Stones of Aran

by Tim Robinson

  As parting of soul and body.

  In the east the stag is wakeful,

  Bellowing through the night;

  Although he’s in the blackbirds’ wood

  He does not think of sleeping.

  The hornless doe is not asleep

  But leaping through the bushes;

  Leaving her unslept-in lair,

  She’s bleating for her speckled fawn.

  Instead of sleeping in their trees

  The birds are noisy in the woods;

  Instead of sleeping on the bank

  The duck is swimming on the lake.

  The curlews do not sleep tonight

  On the stormy mountainside,

  But their cries are sweet and clear

  Wakeful between the torrents.

  Before dawn they were on the move again, hunted on towards the rest of their story: long wanderings and many escapes, Fionn’s eventual resignation to his loss, the birth of their children, Diarmaid’s death when Fionn delayed in bringing him a healing drink of water, and Gráinne’s eventual marriage with Fionn, at which the Fianna mocked them both and she hung her head in shame. The spirit of the warrior band was broken by this adventure. Oisín went off with his own love to the Land of Youth, and when he returned he found that the Fianna were extinct and a dwarfish race had inherited the earth. He met St. Patrick and told him all the deeds of his lost companions. That is how we know of the Hunting of Diarmaid and Gráinne.

  In fact the legend does not state that the runaways came to Aran, but on the shoulder of the plateau above Corrúch is an ancient compilation of stone called Leaba Dhiarmada is Ghráinne, the Bed of Diarmaid and Gráinne. There are hundreds of such “beds” in Ireland; some are just curious formations of boulders thrown together by nature, but most, like this one, are the ruins of megalithic tombs. The story that seemed to account for these enigmatic structures is still well known, and some Araners have not relinquished belief in Diarmaid and Gráinne; one old man wanted me to tell him how they travelled to the island. (The folksy details of how the gigantic couple collected huge slabs of stone to make their beds, that I have inserted into the medieval tale, I heard from a farmer in the Burren who had such a tomb on his land.)

  Fionn, Diarmaid, Gráinne and the rest were all Celtic deities once, until rawly Christianized monks fresh out of the woods of paganism recast their myths as hero-tales, and they acquired the ambiguous passions and distressed loyalties that make them not much more or less incomprehensible than ourselves. Compared to such storm-driven wraiths, the solid beings who built tombs like the one above Corrúch are difficult to grasp. But the flown chrysalis of Stone-Age humanity is here on the hilltop; we can at least look into it, and speculate.

  The easiest ascent to the tomb is by the boreen running up past the Church of the Four Beauties. The slope of fields above the church is known as Na Clocháin from the ruined stone huts there; I had better glance at them in passing as I shall not return this way. On the west of the path is Clochán an Phúca, the hut of the púca, which used to be a mass of fallen stone, confused but with potential, until in the ’seventies the Office of Public Works set its local employees, unsupervized, to tidying it up, which they did with a will. The “linders” or beam-like stones that had formed its roof were too heavy to lift out, so they sledge-hammered them; traces of a partition-wall dividing its interior into two rooms (a rather unusual feature recorded in a plan made for the Ordnance Survey in 1840) were swept away, and all the bits and pieces arranged neatly around the perimeter, making the exterior walls an impressive eight feet thick instead of about three. One field away to the north-west of this clochán is a roofless rectangular ruin which has also been eviscerated by its conservators. Two chunks of carved stone lying on one of its walls can be fitted together to make the top of a Gothic window with two small trefoil-headed lights, which suggested to John Goulden that this building was perhaps Cill na Manach, the “lost church of Aran” so many antiquarians have tried to locate. On the other side of the track and above a further little scarp of the hillside is some utterly confounded structure; it looks as if a small roundish field has been filled wall-high with stones. A local man who did some “rooting” here tells me he saw plastered masonry and windows with lintels down among the wreckage. Fr. Killeen thought this was “a dun destroyed in an act of war,” but the Rev. Kilbride regarded it as “a coenobium of a colony of monks.” Indeed these and a few other even obscurer ruins of the area may well have been associated with the ecclesiastical settlement below.

  A few dozen yards beyond the point at which the boreen levels out onto the plateau of Na Craga there is a narrow turning to the west, a róidín running between high ivy-clad walls, of which those on the right are supposed to be part of “a cashel of about sixty feet in diameter” recorded by Kilbride in the 1860s—but I cannot make out anything of it now. This tiny twisty way is called Bóithrín an Dúin Bhig, the boreen of the little fort, not from this dún but from another quite substantial one on the north-west shoulder of the plateau, a few hundred yards farther on. But before one comes to that, the jutting uprights of the megalithic tomb appear against the sky, on a knoll in a field to the right. One’s first impression is of something empty, skull-like, staring westwards.

  On nearer approach, it looks like a small flat-roofed hut built out of rectangular slabs of limestone—the sort of slabs that are to be had in plenty here, as a glance around the half-barren field confirms. Four slabs set on edge make two side-walls three to four feet high, another slab closes the eastern end, the roof is of three slabs laid across, the western end is open. Along the south side and close to it, five pillar-like stones up to five feet high form an outer wall. I notice that nearly all the main slabs have a distinctive veneer of another mineral on one face—chert, perhaps; I forgot to bring home a sample—indicating that they were all levered out of the same stratum, which an exploration of the immediate neighbourhood would probably identify. The opening is three foot four inches high and four foot six wide; one could creep into it and lie down, for the compartment is about eight feet long. At the other end it is only two foot six high and two foot nine wide. Originally the entrance would have been closed with another flagstone and the whole thing buried in a cairn of stones and earth; in fact there are traces of a mound on the south of the tomb. One feels that the open, larger, end is the front. Thus the tomb looks westwards across lowlands and three far-separated villages, to the opposite hillside and Dún Aonghasa.

  There has never been an archaeological investigation of this tomb, though its structure was carefully recorded in the 1960s by Dr. Ruaidhrí de Valera and Seán Ó Nualláin and it figures as no. 21 in Vol. III of their monumental Survey of the Megalithic Tombs of Ireland. Indeed it is possible that excavation would reveal little or nothing about the people who built it or their reasons for doing so. J.T. O’Flaherty in the 1830s would have identified this table-like construction as a Druidical altar; the Rev. Kilbride in the 1860s saw it as what he called a ligeatreabh or “pillar-house.” In calling it a tomb I am already assimilating it to concepts that have been evolved out of generations of consideration of hundreds of similar structures elsewhere in Ireland and further afield. To approach these particular stones with understanding one has first to step back, through generalization and classification.

  In the first volume of their great work de Valera and Ó Nualláin proposed a division of Irish megalithic tombs into four categories, which have proved sturdy enough to withstand some recent battering. Passage Graves, of which the vast tumulus of Newgrange in the Boyne valley is the best-known example, consist of a passage leading into a burial chamber, the whole usually buried in a round mound. Portal Dolmens are the dolmens of romantic Ireland, with a single chamber formed of a cap-stone—sometimes a huge boulder—perched on three or more uprights, of which the front pair, the portals, are the tallest. Court Cairns have one or more suites or “galleries” each of two or more chambers, covered by a long cairn and entered from one or more o
pen courtyards defined by upright stones. And the Wedge-shaped Gallery Graves have one main chamber, sometimes with a small portico or anti-chamber and a small closed rear chamber, and usually decreasing in height and width from front to rear. Nowadays archaeologists refer to these classes as passage, portal, court, and wedge tombs.

  So what we have in Corrúch is a simple type of wedge tomb. The act of classification immediately opens up questions of distribution, affinities, origins. All the identifiable megalithic tombs in the Aran Islands are of this type: one in Inis Oírr, reduced to hardly more than a low outline; one collapsed but still impressive, and another so ruinous it is difficult to be sure about, in Inis Meáin; this one, the best-preserved, in Corrúch, and another halfway down the hillside north of Oatquarter. (This last is so obscurely tucked into an overgrown corner of a field, of whose walls its stones form part, that although O’Donovan saw or heard of it in 1839 it was not located until 1980, when I came across it, just too late to include it on my revised map, and right beside a path we had taken a hundred times before on our evening strolls.) Further afield, there are about seventy wedge tombs in the Burren, some of them fifteen or more feet long and very simply constructed out of a few enormous slabs. Other notable concentrations of wedge tombs are in Sligo and north-east Mayo, east Clare and west Tipperary, and west Cork. In all there are about five hundred in Ireland, and their builders clearly preferred uplands of sandstone or limestone with thin well-drained soil-cover, rather than the danker shale-lands and the lush river valleys. Such areas would have been only lightly wooded and were easily cleared by axe or fire to create grazing land; the wedge-tomb builders were primarily pastoralists rather than tillers of the soil.

  Although some twenty-three wedge tombs have been excavated in recent years, in only three cases has material been found in them that could be radio-carbon dated and definitely associated with the primary period of use of the tomb. A small wedge tomb rather similar to the Corrúch one in the townland of Altar near Schull in Cork was excavated by a team from University College, Cork, in 1989; hardly enough human material to make a handful was found, but among the tiny scraps of cremated bone was one unburned tooth, and this proved to date from between 2316 and 1784 BC. The consensus is that wedge tombs were being built from about 2500 to 1700 or perhaps 1500 BC; this means that they span the last centuries of the Neolithic period and the early Bronze Age—a time as progressive as that of the initiation of settlement and tillage in the early Neolithic around 4000 BC. It is known that copper was mined in Munster and traded throughout Ireland and to Britain; for instance there are primitive workings on Mount Gabriel in Cork dating from the end of the Neolithic. Perhaps the tombs should be associated with a brief “Copper Age” preceding the decisive technological advance to the use of bronze, a mixture of copper and tin. (Copper is easily mined and extracted from its ore but is rather soft unless mixed with tin; but tin is not to be found in Ireland, and in fact there was a trans-European trade in Cornish tin.) But if the wedge-builders were probably among the earliest metal-workers in Ireland, it seems that the occasional bronze axe-head or copper ingot that has been found in a tomb was placed there as part of a ritual deposit, a votive offering, perhaps long after the use of the tomb for burial had ceased, for the Bronze Age adopted a new rite of single burials in small stone-lined pits or cists, as opposed to the grand communal tombs of Neolithic times. But long after the original function of the tombs had been forgotten they preserved something of the numinous, as they do to this day, which suggested other ritual uses for them. Thus the Altar tomb was used as late as AD 124–224, in the Iron Age, for the deposition of offerings of sea-food. In what we might call our own era some of them served as mass rocks in the seventeenth century, when Catholic priests had to minister to their flocks in secret and celebrate the sacraments in hidden places; hence the name of the townland, Altar, in which the tomb near Schull stands. A lady from the Burren told me that when she was a child the St. John’s Eve bonfire was lit on the top of a huge wedge tomb near her house, and she heard the great roof-flag crack; so one could say that this wedge was indeed a druidical fire-altar only fifty years ago. They have also had their secular uses. Several in the Burren were inhabited until late in the last century; I have read of a doctor visiting a woman in childbirth who was living with her family and their cow in a tomb near Kilnaboy. Another one in the Burren, that the Megalithic Survey missed, had a little door fitted and was in use as a goose-pen in the 1960s. All this usage and reusage means that the structures have been repeatedly robbed or refurbished or spring-cleaned, and that whatever happens to be found in them today probably has nothing to do with the original builders.

  In the heyday of the Megalithic Survey an attractively clearcut picture of the origins of the wedge-tomb builders emerged. There are in Brittany fifty or so tombs rather similar to the wedge tombs of Ireland, called allées couvertes, and this fact, together with the predominantly western and in particular south-western distribution of the Irish wedge tombs suggested that their builders first entered the country from Brittany, occupying the peninsulas of Cork and Kerry, and from there spreading northwards and later eastwards, settling wherever they discovered pasturage to their liking. More recently it has been proposed that the wedge tombs evolved from the Irish court tombs, which are mainly found in the northern half of the country, and spread thence to the south and west. Few archaeologists would be dogmatic on the question nowadays.

  One important difference between the allées couvertes and the wedge tombs is that the former generally face east and the latter almost invariably west to south-west. When I took Professor Rynne of UCG to see the wedge tomb in Fearann an Choirce, he climbed up on top of it and delivered an impromptu burlesque lecture, to myself and a stray dog who was accompanying us, on the abiding cultural differences between the laborious Breton peasant, up every morning in time to pay his respects to the rising sun, and the convivial Irishman rolling home rejoicing in the glow of sunset. Undoubtedly the west had some significance for the wedge-tomb builders which it did not for those of the earlier types of megalithic tomb; Newgrange, with its long passage and burial-chamber briefly probed by the rising sun at the winter solstice, represents some belief perhaps of the identity of death and rebirth, but the west does not enter into it; court tombs, which were evidently the sites of funerary ceremonial, are often aligned to the north, and portal tombs to the east. But it is this people who, whether they came from Brittany or from Britain through northern Ireland, eventually colonized the west, turned their gaze to the horizon under which all the lights of the sky disappear, the threshold of a region into which no human can penetrate, in this life at least. Perhaps only those who move on until they live on the western edge of the world can feel this dire fascination of the forbidden compass-bearing. The Celts of the Iron Age, or at least those of them who, having wandered or been driven out of the depths of Eurasia, arrived at the ocean wall, situated their Tír na nÓg, their land of youth, beyond the Atlantic horizon. Aftercomers, even the most recent blow-ins like myself, even if we know nothing of the beliefs and rituals of the wedge-folk, feel the pull of magnetic west in our bones. America counts for nothing in this European mind-set; America is only what Columbus thought to find, the nether edge of the farthest East.

  Westwardness entrains the drift of this book like a quiet but irresistable undertow. From the Bed of Diarmaid and Gráinne I can look ahead and scan the lowlands I will soon descend into, the waist between Port Mhuirbhigh on the north and the bay at Gort na gCapall on the south, which almost severs the farther, ultra-western, third of the island. Diarmaid and Gráinne themselves, sitting here of an evening in a time-dimension oblique to that of history, could see not only the valley but all that has and will happen in it. On the opposite skyline, files of men carry stones to build the ramparts of Dún Aonghasa, and flocks of tourists toil up the hill to admire their work. Lower down, a rain-soaked Dublin architect is directing the transformation of a thatched cottage into Kilmurvey House. On
the main road coming up from Port Mhuirbhigh two saints quarrel over the division of the island; one of them is on horseback and the other has welded the horse’s hooves to the ground. Near the southern shore a Beartlaiméid Ó Flaithbheartaigh is founding the village of Gort na gCapall, and his great-great-great-great-grandson, Liam O’Flaherty, is skipping across the crags to Oatquarter School while writing his first story in his head. Archaeologists are fossicking around their bed; the lovers rise with a sigh—they are bigger than anyone we have ever seen, but without the crude, pitted skins of giants; they are immaculately beautiful—and begin to make their way towards their next resting-place. But they dare not enter the last third of the island, which is too near to being an island with only one harbour. At all costs they must avoid being trapped against the unclimbable wall of westernness.

  MODALITIES OF ROUGHNESS

  Very nearly all of the next townland, Cill Mhuirbhigh or Kilmurvy, is visible from the megalithic tomb that looks out across it like an empty eye-socket of the hillside; the nearer boundary is a narrow slot of a gully running across the slope below and about fifty yards west of the tomb, and the farther one, two miles away, is only just behind the skyline of the opposite rise. The three villages in the intervening lowlands are far apart; one can trace their interlinking roads by the lines of telegraph-poles, thin as insects’ legs from here. Fearann an Choirce or Oatquarter—it is the only Aran village to have an English name that is not just the Irish one anglicized, i.e. misspelt—begins close by to the north-west, its nearest houses hidden by the last shoulder of the plateau and the further ones coming into view as they straggle down the main road towards the bay. Gort na gCapall is near the south coast in a slight hollow, a very inadequate-seeming shelter against the Atlantic, which in certain lights appears from here to rise steeply behind it or even lean over it menacingly. Cill Mhuirbhigh village itself is far off, near the north coast, with Kilmurvey House (which spells itself with an “e”) a little aloof from it, withdrawn into the greyness of the hillside beyond. The terrain embracing these three villages is arranged like a vast amphitheatre facing north and focused on the bay of Port Mhuirbhigh. A crescent of dunes rims the beach, then there comes a broad green arc of big fields belonging to Kilmurvey House, and around that a mosaic of tiny pastures and tillage plots belonging to the smallholders of the townland. A cliff of ten to twenty feet wraps itself with a rugged tenderness around all this good land, and the wide terrace of almost uninterrupted grey rock above it curves like an immense battered horseshoe from Cill Mhuirbhigh village, south to Gort na gCapall and then north again to Fearann an Choirce. Above that is another cliff and an even wider horseshoe terrace, this one of craggy land a little more hospitable than the one below and therefore criss-crossed by walls, with the Atlantic taking a bite out of it on the south. Finally a tumble of tip-tilted fields at one’s feet here on the east, answering to a similar slope closing the vista to the west.