Age, and nothing among the surviving finds proves him wrong; however, techniques now available to researchers could give a different answer.

  So much for old-fashioned archaeology, in its mode of rendering dust to dust. In search of other perspectives, I persuaded Seán Powell of Baile na Creige to show me round the area. Seán had been one of those employed by Goulden on his excavations; he is the old cliffman I quoted in Pilgrimage. A short thickset man with one sharp and one opaque eye, he was a meticulous guide, and would permit no divergences from his preplanned route and his sequence of anecdotes. We set off up Bóithrín Bhaile na mBocht, which starts in Seán’s backyard and comes to a stop five hundred yards up the hillside. Two fields to the east of it was the first site he wanted to show me: Garraí Joe, Joe’s garden. It was roughly circular, about thirty paces across, and with thick irregular masses of masonry here and there about its margins. Seán had shown this field to Goulden and told him that it was once a stony crag which Joe had been given, long ago, to make a potato-garden for himself; over three years he had picked so many stones off it, piling them up into huge walls around it, that the delighted owner took it back and gave him another stony field to start on. “Nonsense!” Goulden had said; “This is an old dún!” Indeed, whatever about the historicity of Joe—and one pictures him at his Sisyphean labours yet—Goulden was right; this is the remains of a substantial ring-fort, and it is surprising that neither the Ordnance Survey nor Kilbride and Kinahan had recorded it. One area of it, according to Seán, is “thick with copper pins,” but he will permit no digging; it seems, like many such sites, this place is not quite canny. Seán’s son Antoine tells me that Seán saw a rabbit there on the day of Antoine’s birth, and again when the child was very ill. Of course rabbits are to be seen in most places in Aran on most days, but the fact that these rabbits were remembered shows that, if not exactly in the semantic field, they were hopping around its margins.