Stones of Aran

by Tim Robinson

  The end of the terrace below the tomb and overlooking the village of Oatquarter is called An Scairbh, the rough place. And since I was for a dozen years a besotted Oatquarterite, courting moods that echoed well off stone, I know the modalities of its roughness intimately. I used to browse from field to field here as if leafing through a well-loved anthology, or find myself caught wordless in the middle of a page by the disappearance of a questionmark, a lizard’s tail, into the margin. If the text frequently held me up with obscurities, long practice gave me great fluency in its grammar, though perhaps memory flatters in showing me drifting across this terrain as little impeded by stones and thorns as a cloud-shadow. So now, although I could return to Corrúch by the boreens and follow the main road to the village, I prefer to work my way down to it across An Scairbh, from the point this itinerary has reached, despite the weird impracticability of the route.

  Just a hundred yards west of the Bed of Diarmaid and Gráinne—a hundred yards that involves crossing five field-walls and the little ravine of the townland boundary—is An Dún Beag, the small fort. Its rampart is reduced to a knee-high bank with a more recent field-wall on top of it, enclosing an oval space about seventy yards long and half that across, divided into three fields full of rank grass and brambles. Given its strategic, even precarious, perch on the brink of the steep slope falling north and west from it, this was no mere cattle-yard. I am told that it had a chevaux-de-frise of stone spikes on this slope until the Dirranes, the principal family of the village below, took them to build walls; how long ago this is supposed to have happened I do not know, but none of the nineteenth-century antiquarians noted any such feature.

  A few fields below the fort is a big stony, brambly mound that looks like a collapsed clochán, from the vicinity of which a narrow many-elbowed path makes a relatively sensible north-westward descent to the village. But that is not the route I am taking; instead I scramble down south-westwards from the dún and drop into a steep-sided ravine full of chest-high hazel scrub. When one of the villagers first told me that there was a wood a mile long on this hillside I was incredulous, but it is true, or nearly true; the area of scrub is only ten or fifteen feet wide, but it is half a mile long at least and was probably once longer. It fills the ravine, which runs southwards, with the jointing of the underlying rock, until interrupted by an embankment where Bóthar na gCrag descends from the uplands. This wood is called simply and uniquely An Choill, the wood. According to J.T. O’Flaherty, among the many reminders of druidism on Aran are “evident vestiges of oak groves.” That was an antiquarian’s fantasy even in his time. Even in the days of the magnificent oak-forests of Celtic Europe, where the dim, lofty, sacred grove, the nemeton, prefigured the Gothic cathedrals, in Aran the druids would have had to make do with the equivalent of a little provincial chapel, difficult to stand straight in and with not much oak in its composition; and for centuries even that much woodland has been reduced to a second childhood. I once inveigled M into this toy forest, to savour an Alice-in-Wonderland experience: crouching in it one can look along mossy glades lit with exquisite pale lilac flowers of wood-sorrel, and then by straightening up, grow through the canopy to giant stature and see far over the treetops.

  There was in fact a giant here once, whose gory legend I took down from old Seán Gillan. He was an O’Flaherty called Pádraic Mór (Big Patrick), who went on the run after the Cromwellian army took the castle of Aircín in 1651, and lived in a cave, or perhaps a cleft with a few flags laid across it, in this ravine, and became known as Fathach na Coille, the giant of the wood. One day his brother came to warn him that the English soldiers had discovered his whereabouts, and the two of them went to live in another cave in a little cliff above the turlough at Gort na gCapall village. Pádraic, although a peacable man, was a great fighter, whereas his brother, in Séan’s words, was only réasúnta (reasonable). One day the brother went out to milk the goat, and met an English soldier. “I’m a soldier as well as you!” said the brother, and they began to fight. The Englishman had a sword of Swedish iron and an armoured vest against which the Irishman’s sword bent like a snake, so that he had repeatedly to step back and put his foot on it to straighten it out. Finally he wounded the Englishman in the belly, but the dying soldier seized him by the head and thrust it into the wound, and stifled him in his bowels. A month later, at Christmas, the English soldiers came across Pádraic’s footprints in the snow and followed them back to his lair. Pádraic heard the men’s footsteps on the flag above his cave, and counted nine of them, and killed them as they appeared one by one in the mouth of the cave. Eventually though he was captured by a force of three hundred soldiers, taken as a prisoner to Caisleán Aircín, and there hanged—“agus sin an deireadh a bhí aige!” (“and that was the end of him!”).

  Have I got the horrible details right? Seán’s Irish I found difficult to follow, so I took the precaution of writing the tale out in English as I had understood it, for him to read and check; later he told me that my version was correct, but I cannot find it now, and there are some obscurities in what notes I can unearth—a pike with a hook for pulling a man off a horse entered into it somehow, and whether it was the brother who smothered the soldier in his bowels or vice versa I am not sure. The two or three other islanders who had heard something of Pádraic Mór always referred me to Seán, the last of the story-tellers; but Seán is now dead and I fear that what I have put down here is as much as survives of this legend. Is it only a legend? Very likely there were O’Flaherty fugitives on the island after the defeat of 1651, but the incident of the sword that bent like a snake (I remember Seán’s vigorous mimicry in describing it) sounds like an echo from the Bronze Age, from that mysterious Copper Age of the wedge-tomb builders, even. The Giant of the Wood may have been an outlaw from history for three thousand years before Pádraic Mór joined him in the greenwood shade.

  Extricating oneself from An Choill is a matter of working along the clifflet forming its western rim to find some combination of fallen stone and tree-roots and matted ferns by which one can clamber up, and then locating the beginning of a path, about five hundred yards south of the dún, that wriggles through the network of field walls, first west and then south. Bóithrín na Coille, the boreen of the wood, is only about three feet wide, and in any particular year whether it is reasonably passable or arched over by briars that have to be negotiated one by one depends on whether or not Pádraic Dan Phatch of Gort na gCapall has cattle in one of the fields it serves, for no one else comes this way. Instead of following it south until it escapes into the wider Bóthar na gCrag, I shall take a minute branch off it to the west, which curls down into a nook of the scarp below it. Perfectly named An Poll i’ bhFolach, the hole in hiding, in a chill April this sheltery spot is always a week or two more optimistic about the coming of spring than its surroundings. A gleam of water catches the eye; look behind you halfway down the path, and you see the spring-well of Clochán an Airgid with all its attendant flowers that I described, pages back. No, that is impossible, even in a labyrinth; this well faces west, the other east. And indeed on a second look this one is more like the Well of the Four Beauties behind the ruined chapel at Corrúch. The scarp in which these wells are formed is the common factor; on a map it outlines each of the upland areas of the three Arans like a contour. Its profile varies little along its length: the land rises in distinct stages from the flat bare crag at its foot, first in two sharp steps, each of them a limestone stratum about four feet thick, then the clay-band that conducts water to this and to many other springs, and above that a rough hillside not so clearly stratified. This sequence—pavement, two steps, clay-band, hillslope—is instantly recognizable once it has been pointed out (as Conor MacDermot of the Geological Survey pointed it out to me when he was mapping the Aran and Burren limestones), and one meets it again and again, giving a family resemblance to places one would never otherwise have associated with each other, such as the hillside below the second rampart of Dún Aonghasa and that below Túr
Mháirtín. The clay-band has the resounding name of the Asbian-Brigantian contact, from the two subdivisions of the Lower Carboniferous respectively below and above it, which can be identified by their fossil contents and rock-chemistry in other parts of Ireland and Britain, the Asbian being so called from Little Asby Scar in Cumbria where it is particularly well exposed, and the Brigantian from the ancient territory of the North British tribe, the Brigantes. The transition from one type of deposit to the other corresponds to a change in the Carboniferous ocean dated at 330 million years before the present, and the presence of clay at this level shows that at that time this was dry land, and for long enough for overlying rocks to be rendered down into soil. So, that glint, catching the attention in the obscurity of “the hole in hiding,” is the cutting edge of a vast discrimination in earth-history.

  The path down to the well—hardly more than a sequence of steps worn into the scarp face—exists for and because of people fetching water to cattle in the fields above; similarly a little path leads out of the walled oasis of green around the well, down the two limestone steps and out onto the open crag, for the convenience of people with cattle in some small fields under the scarp; these two paths then make a secretive shortcut from An Choill, in Brigantia as it were, to An Scairbh, in Asbia, which is no part of their purpose. One alights from this bramble-frought time-tumbling past the 330-million BP mark onto a superb limestone pavement, the best in the islands, so smooth and with such wide intervals between its grykes that a set could be danced on it without fear of broken ankles. Low walls, easily stepped over, divide it into a few areas which, after the poky topography one has fought through above, have the breadth of agoras, piazzas, civic spaces suitable for decorous and convivial rites—utterly deserted, though; one is far off any usual route to anywhere usual here. Often, wandering back home from a walk on the cliffs, M and I used to rest on the crag nearest the well, the level emptyness of which is enhanced by one single powerful presence, a roundish granite boulder four or five feet high. We would lie starwise on the pavement by it and close our eyes and let the sun or the breeze or even the first drops of a rain-shower explore our faces. After a few minutes our shoulder-blades would have fused with the limestone and we would be whirled along by the earth’s turning, the dynamo that generates all our little norths and souths and easts and wests.

  But I soon tire of transcendental flight and start poking about again, questioning the ground I stand on. This remarkable boulder, for instance; it looks as if it were put there to make a point, for it stands like a sculpture on a little pedestal, a natural swelling of the limestone floor. Since there are no other such swellings on this exceptionally level and smooth pavement, this one must be due to the presence of the boulder; it must represent the thickness of limestone that has been dissolved off the rest of the pavement by rain since the boulder arrived to shelter this one spot. In fact the diverted rainwater spilling off the rim of the boulder has excavated a moat a few inches deep all around the pedestal, accentuating it and making it difficult to judge its exact height; however, the bottom of the boulder appears to be about eight inches above the general level of the pavement. There are quite a few “perched boulders,” as such glacial erratics are called, in Aran (but this one is the best), and several have pedestals of that order of height. Hence, in the fifteen thousand years since the melting away of the glaciers that brought them across from granite Connemara, eight inches has been lost off the limestone of Aran. That is an average rate of attrition smaller than the current rate for the Burren, where scientists deduce from the concentration of dissolved calcium carbonate in stream-water that the relief of the area is being lowered by a twentieth of a millimeter per annum. Perhaps that high figure betrays the pollution of our contemporary world, spreading even into this ocean-washed desert. But the process is not a uniform planing-down of the surface; run-off is directed by unevennesses and irregularities, which themselves are exacerbated by these currents, so that channels grow and coalesce, fissures widen, solidity is sapped and rock is rendered down to rubble. The polish and perfection this crag has attained to, a reflection of the petrology of a particular stratum, is a passing phase in its descent to obliteration.

  If so much has been erased, do we know what sort of landscape this was, for instance when the first humans moved in, perhaps five thousand years ago? In Connemara, where bogs have been accumulating over much of the time since that period, researchers can reconstruct the history of the flora by identifying the types of pollen-grains preserved at various levels in the acidic peat. This is not so easy in areas without bogs and has not yet been attempted in Aran, but some similar studies have been carried out of pollen from the sediments of lakes in the south-east of the Burren, and most recently from a bog on an isolated patch of shale in the north-west of the Burren, which would include windblown pollen from limestone areas almost as exposed as the Aran Islands. In the south-east, Mullaghmore is a famously primeval-looking landscape, but its seemingly immemorial stoniness is a historical phenomenon and developed only after about AD 400. In the Stone Age that area was covered in hazel-woods, with much pine, elm and oak. The elm declined drastically in Ireland at about 3100 BC, just as it has done throughout Europe in our own time, and it may be that something like Dutch elm disease was spread by increased coming and going of humans. In any case the first settlers started thinning the forest about that time; the earliest activity at the great portal tomb of Poulnabrone in the central Burren has recently been dated to about 3000 BC. The large number of wedge tombs in the Burren show how attractive it was to the graziers of from five to fifteen hundred years later, around the end of the Stone Age and the early Bronze Age. The pollen-record from the north-western site does not go back quite so far, but it suggests that as early as 1250 BC. the landscape was largely open grassland, and the sorts of weeds present indicate that it was heavily grazed and not much disturbed by tillage. There still were oaks and hazels (the oak is virtually unknown there now), and in the period from AD 200 to 580 the hazel scrub won back a good deal of the land, owing to some unexplained remission of the pressure of humans and their animals on it, just as is happening now in many areas of the Burren drained by emigration over the last hundred years. Extrapolating all this to the Aran Islands, one can picture the Stone-Age voortreckers arriving here and finding forest, thinner and more dwarfed by exposure than that of the Burren, growing on a soil perfect for cattle-rearing; they probably knew as well as does the Aran man of today that “limestone puts bone on a beast.” They would have returned to the mainland with the good news, and brought their animals and chattels and gods and diseases across by currach. Since then the battle has mainly gone against the wood; fire and axe and hoof and tooth have stripped the land; rain and wind have carried off the unbound soil. The Iron Age, the feeding of the seven great cashels, if they were contemporaneous, must have depleted the environment, and perhaps by the time the saints arrived the islands were already as Roderic O’Flaherty described them, “almost paved over with stones, soe as, in some places, nothing is to be seen but large stones with wide openings between them, where cattle break their legs.” Only in this century, on some sheltered hillsides, does the Giant of the Wood increase his holding once more.

  That story is at least an attempt to answer the first question posed by the perched boulder, but one is immediately led on to others. There is something of the classroom or examination-hall about the crag this boulder stands in; everything here is well lit, separated out, reduced to essentials, so that if we cannot understand, it is our fault. The boulder itself, pedagogical on its podium, demands clarity of thought: observe this, comment on that, deduce the other. A few long straight fissures draw elementary geometrical figures on the the blackboard-smooth pavement; I stump around and look at them this way up, that way up. What sort of surface was revealed by the removal of the post-glacial soil-cover? Was this pattern of grykes and clints seen by pre-Euclidian eyes?

  One fissure at least demonstrates the answer with gratify
ing rigour. It runs right across the crag for dozens of yards, passing exactly under the boulder and bisecting its pedestal. It is a few inches wide all along its length, but if one lies down and peers under the boulder one can see that just at the top of the pedestal, where not even the gales can blow rain into it, it narrows to a hair’s breadth. A textbook exemplar! The fissures have been opened up only since the ground was bared and rainwater began to work its way into the joints of the limestone. At least that is true of most of them; I can think of one, a very wide one on the next terrace below An Scairbh, that is stuffed with glacial till and so must have been open during or before the last Ice Age. Of course the warm spells between the Ice Ages—we may be living in one such—may also have seen erosion and fissuring of the limestone surface, but most traces of that would have been scoured away by the most recent glaciation. And to qualify the thesis further: not all the joints are open yet. Here by the boulder are some grykes that taper to a point and are continued by fine lines that look as if they had been drawn by a stonemason with scriber and steel rule. It is difficult to account for this: on a stratum that looks perfectly level and uniform, why is the joint closed here and open there? A freak of the irregular stripping away of the soil-cover? Or perhaps a joint can remain closed for some time after the baring of the surface, until some chance opens up a bit of its length, after which, because water-flow into the opening would be most concentrated at its advancing corner, the rest of the joint is comparatively rapidly unzipped. The fact that such effects are still legible on the present-day surface shows how tender and newborn it is, and how short will be its life. Once a fissure is open it will widen inexorably as the rainwater swills over its rim; erosion acts fastest on edges and corners, picking off the more exposed molecules, or so I have read in some textbook. But is that what is happening here? Looking around this crag again, I see a joint that is closed along most if its length apart from two or three short stretches, which are full of standing water; when I splash in one of them, the water in another is disturbed. So there is an open level of the joint, running underground like a drainpipe; in fact I can peer some way along it and see that only the upper inch or less of the joint is still tight. Solution is taking place from below; the agency is stagnant, not flowing, water. What does this imply about the closed joint running through the boulder pedestal? Science shrugs its shoulders like an Aran man, and looks off into the distance.