Stones of Aran

by Tim Robinson

  Certainly a track leads southwards from immediately east of the school; it shortly peters out, but one can persist in the same direction by climbing field-walls until one reaches the near end of a róidín coming to meet it from Bóthar na gCrag; we often went that way to the cliffs, and because it was a favourite route I marked it on my first map of Aran by a string of dashes, as something aspiring to be a path. However, soon after its publication I received a copy of my map through the post, on which that dashed line had been energetically crossed out and replaced by another string of dashes veering south-west to Gort na gCapall, defying the rule my explorations had determined, that paths tend to work along the natural grid of directions given by the north-south and east-west sets of fissures. The sender was a Pádraic Ó Flaithearta, formerly of Gort na gCapall and now living in Enniscorthy, or as he insisted on spelling it, Inis Corthaigh. On his next visit to his native island he called on me, and led me across the crags to Gort na gCapall pointing out the amenities of the way: a few blocks thrown down to help one across a gully, a narrow clearance through an area cluttered with loose stone, a tread cut in a rock-face, a slit in a wall just wide enough to step through one shin at a time. The ordinary Aran stile, I learned, consisting of two or three long through-stones sticking out on either side of the wall, is called the staighre (stairs) and is used between two fields within the one person’s holding. The other sort, marking a right-of-way, is the céimín (little step); it is an opening, usually not quite coming down to ground-level, between two uprights set so close together a sheep could not squeeze through. Since such a gap is virtually invisible until one is opposite it, and the other little orderings of stone making up the footpath are indistinguishable from the rest of the stony chaos until they are almost underfoot, our effortless oblique traverse felt to me like a run of good luck. I trotted after Pádraic Dan Phatch across this familiar terrain with a new and disorientating freedom, such as one would find on being shown how to pass through the walls of one’s own house.

  This footpath is Gort na gCapall’s right-of-way across Fearann an Choirce territory, its shortcut to the school and the main road leading on to the chapel and Cill Rónáin. “There used to be a shine on the rocks so many people went across there,” an old man of Gort na gCapall told me later on, “but since the bicycles came out no one goes that way.” There is a similar right-of-way going south-west from Cill Rónáin to Bóthar na gCrag, of which Dara the postman says, “There used to be a white line worn by the nailed boots all the way across the crags; you could even see it at night.” So in fact it was “the heavy boot of Europe” that for a while paved these ancient paths with a new magic, until the advance of technology left them to the slow recarpeting of lichen. What O’Flaherty calls a “mystic bond between this beautiful human energy and the wild earth over which it passed” was actually something less ineffable and more interesting, a temporary concatenation of compromises between nature’s immortal symmetries and the ordinary mortal’s will to cut corners.

  Over the years I have been shown several others of these formerly shining ways. A particularly attractive one, which was much used at night by seaweed-gatherers and kelp-burners, runs from the upper end of Fearann an Choirce down to An Duirling Bhán, the village’s kelp-shore, dropping from terrace to terrace by little steps nested in ferny clefts of the scarps. It would be reasonable to suppose that there was one cutting north-south across the great crags behind Cill Rónáin, and the tradition that the saints used to go that way between Mainistir and Cill Éinne probably represents the memory of such a path. If Nell of the Tower knew that shortcut and could follow it by night, something of her mystery might be explained; if there was a “shining way” from Gort na gCapall right across the back of the island along the line of the present Bóthar na gCrag, then Nell might well have been able to make her famous journey from Gort na gCapall to Cill Éinne faster than the man on horseback going round by the road through six hospitable villages. Few people would have known any of these intimately local routes other than the ones linked with their own village; the exceptions would be such anomalous characters as wise women and cartographers, who are not above cultivating a reputation for paranormal powers of way-finding.

  Today’s schoolchildren seem not to know of the shortcut to Gort na gCapall, or they prefer the chance of a lift along the roads. The sides of one or two of the little stiles have leaned together, quietly closing the way; grey forgetfulness has wiped away the footmarks that mapped out Aran for the moon. I spoke about this way once to a lady of another village who was born in Gort na gCapall, and it was as if I had reopened the gates of Eden. Raptly she recalled the adventures of that daily to-and-fro with her school-friends. The spots they rested their hands on in clambering up and down ledges were polished smooth, she said. Once she dropped the silvery cap of her new fountain-pen down a fissure; they could see it glinting, but “You might as well have been looking down into Hell, that scailp was so deep!” They marked the spot with a pile of stones, and that evening her brothers came with a crowbar, levered out a great slab, and reached out the pentop. She could show me the very slab today, she remembered every stone of the way. And as she talked, her eyes reflected the gleam of silver gifts unwrapped after years unseen.

  MOONGRAZING

  The finest limestone pavements of the island lie like a fallen sickle moon, some days old, some days new, along the curve of the land beyond Gort na gCapall; one can walk over great open tracts of rock, west and then north-westwards, all the way to the village of Cill Mhuirbhigh. On one’s left are, at first, the jagged ridge of the storm-beach around Port Bhéal an Dúin, and then the slightly higher ground, sparsely grassed and salted by spray, rising to the cliffs of An Sunda Caoch. A few hundred yards inland on one’s right, the terrace-edge is a sharp drop of fifteen or twenty feet, rimming a busily subdivided lowland of milking-pastures and potato-gardens. The walk from village to village could be made as little as a brisk mile, with only a few awkward walls and ravines to be negotiated, but the best route is indefinitely more complicated.

  Pádraic Dan Phatch first showed me the bee-line right-of-way across the crags from Gort na gCapall to the villagers’ favourite fishing perches on the cliffs. This used to be another of the silvery ways I have described, but its moonshine had long evaporated; I remember that at one point when I was walking a couple of paces to one side of him he gestured me back onto the correct path, which he could see or perhaps feel through his feet, although to me its humps and cracks were as illegible as the rest. Pádraic, that day, was an exile home on holiday, his long strides and declamatory reminiscences were an exultant reappropriation of the land of his youth, and the jottings I made on my map in his turbulent wake were far from clear to me afterwards. So I returned several times to go over the ground at my own pace, and gradually accommodated my eyes to catch the residual luminosity of the past even in the brightest present-daylight; and then I found that, apart from the fishermen’s shortcut, I could make out yet another and finer web of human investment in these crags.

  Some of the stiles of the right-of-way have collapsed or been filled with stones, but the first is clear to see, a substantial staighre in the wall of the boreen from the village where it turns south to the shore, and the second, a céimín, is straight opposite it, across a hundred yards of pavement which the glaciers have moulded into long smooth billows. After that the route is crossed by more recent walls, and the next clear céimín is three hundred yards further west. My wanderings over the intervening crags in search of traces of the true way revealed so many intriguing little adjustments of the ground to the foot that I ended up by mapping it in detail; any islander seeing me nosing out these rocky hints and nudges might have wondered if I had trodden on the fóidín mearbhaill or “stray sod,” for one who steps on such a spot loses all sense of direction and has to wander till moonrise, the only remedy being to take off one’s coat and put it on again inside out.

  I am tempted to write a guide to this crooked acre, to push fu
rther into absurdity the pretensions of this book to comprehensiveness. But such a guide would have to be addressed to the cow’s hoof rather than the human foot, and would fall into a browsing, straying, gait, petering out in ruminative stillness, for the expanse of stone is interrupted by oases of grass, and the purpose of all this micro-engineering is to link these into a maze of grazing, that the desert may yield meat and milk. Thus:

  To begin at the beginning (Oh Cow!), you should wait patiently while Rónán Dan Phatch or Oisín Rónáin Dan or whoever is conducting you throws down the “gap” in the boreen wall twenty yards south of the first stile mentioned above. An unusual oblique gully in which some knee-deep and more than worthwhile grass is growing guides a narrow track to the next gap, beside the second stile; this track looks comparatively recent, and where it crosses rock the fissures have been filled with small stones and the way edged with larger blocks and surfaced with clay for your comfort. Beyond the second gap there is a deeply fissured outcrop on the right; roll your eye at this and remember Tom O’Flaherty’s essay “Bó i Sgailp.” (Easily translated: bó, a cow, is one of the noble ancient words of Irish, and indeed as the late Professor Vendryes puts it in his indispensable and most regrettably uncompleted Lexique étymologique de l’Irlandais ancien, “C’est le nom indo-européen de l’animal bovin, conservé dans la plupart des langues,”—and he instances among others Sanskrit Greek and of course the Latin bos; from bó derive such foundational terms of Irish culture as bóthar, a road, originally a way that could accomodate two cows, buachall, a boy, originally a cow-boy, and, to butter you up no further, Boand, the cow-goddess who gave her name to the River Boyne. The word sgailp, nowadays spelled scailp, plural scalpachaí or (my preference) scailpreachaí, a cleft, fissure, cave, etc., is in Aran of almost equal weight, being with creig the most important term of topography in this island composed almost entirely of creigeanna and scailpreachaí. Hence: bó i sgailp, a cow in a cleft.) Picture, then, young Tom’s alarm when:

  …the most wierd and feared cry that ever smote the ear of Aran islander fell on the village like the crack of doom.

  “Bó I Sgailp! Bó I Sgailp! Bó I Sgailp!”

  The meaning of this was that somebody’s cow had caught in a cleft among the rocks, and that it was almost certain the animal was lost.

  In that case the precious beast had broken its leg and had to be “put down”; here though there is no danger of such a disaster, because Dan Phatch himself long ago built a little rim of stones around the patch of scailpreachaí, to guide you leftwards. Better still, the stones he used were fished out of a saucer-like depression of broken ground in which the grass therefore grows unimpeded; room to swish one’s tail here! A trodden path winds southwestwards across the grass to another gap, giving onto a crag that is deeply scored across by long depressions a couple of yards wide made by the glaciers that grazed the island fifteen or twenty thousand years ago. Each of these gleainníní or little glens has a thin carpet of heather and some mouthfuls of grass to be snatched while following the first of them to the north for a few paces. Now cross the intervening rib of limestone to the next gleain nín—the fissures at the crossing-point have been packed with stones and a row of small blocks placed on either side to stop you straying onto rock which might be slippery after rain. The second hollow offers thirty or forty paces of grazing flavoured with tormentil, milkwort, fairy flax and a dozen other herbs too minute to be savoured individually but all said to be good for you. This brings you to the wall separating this enclosure from the one north of it, which is even less interpretable as a field than this enclosure. A bit of smoothening and infilling of the creig has made a passable route along the wall—mind your flanks, especially if pregnant, on the projecting angles of its stones—to a gap in the western wall of the enclosure, opening into another grassy hollow going south again. A cutting hacked through the next long finger of rock—rather narrow and sharp-edged at hock-level, please note—opens up one more dip the glacier bulldozed out for grass to grow in. The staighre in the wall immediately west of it is of course not good enough for cows, but the wall makes this a sheltered corner in which to chew the cud.

  The point to which I have brought the cow is only two hundred yards from the gap in the boreen wall, and after so many closely considered paces it is exhilarating to rove more widely over the crag of almost uninterrupted bare rock to the north, which forms a salient of the terrace-rim, sticking out like the nose of the Man in the Moon over the lower land beyond. The tip of it is called Aill na Sagart, the cliff of the priests, and there is a vague tradition that the Mass used to be celebrated here, perhaps during the time of the Penal Laws against the Catholic religion some three hundred years ago. It is a lofty-feeling spot, though I suppose it is not more than twenty feet above the little fields that congregate around its foot. A green and flowery boreen, a favourite walk of ours when the primroses are in bloom, passes immediately below on its many-angled way from Gort na gCapall, of which the nearest houses are not far away on the right, to Cill Mhuirbhigh beach, half a mile ahead to the left. This fertile area is called An Caiseal, for no clear reason; a caiseal can be many stony things from a great stone fort like Dún Aonghasa (which overlooks the entire scene of this chapter from the western skyline), to a little pile of stones left over from a children’s game, but this is Gort na gCapall’s most stone-free land, of good duramhán, sandy loam, and well watered from springs under the terrace-rim. Seen from above like this, the fields in their low walls look up with the innocency of rooms in a doll’s house when one lifts the roof and peeps in. This would be the setting of “Spring Sowing”—in fact there they are, Martin and Mary, at their midday bread and butter and tea. Should one look?

  Martin ate heartily, revelling in his great thirst and hunger, with every pore of his body open to the pure air. Then he looked around at his neighbours’ fields boastfully, comparing them with his own. Then he looked at his wife’s little round black head and felt very proud of having her as his own. He leaned back on his elbow and took her hand in his. Shyly and in silence, not knowing what to say and ashamed of their gentle feelings, for peasants are always ashamed of feeling refined, they finished eating and still sat hand in hand looking away into the distance. Everywhere the sowers were resting on little knolls, men, women and children sitting in silence….

  From Aill na Sagart I look away, into the distance. Poking my nose into the island’s tender moments, when there is work to be done, sense to be harrowed out of the rock! Back to my moonscape!

  In that distance beyond Cill Mhuirbhigh bay, a crisp pleating of grey-blue and fawn along the horizon represents the highlands of Connemara. According to most accounts of the last Ice Age it was from an ice-cap on the mountains to the right in this vista, the Maumturks, that our local glaciers emanated. Listening to one’s footsteps ringing on the pristine pavement above Aill na Sagart one could imagine that the ice had only just retired from its polishing. The name of this particularly fine tract of crag is Creig na Leacht, and it seems that here leacht means, not a monument or cairn, but simply the same as leac, a “flag” or rock-sheet. When a low sun plays obliquely across this wide-open expanse it adumbrates every inequality of the surface, overlaying the rock with transparencies, dim maps of all the dimly understood processes that have worked on it. Among these diagrammatic apparitions are a number of approximately parallel channels, a few feet wide and a few inches deep, their shelving flanks delicately carved into scarps of half an inch or so, traceable in places for thirty yards or more; they look like gentle rivers of space or fossilized breezes. They have not been created by erosion along particularly close-set joints of the limestone, like the much deeper gleainníní with their bottoms of broken, fissured stone and heathery sward, for these channels have floors as bare and smooth as the surrounding pavement. I have noted them in many parts of the island, but these on Creig na Leacht are the most striking examples. They seem to occur mainly, or at least to be more apparent, on rock-exposures with very few joint
s, that is, on the hardest, purest limestone, and they tend roughly north-north-east, just a few degrees more easterly than does the principal set of joints. (Here their bearing is about 21 degrees east of true north, whereas the main joints, the field walls and the gleainníní run at about 12 degrees east, i.e. in the direction I have been calling Aran North). That they pre-date the opening-up of the joints by weathering is demonstrated by the fact that they run on from clint to clint; where the rainwater swills off them between two clints their lips have been worn down into wide funnels, but otherwise their beds are continuous across the grykes. This seems to suggest that although they have been modified by weathering since the crags were left bare, basically they are the work of glaciation—and, looking out along them, their perspective converges very convincingly on the Maumturks. However, if they were excavated by loose rock being dragged across the land surface by ice, one would expect them to be very varied, whereas throughout the islands they are rather similar in their dimensions. My sources of geological understanding are unwilling to commit themselves to an opinion on the origins of these tracings, so I leave them among the enigmas of Aran.

  “Solution-hollows” are common features on smooth pavements like this, and they too pose their questions. They are usually rather flat-bottomed, a few inches deep, with sharply-defined, near-vertical sides, and as varied in shape as puddles on roads. Many hold rainwater long enough for algae to flourish in them, not only the free-swimming single-celled sorts that under the microscope look like bizarre clockwork toys, but grape-sized blobs of a blue-green alga called Nostoc, sometimes enough of it to cover the floor of the hollow. In a dry spell this squashy stuff is reduced to a black soil and generally blows away, but if some of it remains and accumulates, mosses and herbs will seize their chance and eventually the hollow may be plugged with a grassy “scraw” or sod; thus Nostoc is in the front line of the vegetable-world’s unremitting struggle to take over the crags in the teeth of the wind and the herbivore. But this primitive life-form may be an agent of creation and destruction at an even deeper level; for it secretes a weak acid which attacks limestone. The solution-hollows themselves are the work of Nostoc, slowly eating out nests for itself from whatever little toeholds its spore wash into. The cratering of clint-surfaces by this almost amorphous slime is one of the forces rendering Aran down to oceanic solutes once again. On the way to this end, Nostoc helps make the place liveable, fit for grass, cows, humans, books. It may also explain those fissures closed on the surface and open below, that I puzzled over in “Modalities of Roughness.” But it leaves another puzzle in its wake, that often makes me halt and kneel to examine it when I am mooning about the crags. The curiosity is that many of the solution-hollows have rims standing a quarter or half an inch proud of the pavement and fretted into little crests and thorn-like points. One might wonder if these have been built up by deposition of calcium carbonate, as a side-effect of the chemical activity of Nostoc, but so far as I can see they are composed of exactly the same limestone as they arise from, and have been carved out of it. Why would such delicate structures not be abolished in their incipiency by erosion? Why have they been excepted from the general polishing-down of the surface? Again, I search the land and the literature of limestone in vain for an answer.