by Tim Robinson
[Indeed this craggy island looks a bare cold rugged place in the eyes of the stranger, who is amazed that the people can live on it at all. Not unknown to their bones is it, believe me, for early and late they are reclaiming and preparing land, shattering and blasting, and flattening ledges and stony crags with a crushing-stone, that and blocking up the crevices and hauling sods and clods in baskets on their backs, and spreading them on the rough stone-patches they are trying to make into fields.]
All the factors bearing on it—population, the potato-diet, pig-rearing, farming in general—having fallen away, the making of land is now at an end. I only once saw it being done, in 1973. In the course of a walk near Gort na gCapall, M and I stopped to pass the time of day with a man who was stirring a few sods of grass around with a spade, trying to make them cover a small area of crag, which showed through his incipient field as through a worn-out carpet. It was a grey cold day; he stood there as grey and cold as a monolith, and looked at us expressionlessly. “Are ye enjoying your holidays?” he asked; it was clearly his mechanical response to the sight of strangers. We had been on the island for several months at that time, and hastened to tell him that we were not on our holidays, and for some reason M added, “We’re poor people!,” as if that were a guarantee of our groundedness. “Oh, ye’re poor people,” he echoed tonelessly. I wondered uneasily how my labour compared to his, mine at that stage being nothing more than vacant wandering about the island. Perhaps we were unnerved by an imagined implication of his task, that he had sculpted himself through timeless toil out of rock. Later on, though, a neighbour told me that the man had no need of another field and was making it with an eye to the grant rather than to any living crop.
Let none of these connections with irrealities that I have drawn be seen as making light of the work. The pleasant greenness of Fearann an Choirce was largely created, over a hundred years or more, by its inhabitants, through a process as sparing (in a profound sense) as that by which a snail secretes its shell. Helping Michael King in a field that, fifty years earlier, his father got the first crop off by laying out lines of seed-potatoes on a little crushed shale and seaweed, and covering them with upside-down sods of grass shaved off the crags here and there, I share his pride in the fact that its soil is now four inches deep, and as I carry a bucketful of stones off it to the great mossy cairn of them in the far corner, I feel I am lending a hand in a labour, not open-endedly timeless, but well found in history. A poem by Tomás Ó Direáin, brother of the more famous Máirtín, shows us an Aran man in prayer on the site of a field to be:
Féach é ina sheasamh ar an leic,
Atá liath agus lom…
[See him standing on the flag, / Which is grey and bare…]
It ends elementally:
Le allas a bhaithis,
Le fuil a chroí,
Déanfaidh sé talamh
As na scalpachaí.
[With the sweat of his brow, / With the blood of his heart, / He will make tilth / Out of clints and grykes.]
Having no better words to commemorate the blood of the heart, I will note the names and properties some of the fields of Fearann an Choirce.
First, just west of Tobar Ghrióir and tucked under the scarp, Garraí an tSeanbhalla, the garden of the old wall, a hayfield with a mass of overgrown stonework at the far end of it, origin unknown. Next to it, by the roadside, is a roofless cottage with empty doorway and window-openings, inhabited by nettles, from which the field behind it is called Garraí an tSeantí, the garden of the old house; the Kings, hereditary blacksmiths, lived here until they moved further down the road, a generation back. The first of them to settle here was Gregory, who—but no! Each of these houses has its story, which I will tell (with certain neighbourly omissions) later on, but for this chapter the fields alone can supply more of the third vital fluid of the village—talk, the others being water and blood—than I can deal with.
So, opposite the old King house, where the water that shows itself in the well resurfaces, having percolated under the ramp of the road, is Gairdín na Sailí, the sally-garden, a tiny quarter-circle nestled into the curving fall of the road, full of osiers, which used to be regularly coppiced and orderly but now are inextricably rampant. The only basket-maker we knew of lived a little way back east, in Baile na Creige: Joeen na gCloch, Joeen of the stones (he had been a mason as well), a big old man who used to sit like a grounded hulk on the rising ground before his cottage, and who answered our greetings with a surly roar—he was very deaf—that for a long time kept us from going up to watch him at work. To make one of the big potato-baskets used with a straddle on a horse or donkey, he would start by spiking sally-rods into the ground two inches or so apart, outlining a rectangle, and then weave rods horizontally through them, one after the other, knocking each one down against the last with the edge of his hand, so that the basket grew from the ground upwards, upside down. When the walls were complete, the uprights would be bent over and woven together to make the base, and finally the whole thing was uprooted and the spikes shortened back to the rim with neat oblique penknife-cuts. I persuaded Joeen to make me a smaller version of such a basket for the handlebars of my bicycle, and in later years this became the feature by which I was recognized all over Connemara; old boatmen in particular would flag me down to reminisce about the fine sally-rods, long enough to go round a turf-basket, that they used to bring back from Aran in return for turf itself.
Having irrigated the sally-garden, the water trickles through its wall and disappears underground in the next field, Gort an Bhiolair, the garden of the watercress. I watched a man rather crossly dealing with a newborn calf here, hoisting it to its feet, poking his fingers down its throat to make it swallow the crucial first milk from the cow, the thick yellowish “beestings.” It was not his calf, and he came away from the slobbery job grumbling about its owner who had missed the critical hour, having gone into Cill Rónáin “for a pound of butter,” his invariant excuse for a session in Joe Watty’s pub. South of that field and just outside Gilbert Cottage is Garraí na Ceártan, the field of the smithy. The King’s old smithy is now an outhouse or “store,” next to the guest-house. From here the road straightens itself out again and runs west. Along its north side is an alternation of bungalows and cottages, and opposite them a sequence of rough meadows collectively known as Gort an Éadáin, the field of the face, referring to the cliff-face of the scarp, which closes them to the south. Once, perhaps fifty or sixty years ago, two men were digging shale out from under the scarp here; they broke off to go home for dinner, leaving their baskets in the field, and when they came back there was a white rabbit in each basket, which frightened them so much they abandoned the work and never took it up again. Or so I am told—with the same reluctance I have noticed in the telling of a few other Aran anecdotes which the teller believes to be both true and false and therefore unsuited to the Aristotelian ears of outsiders.
After Gort an Éadáin the scarp swings away to the south, leaving the road exposed to the breath of the Atlantic. Mícheál King’s house—a large cottage with ample loft-rooms that make it almost two-storied—stands a little defiantly further out than the original village cluster into this sudden spaciousness. The area around it is called An Mullán Mór, the big boulder, from a huge granite erratic which Mícheál tells me was “the only landmark in Aran,” until the Kings broke it up with “block and feather” when reclaiming the land; a fraction of it lies by their front gate still. The lichen-grey house has the loneliness and wilful isolationism of ageing bachelorhood about it, and I know the wasteland underlies by a very few inches the greensward about it; nevertheless, for a few years An Mullán Mór was for me the dream-field of a childlike age.
One dark evening shortly after our arrival on the island I was walking by when Mícheál came stumbling down to the roadside wall with a gift: five hen-eggs, luminous in the twilight, nested in his cupped hands. For good measure he also gave me a turn of speech useful for expressing a reservation: “A dece
nt man—but did you ever have to divide five eggs with him?” He soon took to calling on us for help with his residual farming, rather than be beholden to his neighbours, and this initiated us into many country ways and sights no longer to be found on the mainland. When Mícheál’s hen, having hatched out her eggs in some secluded bramblebush, led a wobbly line of chicks to his doorstep, we helped him to herd them to the little sty or póirín attached to the barn behind the house. He was insistent that we imitate him exactly, advancing gently with arms slightly spread and palms towards them, murmuring “Póirín, póirín,” and I realized that indirectly we were miming his mother spreading her skirts to herd chicks generations back from these. In the margins of Mícheál’s scything and harrowing and potato-spraying I would search out the old-fashioned weeds that have been long rooted out from modern farmlands: vaporous grey-green fumitary, long-headed poppies, lady’s mantle, wild carrot, all the lovely little cranesbills—the long-stalked, the Pyrenean, the cut-leaved, the doves foot, the shining—and precious rarities such as thale cress, and, best of all, penny-cress, with the heart-shaped translucent purses full of flat round seeds that must have delighted country children everywhere once. (But how did I miss the cornflower, rediscovered in Fearann an Choirce in 1987, having been thought extinct in Ireland for thirty years?)
Mícheál had only one milk cow, and wanted to teach me to milk it so that I could stand in for him when he went off to Galway for a few days. The agreed convention is that one squats by the cow’s right flank to milk; if I forgot this and approached from her left she would look backwards at me out of the corner of her eye and turn herself right round in one jump. Often she would not “stand” for me at all, but rambled off from field to field with me patiently stepping after her, holding out the plastic bucket like a begging bowl and repeating the charm that was supposed to lull her into a cooperative mood, “Sonas ort!” (“Fortune on you!”). Mícheál would knit his brows over this, and go up to where M was watching from the safety of a high flowery bank, and say, “You would think with all his education he could milk a cow!” But I got the knack of it to some degree, and then there were many dawns in which the cow’s overhang sheltered me from the drifting rain while I participated in the ancient insanitary magic of milking a cow in Aran, dipping my finger and thumb into the milk to lubricate her warty teats, cursing her when she suddenly let fall a splatter of dung, dipping into the milk again when I had finished to make the sign of the cross on her haunch. Sometimes I had to take some of the milk to a calf that had been weened, that is, dolefully separated by walls from its mother, some weeks previously. Leaning over the built-up “gap” and holding the bucket down to the calf, feeling the roughness of its newly dehorned skull thrust against my knuckles, seeing the long threads of milk and saliva curve away with the wind as I lifted up the bucket and spilt the last drops into its gaping mouth, I used to wonder if I would ever find exactly as much or as little strangeness in these actions as an Aran man does.
Also, I learned to ride Mícheál’s Connemara pony in the meadows of An Mullán Mór—and “not unknown to my bones was it!” She had just been unhitched from the harrow and loosed into a fine flat field. Mícheál, seeing me considering flinging myself onto her back with the virile abandon of an Aran lad, called out, “Mind the hins!,” but since all the hens were out of the way at the other end of the field I ignored him, and leaped up, and bruised my ribs on the “hins,” which, I learned too late, are the iron projections of the yoke to which the harrow is linked. My chest hurt for weeks. I never lived out my fantasy of galloping a bareback horse into the surf at Port Mhuirbhigh, leaning back with halter held high in the heroic and antique style I admired, for instance, in a ten-year-old known as Tom Tom Mhikey Tom, the butcher’s son.
But there are deeper sources of misunderstanding than the lexicon of skills between people of different cultures. An anthropologist might have frowned over all this Edenic time in An Mullán Mór as the classic but unstable alliance between a slightly marginalized member of a traditional society, and a potentially transient incomer. I suppose it is a wonder that my part-time participation in the life of the Man of Aran, or at least of his younger brother, lasted as long as it did, and ended, I hope, without too much heartache on either side.
Mícheál’s is almost the last of the reclaimed land on this level of the island; opposite it on the north of the road is Creig Chol Citte, of which a bit has been reduced to a lawn of suburban neatness in front of Máire Bhríd Rua’s little B&B, and the rest, left wild, occasionally supports a donkey in existence for a while. Col Citte (i.e. Colm the son of Cáit), the man who heard the fairies churning at Clochán an Airgid, is remembered by the older neighbours as a great worker who, by the time they were getting out of bed, would have already begun his second journey of the day with a load of seaweed from the shore to his potato-gardens south of the village. On his creig there are a few little heaps of stone, memorial cairns—though who they memorialize is unknown—built while funerals passing here took a rest after climbing the hill from the west. Just beyond them are high, half broken-down walls surrounding the overgrown yard and low ruins of the National School built in 1868. These walls used to have coloured glass windows in them, a whim of a schoolmaster called Moloney, whom middle-aged islanders remember as a curiosity for his plus-fours and his “great liking for trees.” It was to protect his trees and shrubs that he had the walls built both around the school and the teacher’s residence a little further on. In our time a tall gawky Cordyline australis—we supposed it was a palm-tree until a visiting botanist put us right—still grew by the ruins of the school, tattered by gales and hacked by children, as inappropriate, pathetic and evocative as a bit of stage scenery left behind by travelling players; even today its rotting broken-off stump sprouts a few green fronds. Creig na Scoile, the crag of the school, over the road from it, no longer exists as such, since the present school was built on it in 1945 and in the last few years has been joined by the Irish-language summer school, a rather ambitious piece of architecture which rears a tall prow against the great sea of rock behind it—An Chreig Mhór, the big crag, on which for years I nourished my solitude. Between the two schools is one of the square pillar-shaped cenotaphs, in a rather shaky state from generations of children climbing on it, whose weather-beaten plaques are illegible until the sun comes round to the west far enough to graze them with its rays, when suddenly one can read:
Lord have me
rcy on the soul of
Ann Dirran who
died in 16th yr. of
her age 1846
This Monunent
was Erected by
her Father
Patrick Dirrane
There were also, I am told, a number of small memorial cairns on this crag which were swept away when the school was built. Despite these funereal reminders a fine flat bit of pavement here was the village dance-floor. A little further west there is a modern plaster Christ Crucified; occasionally I used to see old Uncle Colman from Gilbert Cottage kneeling in prayer before it, when he thought there was nobody on the road. Perhaps Creig na Scoile was a place associated with gatherings and ceremonies of various kinds, for the St. John’s Eve bonfire is still lit on a grassy margin of the road just east of it. Each village of Aran has its bonfire-stand, usually a neat round stone-built platform about a yard across and two or three feet high; visitors are puzzled by these sooty little altars, nowadays often draped in coils of fine wire from the worn-out tyres that contribute a large part of the blaze. Nearly all the Celtic magic of this midsummer festival is lost now—the throwing of embers into the fields to bring luck to the crops, the driving of cattle between two bonfires, the leaping over the flames—but if the night is fine the villages of Aran and those of Connemara still remind each other of it across a dozen miles of sea.
Another people held their revels just down the road. A green patch, thirty paces by twenty, three days’ grazing for Mícheál’s cow, has been walled off from the few hundred yards o
f rough ground between the schools and the former teacher’s residence. Its perimeter is thickly lined within by blackberry bushes which reduce its open area to that of a good-sized room—a ballroom, perhaps, for this is Móinín an Damhsa, the little meadow of the dancing. I used to wonder if it was the meadow itself which was supposed by this name to dance, for its surface is just two or three smoothly swelling waves of grass and daisies. When Mícheál’s elder brother Patrick, who used to revisit the island occasionally, told me the meadow was so named because someone once saw fairies dancing in it, Mícheál looked displeased, and I half suspected Patrick of testing my credulity. But recently I came across the following, in The Fairy Faith in Celtic Countries by Evans Wentz, published in 1911:
Our next witness is an old man, familiarly called “Old Patsy,” who is a native of the Island of Aranmore, off the coast of Galway, and he lives on the island amid a little group of straw-thatched fishermen’s homes called Oak quarter. As “Old Patsy” stood beside a rude stone cross near Oak quarter, in one of those curious places on Aranmore, where each passing funeral stops long enough to erect a little memorial pile of stones on the smooth rocky surface of the roadside enclosure, he told me many anecdotes about the mysteries of his native island.
Twenty years or so ago round the Bedd of Dermot and Grania, just above us on the hill, there were seen many fairies, “crowds of them,” said “Old Patsy,” and a single deer. They began to chase the deer, and followed it right over the island…. When I asked Patsy where the fairies lived, he turned half round, and pointing in the direction of Dun Aengus, which was in full view on the sharp sky-line of Aranmore, said that there, in a large tumulus on the hillside below it, they had one of their favorite abodes. “But,” he added,” The rocks are full of them, and they are small fellows.” Just over the road from where we were standing, another place was pointed out where the fairies are often seen dancing. The name of it is Moneen an Damhsa, “the Little Bog of the Dance.”