Stones of Aran

by Tim Robinson

  Close to the last and an hour farther round the clock is another Lithostrotion colony, of a form in which the branches are so bunched together that in cross-section they look like the cells of a honeycomb. Parts of this fossil have been replaced by silica rather than calcite, and as limestone wears away faster than silica they stand out of the surface of the rock as if a finely tooled bronze bracelet were being revealed. The point in common with the other, round-tubed, Lithostrotion, and which serves to identify it, at least among the Aran fossils, as a member of the same genus, is the flattened, rod-like structure in the centre of each tube; in these cross-sections it looks as if each hexagon or roundel has a tiny compass needle in it.

  The last of the corals here is another solitary, Palaeosmilia, a pale patch like the thumbprint of a giant frost on the rock, touching the nautiloid at six o’clock. Its structure is incredibly delicate, with perhaps fifty septa (more than I can count) and innumerable tiny curved plates between them forming a pattern like overlapping round tiles or fish-scales. There is another Palaeosmilia four paces away at half past four, showing a longitudinal section in which the septa appear as a bank of slightly curved lines. A rough band across them perhaps records an accident to the creature, from which it recovered and grew on.

  Some fauna other than corals of the Carboniferous sea can be sampled along this same half-past-four line. First, right by the nautiloid, is a spiral a couple of inches across, showing slight traces of ornamentation but none of the partitions that distinguish the nautiloids; it is a gastropod, a mollusc like the modern snail or winkle. Eighteen inches further out is something that looks like a shard of bone-china—one of the large lamp-shells or brachiopods, Gigantoproductus, that I described in my first volume in connection with the shell-beds on the coast nearby. Immediately beyond it are dozens of white bits and pieces, some like beads or short rows of beads stuck together, and some like a thick letter O, which are the remains of sea-lily stems. Sea-lilies or crinoids are animals related to the starfish, with five plume-like arms for trawling the water, and all the Carboniferous species of them, like many modern ones, were anchored by a flexible stalk, which falls apart into short cylindrical bits after death. In places the Aran limestone is almost entirely composed of minute crinoid fragments. Finally, beyond the beads, are traces of some mud-dwelling invertebrate species; their boneless bodies have left no fossils, but their burrows have been filled in with some material that now shows up in the surface of the limestone as intermittent ribbons and patches of a darker tint. And all over the surrounding crag are other dim or pallid shadows of once brilliantly coloured creatures. At any hour of the clock the ghosts of Aran’s gorgeous natal sea are around one’s feet.

  Lithostrotion, Palaeosmilia, Dibunophyllum—to some, these polysyllables may sound like dog-eared labels curling in the drought of a museum, but to me they are as fresh and exotic as the names Adam gave the beasts were to him. As I have presented them here, they are so many isolated bits fallen out of a structure of which I know little, in which each has its place and its significance, naming a link in an evolutionary chain, indicating a distinction between strata, commemorating a discovery, insinuating a hypothesis. The only question that arises as regards this book is whether they serve to focus vision or stand opaque between the eye and its object, for I call on the past only to cast its colours on the present. And I have found in practice that the attempt to learn the names of things magnifies their features; even when detached from the apparatus of science such nouns are powerful lenses. With them I peer into this rock-surface as if it were a glass case in a museum—and when I lift my tired eyes to the museum clock, whose spring winds back through so many aeons, sometimes its face is a stony blank, and sometimes it indicates the present moment with a scrupulous and hard-won exactitude.

  GOING TO CILL MHUIRBHIGH

  O’Donovan’s Ordnance Survey letters, 1839:

  In the same townland of Kilmurvy about half a mile east of Mr. O’Flaherty’s house are visible the indistinct foundations of a church which is said to have given name to the townland of Kilmurvy, which means the church of the Muirbheach or Sea plain. It is at present, however, called Eatharla, a name which seems to signify a cemetery. Stations are performed here with great solemnity on Good Friday, on which the pilgrims walk round the whole island keeping as near the strand or edge of the cliffs as they can.

  This is the only substantive reference we have to “the church of the sea-plain,” of which nothing is remembered. “Atharla, site of” is marked on the old OS maps, about forty yards south of the main road where it makes a little detour around the head of Port Mhuirbhigh. On several occasions I have hopped across the low roadside wall into the big field to look for it, never quite reconciled to the fact that not a trace of it is to be seen. I was usually on my way to the Conneelys’ shop, guest-house and post office in the village, half a mile further west, which was a focus of the island for us. If, to the islanders of long ago, going to Cill Mhuirbhigh meant going to the church of the sea-plain, in our time it meant going to Conneelys’. Now Conneelys’ lies derelict, and on recent visits to the island I have stayed at Kilmurvey House, the former O’Flaherty residence O’Donovan refers to, which in its turn has become for me the centre of gravity of the village.

  The sea-plain itself, Na Muirbhigh Móra, around the head of the bay, is the heart of the Kilmurvey House farm, a smooth tract of sandy grassland divided by straight walls into near-rectangles of two thousand square yards or so, in striking contrast to the Gort na gCapallites’ crumpled pocket-handkerchiefs of land immediately to the south in An Caiseal. Each year one or two of the fields are in hay, and dry cattle roam the rest. Parts of this area used to be tilled, and the evening sun brings out the shadows of old potato-ridges that must have seemed eternally long to those who had to dig them. In a damp hollow there are traces of unusually broad ridges, about three yards across, in which I am told flax used to be cultivated. On a knoll by the roadside at the west end of the beach is a small, walled, cemetery, from which the Celtic cross marking the O’Flaherty grave-plot overlooks the entire productive basin of land; seeing it, I imagine James O’Flaherty JP watching the scythes work across his fields from that vantage-point and reading the self-gratulatory motto “Fortuna favet fortibus,” “Fortune favours the brave,” on his father’s tomb.

  The westernmost of these big fields below the cemetery is favoured by a fortune of wild-flowers. A honeyed breeze rolls across the road from it in high summer; it breathes out more riches in an afternoon than the O’Flahertys gathered in all their history. The usual meadow-herbs such as purple and white clovers and the yellow kidney vetch, bird’s foot trefoil and lady’s bedstraw are abundant; there is also the less common squinancywort, and clambering and twining through all these a rare curiosity, the common dodder. This parasite, a network of reddish, hair-fine, filaments, virtually rootless and leafless, blossoming in tiny clusters of minute pinkish bells, taps the juices of other plants through tiny suckers penetrating their tissues. It seems to enjoy a superfluity of sweets here; I think that much of the aerial mead intoxicating the bees is distilled by its flowers.

  This field falls away shallowly to the south-west, and under the wall of the boreen going by it to An Caiseal are three hollows where water wells out of the ground after rain. One December M and I decided to walk round that way, after having been kept in for days by thunderstorms charging across the island on great thick smoky stalks of rain, each one darkening the house for a few minutes and turning the garden shrubs inside out before rushing off eastwards. Having edged our way down the road between the hard lumps of wind, we found that Bóithrín an Chaisil had disappeared into a small angry lake. There were two or three whooper swans on the water, and some wild duck I could not identify in the winter twilight. I went down again after calm had had a few days to establish itself. This time, it was the hour accurately termed in Irish “the ring of dawn.” Stepping out of the house into a stillness that was just beginning to be quartered by birdson
g, I found my wellington boots so noisy on the road I had to go back and change into shoes, by which time the moment of perfection had been replaced by some mere gritty-eyed early-morning clock-hour. But down by the wintery lake I was rewarded by a glimpse of a bird I hadn’t seen in Aran before, the water rail, like a little grey-brown hen, going off high-stepping and tip-tilted into the ranks of curled dock along the further shore.

  Even in droughty weather one would guess that the lower half of the field is a turlough, from the ragged hanks of black-brown moss on the stones of its southern wall, and the striking distribution of plants that are particular about how much immersion they can take. In their respective seasons the small dandelion-like autumn hawkbit, Leontodon autumnalis, and the big white ox-eye daisy make vivid contour-maps of the slopes around the hollows. The hollow nearest to the main road—Poll an Chapaill, the pool of the horse—must go down nearly to sea-level, for the stones in its bottom are draped with livid green tresses of Enteromorpha seaweed; it probably connects with an outflow of fresh water on the shelving beach across the road and four hundred yards to the north, that shows up in the bright clean sand as a dark patch smelling of vegetable decay. Each of the three foci of the turlough has its own flora. In Poll an Chapaill, on the mud between the stones there is water speedwell, and around that a stratum of silverweed and marsh bedstraw, with creeping cinquefoil on the rough outcrop that makes a little mantle to the swallow-hole. The second swallow-hole, a hundred yards further inland, is shallower. A dark-toned area of spike rush surrounds it, mixed with common redleg and the rather rare marsh yellow cress, Rorippa icelandica, and in the muddy centre grows a white-flowered crowfoot, Ranunculus trichophyllus. The third is in a small triangular field over the boundary wall in Gort na gCapall territory. Most of the hollow is deeply carpeted with silverweed, round its rim is a zone of marsh ragwort, and on the bare mud in the middle squats the miserable-looking toad rush.

  In summer the air over these mud-ponds is zipping with small brown dragonflies; the common Sympetrum, I think. They mate in flight, with Kamasutral contortions: in both sexes the genitalia are under the tail-end of the long abdomen, but the male also has claspers on his tail and accessory sex-organs under the front end of his abdomen; with the claspers he holds the female by the back of the neck, she secures the grip by flexing her head or neck, and then she bends her own abdomen forwards and applies the sex-organ near the end of it to the male’s accessory organ; and off they go looped together like some letter out of an erotic alphabet. When she is ready to lay her eggs, her mate helicopters over the pond with the female still hanging from his tail and lowers her until she can dab her abdomen into the mud or the water again and again, washing off the eggs one at a time. Admiring these antics one day, I saw a lone dragonfly pursuing a linked couple. She—it must have been a she—attached herself by the neck to the tail of the other female, which brought the whole train of them crashing to the ground. The male quickly disengaged himself and flew off, the female in possession got herself free and darted after him, and the interloper stayed there flicking her wings. It was impossible not to see the three of them respectively as exasperated, insatiate, and disconsolate.

  One day in the summer of ’75 I found this last part of the turlough covered with ragged sheets of something like a thick whitish paper, draped over the rampant tussocks of silverweed; there were perhaps a hundred square yards of it. I was baffled as to this nature of this substance, which seemed to have appeared overnight and was to shrivel away over the following few days. Later I learned from Máire Scannell of the National Botanic Gardens that it was “algal paper.” It forms in turloughs when hot weather causes microscopic algae (Oedogonium and other species) to proliferate in a matted scum, which is left high and dry as the water-level drops away, and is baked and bleached to the consistency of paper. Since then I have seen acres of it around one of the big turloughs in the Burren, but outside the turlough areas of the west of Ireland it is an exceedingly rare occurrence. A German scientist told me it had only been reported about a dozen times in Germany, where it is known as “meteor-paper” because it used to be thought to fall from the sky. It is curious that Praeger, who recorded the turlough flora very thoroughly, makes no mention of the phenomenon, which suggests that it has become more frequent since his time—but why that should be, I do not know.

  Loch an Mhuirbhigh, the lake of the sea-plain, is the name of this turlough. I love the place. Its moods are less coercive than the hyperventilating lucidity of the crags or the hypnotic intricacies of the thickety little scarp-foot plots. In its relaxed openness and the grace of its distinctions, not to mention the cards it keeps up its sleeve, the quality it suggests is intelligence.

  Going on towards the village, the road climbs past an odd detached length of cliff like a bun sandwich, a thin slice of shale between two fat layers of limestone. The tall umbellifers flourishing on the cliff-face, with dark glossy leaves and yellowish flower-heads, are alexanders. The cemetery lies along the south of the road at the top of the slope, and opposite it is a wide, rough field looking back to the bay, called Fearann na gCeann and said to be a battle-site. The earliest reference seems to be J.T. O’Flaherty’s article of 1824, though it is likely he got the information from Hardiman, who was a friend of the Kilmurvey O’Flahertys:

  At the north extremity of the larger Aran, not far from Port Murvey, the islanders show a field, where human bones and sculls are frequently dug up, and for which reason it is called Faran-na-ccan, “the field of sculls.” Here the O’Briens are said to have, at some remote period, slaughtered each other almost to extermination. This sort of self-destruction is the largest and impurest blot of the page of Irish history: it always has been, and alas! continues to be Ireland’s sad and inalienable inheritance.

  The “remote period” must have been some time before the expulsion of the O’Briens by the O’Flahertys in the 1560s. The little cliff by the road is called Cnocán na mBan, the hillock of the women, who are said to have stood on it to see their men-folk making history. I am told that the cemetery itself was called Cnocán an Chochaill, or Reilig an Chochaill, the hillock or graveyard of the cloak, a name that perhaps has a connection with the story of St. Colm Cille’s cloak told in my first volume. According to an old villager, some such name was written on a “flag” set in its wall, but when the wall was being rebuilt in the 1930s a woman who was not quite right in the head took it and carried it on her back all the way to Teaghlach Éinne, and it is now lost. The old recumbent gravestones here are hard to read except in certain lights; now and then, in necrological mood, I used to kick through the tousled grass and little sandpits to see what death-notices were being posted by the circling sun. Old limestone and new marble agree that Hernon is the predominant name in this cemetery’s mortal catchment area, principally the village itself. There are also many small, blank, boulders marking the graves of those too young, too numerous or too humble to have been granted even one parting line by the hard art of writing. A stray occupies a discreet corner: A. Tizzard, a Royal Air Force gunner, fished up in the nets in 1941. Another non-Aran name occurs on a well-carved and prominent slab near the O’Flaherty tomb: a Jane Gibson, died 1824 aged five. There is a place—a vertiginous brink in fact—on the west side of the peninsula of Dún Dúchathair called Binse Ghibson, Gibson’s ledge; it is vaguely supposed that some Englishman must have fished from it long ago, and I had marked the spot on my map without much expectation of ever learning more of the man. Then, years after I had left Aran, my telephone rang late one night, and Gibson spoke to me, through the voice of his great-great-grandson who was following up the clue of his name on the map in search of his ancestry. Thus I know that James Gibson was from the Scilly Islands and came to Aran as a coastguard with his wife Catherine and four children, of whom Jane was the youngest, in about 1823. They had another child who died at birth in the same year as Jane, and three more who survived, over the next eight years. Later James was transferred to Casla Bay on the south Connemar
a coast, where he died of a heart attack while pulling a boat ashore. His widow and orphans crossed Ireland in an open cart and eventually returned to Scilly. One son, John, born in Aran, grew up to be a pilot. A passenger on a liner he was piloting once happened to leave an early model of camera on board, and when the captain and the crew had all failed to make anything of it, John took it, mastered it, became well known for his photographs of wrecks, and founded a photographic business, Gibson and Co.

  The highest spot in the graveyard is occupied by the O’Flaherty tomb, with its tall Celtic cross patriarchally surveying the former estate. The cross is primarily

  Sacred to the memory of James O’Flaherty J. P.

  Kilmurvey House who departed

  this life Ocr 24th A. D. 1881

  aged 64 years

  Fortified by the last rights

  of Holy Church

  —but various other O’Flahertys, an O’Flaherty Johnston and a Johnston are named on it too, whom I shall sort out when I come to the history of the house. On the reverse is the motto, Fortuna favet fortibus, and a coat of arms, rather worn: two rampant beasts of some sort support an unidentifiable object; below is a boat with four oars protruding from ports in its hull, and above, a crest with a long four-legged creature. To restore the lost detail and colour of these bearings, I shall have to go back to sources more lasting than stone. As to recovering The O’Flaherty himself and his legendary misdeeds, Máirtín Ó Direáin offers an important admonition. James O’Flaherty is the original of Ó Morna, anti-hero of his long poem of that name; I quote and translate the beginning, which addresses itself to an inquiring passer-by such as myself: