Stones of Aran

by Tim Robinson

  From Garraí Joe I could see some interesting-looking stone slabs sticking up in a field further up the hill, but Seán would not be diverted from the route; they marked a graveyard, he said, and we would return to them later on. So we crossed a few field-walls westwards and then turned up a narrow bramble-choked path to the crest of the plateau. Here we joined the main boreen of Baile na Creige, which runs from just west of Seán’s house, right over the island to within a few hundred yards of the Atlantic cliffs. Originally the Powells had the land on one side of it, Seán explained, while the other side belonged to the Mullenses. It had been agreed between the two families that they would each give up a narrow strip of their territory for the purpose of building this boreen along their common boundary, and the Powells had carried out their side of the bargain by building half the width of the boreen plus its eastern wall, but the Mullens did not reciprocate, and so for a long time there was a half-boreen running up the hill. Later on the present wide track was built under some relief-work scheme, but it is still called Bóithrín na bPóil, not Bóithrín Bhaile na Creige. We went another hundred yards southwards along this track, and then eastward across half a dozen walls, ending up in a field largely occupied by two broad mounds: Goulden’s Oghil III. In the eastern mound, aided by Seán’s energetic indications, I could make out suggestions of the main enclosure, the two little corbelled chambers off it (which had collapsed when the material filling them had been pulled out, according to Seán—one of those little setbacks traditionally passed over in silence by excavators’ reports), and the paved pathway going westwards to the other mound, which he said was made of nothing but periwinkle-shells. Everything had been put back after the dig, and the quern-stones had been left on the site.

  Seán remembered vividly one incident from this dig. He had found a silver ring of wire—a bit thicker than this, he said, picking up a straw to show me—that was twisted like a corkscrew. Goulden was examining a stone with a hole through it at the time, but when Seán called out “Attention!” and held up the ring, Goulden got so excited he threw away the stone, and afterwards searched for it in vain. Goulden then lectured the labourers for an hour and a half on the find, saying that as a piece of silver they would get maybe £5 for it from the bank or a jewellers,” but that in fact it was worth £2000 and he was going to give it to the Museum, which Seán thinks he did. But it is not among the objects deposited with the National Museum, nor does it figure in Goulden’s report. So, did the “village of the poor” have more riches than it has been credited with, or has it somehow been put upon again? Truth-values scutter off like rabbits in the undergrowth from such anecdotes. The most likely solution of the puzzle is that the object was a cheap modern reproduction of a silver torc and had been planted by one of the more knowing participants in the dig. The “salting” of digs is a well-established way of livening-up the science of archaeology. I have been told of one case in which the intended saltee was an eminent professor, and such was the quality of his excavation that he never found the hidden object. Of course this may just go to show that not only does the born archaeologist have a sixth sense guiding the trowel to the significant find, but a seventh to divert it from what should not be found.

  On the way down the hill again Seán took me to the “graveyard”—an irregular structure about seven feet long and two or three across, aligned east-west, of rough slab-like stones set on edge. Goulden had told them that it was a grave, said Seán, and they had not believed him because they thought that “you couldn’t have buried a fly on that creig!” But one day when Goulden was away in Inis Meáin a couple of the workers took their picks over to it for a private dig. To their surprise they were able to root stones out of its floor down to arm’s-length; then they came to a cross-stone they couldn’t shift, and piled everything back so that Goulden wouldn’t know. In fact this monument—one of Kinahan’s “fosleacs”—might be some sort of cist grave.

  Some time after this conducted tour I spent a few afternoons exploring Baile na Sean by myself. In an early draft for this chapter of my book I recorded the fruits of those September hours. As examples:

  Three hundred yards further along the boreen is a very short branch to the west, and in the third field counting west from the end of this are the remains of a rectangular and a circular clochán, very ruinous …

  and:

  Two fields south of the above is a twelve-foot-high heap of stone topped by a tall growth of ivy, that looks from a distance like a bit of a ring-fort. However it seems to be the result of energetic clearance of a little field and the piling up of stone from a ruined clochán, of which some corbelling can be made out to the north-west…

  There are several pages of such diligent plod, arranged into two itineraries, the first taking one up “Bóithrín Denny” from the chapel in Eochaill to the boreen that runs along the spine of the island, and back by Bóithrín na bPóil, and the second following the boreen up the hill south of the medieval chapel in Corrúch and then by ramifying narrow paths west and north again, both with numerous excursions into the interiors of these loops. No coherent image of the place emerges from this dry stuff, nothing that explains what I thought I was at—playing the Schliemann of a dwarfish Troy, perhaps. Why did I spend so much time interrogating this amnesiac rubble? It may be of some help to future researchers that I have pinpointed all Kinahan’s sites on the six-inch OS map, as his own article provides only a rather out-of-scale sketch-map by Kilbride; and I have added another dozen or so unidentifiable ruins to Kinahan’s tally, which I am told were the despair of the field-workers on the Galway Archaeological Survey when they came to the islands a year or two later (“Oh no, not another of Tim Robinson’s cnocáns!”), because they had to go and find all these featureless hummocks among the hundreds of hummocky fields, and measure them up and write reports on them. A few of the sites of Baile na Sean are worth individual description, and I can thread those into the weave of this book somewhere, but they are poor pickings from those hours of scrambling over tottering walls and thorny hollows. Again I follow my own footfalls:

  … But usually, when one is nearly exhausted by the endless succession of obstacles and pitfalls, one is heartened by finding a rarity—such as a frog-orchid, or some more than usually odd conjunction of old stones, or a family of plate-sized horse-mushrooms to take home for dinner.

  Crumbs of comfort, scraps brought by ravens to the hermit Paul in the desert! The wearisomeness of this chill Thebaid was not only due to its countless grey fields and proliferating walls and vacuous ruins, but also to the crushing weight of nothingness above it, the harsh empty birdless blue skies of those long afternoons. The light was nullifyingly even, reducing the mysteries of the past to tedious puzzles. An old, poor, place, it seemed, all grappled down into meaninglessness by the briars. Nothing stands, from the life of the people who crept in and out of those little huts and comforted themselves with a chew of sweet sea-weed, and whose one silver treasure was a delusion. I wasted my time there.

  Coming down disconsolate from Baile na Sean after the last of these explorations, I stopped to talk to one of the wilder-looking and more retiring islanders, a man I never met on the roads, who was cutting down brambles in a field that held more stone than grass. I leaned over the wall near where he was kneeling to drag at a tangle of briars with his great scythe, and asked him in Irish about a certain ruin that, Seán had told me, was once a chapel. He shuffled himself around on his knees to look in the direction I was pointing, and shook his head in silence; it seemed to take him a minute to collect the powers of speech that had wandered off into his solitude, and then it was as if he had never heard of the place. After a desultory conversation I left him, wondering if I had made myself comprehensible. From further down I glanced back. Joe (it wasn’t Joe, of course, but in the low perspectives of bramble-arches it might as well have been he) was still kneeling there, staring up the hillside in the direction I had indicated, a dark knot in a faded tapestry.

  That evening I sudd
enly got sick—perhaps it was just eye-strain, from locating myself again and again in the lattice of field-walls on the map, as tenuous as a spider-web in that seething, unilluminating glare—and I spent the night trailing miserably between bedroom and bathroom, until I was absolutely empty from end to end.

  THE FOUR BEAUTIES

  A dozen cottages, most of them beside the road, a few reached by boreens running uphill or down from it, constitute Corrúch, the last of the villages of the central height and the townland of Eochaill. Looking down the hillside falling northwards from it one sees the shinglebank and seaweed-covered shores of Port Chorrúch half a mile away; it may be from the shape of this bay, or from one of the smaller inlets within it, that the area derives its name: corr-fhuach, bent or uneven cove. But if that is too humdrum an origin, one can discover a better one by mumbling the name of a saint, Caradoc Garbh. I will let myself briefly be drawn into the wild-goose chase for this saint.

  In that intriguing list of churches drawn up by Archbishop O’Cadhla and published by Fr. Colgan, we have:

  Ecclesia Kill-namanach .i. Cella Monachorum, dicta, quae S. Cathradhocho, sive Caradoco, Monacho, cognomento Garbh .i. aspero, dicta est.

  (The church called Cill na Manach, i.e. the church of the monks, which is named from the monk Cathradhoch or Caradoc, called Garbh, i.e. rough.) Roderic O’Flaherty adds to this the statement that Port Caradoc is in Eochaill; hence it is to be identified with Port Chorrúch. However, no such saint as Caradoc is known to even the most inventive of hagiographers, apart from these scholars who have taken O’Cadhla at his word.

  O’Flaherty’s mention of it seems to imply that the church was extant when he was writing in the 1670s, but in 1839 O’Donovan’s most diligent enquiries could find no trace or tradition of it. Since then various investigators have tried their hand at identifying it. Fr. Ó Domhnaill says it is a certain ruin near Bóthar na gCrag south of Baile na Sean; John Goulden suggests another one a quarter of a mile up the hill from Corrúch village; Fr. Killeen almost convinces himself it is Cill Charna near Cill Rónáin, but ends his lucubrations with a sigh: “In tenebris ambulo.” I have no opinions on the matter, and am content to watch this ghostly church flit from place to place pursued by antiquaries lay and clerical, all “walking in darkness.” Caradoc, or Cathradhoch as he first appears, is I suspect only a mishearing of the original form of the place-name, Corr-fhuach.

  If Caradoc is the mere wind of a word, it is not so with the four saints connected with the one known church in Corrúch; they shared a provocative, fragile and dangerous characteristic: beauty. The church is called Teampall an Cheathrair Álainn. The noun ceathrar (from ceathar, four, and fear, man) means “a set of four persons”—“a foursome” would be accurate but sounds too modern, since these special numerals are an ancient Indo-European feature of the language—and so the name means literally the “church of the beautiful four,” or less pedantically, “the church of the four beauties.” Since the church itself has inherited that challenging quality of its dedicatees, I shall approach it cautiously, starting with these saints’ legends.

  The names of the saints are not familiar to the islanders, but according to O’Cadhla they were Fursey, Brendan of Birr, Conall and Berchan, and were said to be buried in the one tomb, in the cemetery of the church. Fursey or Fursu is famous; he was one of the great missioners of the seventh-century Celtic church, and founded the monastery of Peronne in France, where according to the Annals of Tigearnach he died in 649. A member of his community wrote his biography within a quarter of a century of that date, and it is one of the two earliest surviving Lives of Irish saints. This work states that after twelve years of missionary work in Ireland he withdrew with a few monks to an island in the sea, but it does not name Aran. Fursu himself wrote an account of Heaven and Hell, which he saw in a feverous vision once when he was ill, and so initiated a genre which culminated in Dante’s Divine Comedy.

  Brendan of Birr is also known to sacred history; he is said by the same annals to have died in 573, and is buried at Tallaght. His connection with islands has a note of the fabulous about it. In a work perhaps originally composed in the eighth century, The Voyage of Maol Dúin, the hero and his companions wander limitless oceans, visiting islands full of wonders, and in one of these they find a small church covered with ivy, and meet an aged cleric; he tells them that he is the sole survivor of fifteen disciples of Brendan of Birr who went on a pilgrimage with their master, and found this hermitage. But again, the island is left unidentified.

  As to Bearchan, again there are several saints of that name, none with any known connection with Aran. The one O’Donovan opts for is supposed to have been a disciple of Kevin, the saint of Glendalough, and his beauty is the subject of this story:

  A man named Cronan who was first a tanner but afterwards became a holy and pious man before God and men, and built a noble church for God, sent a message to St. Kevin requesting him to send a faithful and proper brother to him, through whom he might transmit his secrets to St. Kevin. St. Kevin without hesitation sent him Bearchan, a monk, alone, according to the custom of ancient times. That brother, commencing his journey through woods and desert mountains, met a woman alone on the way waiting for a guide to conduct her through the desert, and she, seeing Bearchan, said to him, “Oh man of God, for the sake of the omnipotent Lord permit me to go with you through the wilderness.” The brother therefore for the sake of the Lord permitted her in her faith to go with him as far as her own village. On observing the beauty of Bearchan she was captivated in love of him, for he was truly beautiful and then in the flower of his youth. She tempted him frequently with alluring language. At length on their coming to a certain river she said to him, “I request of you, Sir, in the name of Christ to wait for me till I take a drink of water and bathe myself in the river, for I am now wearied with traveling.” She did this wishing to show him the beauty of her person. On her stripping off her clothes St. Bearchan laid his head on the ground, not wishing to look at her, and he was overcome with sleep. The woman, coming out of the water and seeing him asleep, was very desirous of lying along with him, and lifting up his cloak began to lie down by his side, embracing him with her hands. But the soldier of Christ, being roused from his sleep, resisted her with fortitude, and, extricating himself from her grasp, began to strike her with his staff on the back and sides.

  Now St. Kevin and St. Cronan, far off in their cells, saw all these proceedings by the divine power, and St. Cronan said, “Act manly, oh good brother Bearchan, by scourging the immodest woman.” But the most holy Kevin said, “Oh son, indulgent Bearchan, spare and do not beat the wretched woman.” By the will of God Bearchan, far off in the desert, heard these words expressed by the saints sitting in their own cells, and on hearing the command of his master St. Kevin he ceased from striking the woman. And she, doing penance, was conducted by St. Bearchan through the wilderness as he had promised, and, magnifying the sanctity of the man of God, told her friends what had been done on the way.

  The fourth saint’s name, Conall, is a common one; Fr. Killeen says we can be quite sure that St. Conall mac Mainecaoil, a great traveller and a relative of Colm Cille’s, spent a while in Aran, but the grounds of this surety must have been in the nature of a personal revelation, for he cites no evidence.

  What is known of the saints named by O’Cadhla, then, varies from comparatively well-founded history, to myth, edifying anecdote, and mere guesswork, and it is hard to hold them together in the mind as the four beauties of Aran. But whoever they were, their reputation is spreading. Synge visited their church with his old half-blind guide Martin Conneely, during his first visit to Aran, and noted the legend of the holy well there in his journal:

  At the church of St. Carolan, which I have just visited with my old guide, there is still a holy well remarkable for many cures. While we visited in the neighbourhood an old man came to us from a near cottage and told us how it became famous. A woman of Sligo had one son who was blind. She dreamed of a
well that held water potent to cure. So she took boat with her son following course of her dream and reached Aran. And when she landed she came to the house of my informant’s father and told what had brought her but when those around offered to lead her to the well near by she declined all aid saying she saw still her way clear before. She led her son from the boat and going a little up the hill stopped at the well. Then kneeling with the blind child beside her she prayed to God and then bathed his eyes. In moments his face gleamed with joy as he said: “Oh mother look at the beautiful flowers.” Twice since the same story has been told to me with unimportant variations yet ending always with the glad dramatic cry of the young child.

  By the time he tidied up this passage for inclusion in The Aran Islands Synge had realized that “Carolan” was “an ceathrar álainn,” the four beauties. And in his play The Well of the Saints, there is a strange and disillusioned inversion of the story he was told in Aran: “Did you ever hear tell of a place across a bit of the sea, where there is an island, and the grave of the four beautiful saints?… There’s a green ferny well, I’m told, behind of that place, and if you put a drop of the water out of it on the eyes of a blind man, you’ll make him see as well as any person is walking the world.” When Martin and Mary Doul, a weather-beaten pair of blind beggars, hear that a saint is going round the countryside curing people with water from this well, they look forward to seeing at last the beautiful couple they believe themselves to be; the play begins as an ache of longing for physical beauty. But when the miracle has been accomplished and they see their own decrepitude, they quarrel. Then their sight gradually fades away, and, refusing the saint’s offer to cure them again, they withdraw into the world of sounds and their own imagination, which has proved less delusive than that of vision. The energy of the play is perhaps provided by the fusion, in Synge’s creative mind, of the story of the well of the four beauties (many holy wells are supposed to be able to cure the blind, but here the idea of personal beauty is associated with the common theme) and of the experience of being shown the well by a half-blind man, his guide, another Martin.