Stones of Aran

by Tim Robinson

  A ródaí fáin as tír isteach

  Oh mainland tourist straying by,

  A dhearcann tuama thuas ar aill,

  Who looks at a tomb on a clifftop,

  A dhearcann armas is mana,

  Looks at escutcheon and motto,

  A dhearcann scríbhinn is leac,

  Looks at words inscribed on a flag,

  Ná fág an relig cois cuain

  Do not leave the cemetery by the sea

  Gan tuairisc an fhir a bheith leat.

  Without an account of the man himself.

  Cathal Mór mac Rónáin an fear,

  Cathal Mór Ó Mórna was his name,

  Mhic Choinn Mhic Chonáin Uí Mhórna,

  Son of Rónán son of Conn son of Conán,

  Ná bí i dtaobh le cómhra cáich,

  Do not rely on what they all say,

  Ná le fíor na croise á ghearradh

  Nor on the crone’s crossing her brow,

  Ar bhaithis chailli mar theist an fhir

  As testimony of him who is buried

  A chuaigh in uaigh sa gcill sin.

  In the vault of that graveyard.

  Ná daor an marbh d’éis, cogar ban

  Condemn not the dead on women’s gossip,

  D’éis lide a thit idir uille

  Or hints let fall between elbow and knee

  Is glúin ar theallach na sean,

  At the old folks’ fireside,

  Gan a phór is a chró, do mheas

  Without regard for his breed and blood,

  A chéim, a réim, an t-am do mhair,

  His standing, his power, the times he lived in,

  Is guais a shoirt ar an uaigneas.

  And the risks of loneliness to his sort.

  When I tell the O’Flaherty story, I shall have to bear all this in mind.

  Between the cemetery and the village coming into view now a few hundred yards ahead, there is just one more of the Kilmurvey House prairies. The island’s registered bull, an appurtenance of the house, was sometimes pastured here. At the entrance to the village a boreen to the left leads past Kilmurvey House itself to its old stables on the far side of this field. Once I found the bull standing sideways across the track outside the stables, filling it from the fuschia hedge on one side to the gate on the other. A small cow and a few men with sticks stood around it as if at a party before conversation had become general, while the bull raised its head and funneled its dreadful, pitiable roar to heaven, and the naked shaft of its penis flickered like a snake below its belly. Bringing our neighbour Mícheál’s cow to the bull was another occasional reason for going to Cill Mhuirbhigh. She was more amenable to being driven if she was accompanied by her calf of the previous year and the calf of the year before that, so whenever Mícheál saw from the moist state of her rear end that the time was ripe, he would call on me to help him, and with shoutings and runnings and dogs and sticks we would marshal the little herd down the hill, past dozens of wrong turnings, to the bull’s quarters. The bull was sometimes rather dilatory in his duties, and we used to leave the cow and the calves there and come back for them in the evening. On one occasion Mícheál suspected that nothing had occurred in the meantime, and he decided to intervene. I lurked in the laneway and peered round the gatepost as Mícheál tiptoed out into the open field and tried to back the cow up to the bull invitingly, while the bull manoeuvered to keep between him and the calves. Whenever Mícheál was out in the middle of the field, he would turn to me and say in a stage-whisper, “It’s a bad place I’m in now!” I was never allowed to forget that his father had been tackled by a bull and died of it. After some dangerous skirmishing in a tight corner of the field, he got a halter onto the cow so that when the bull mounted her he could stop her staggering away from its weight. Then, with the bull pushing from the rear and Mícheál pushing from the front and leaning to right and left to check that the seed did not fall upon the ground, and with interference from a bull-calf that pushed in between the bull and the cow and tried to mount her, scrambling up like one of Beardsley’s impish cupids on a mountainous Venus, the connection was made. When Mícheál led the cow out, pleased with himself, he told me that in Aran there are two nightmares from which men wake up in a sweat: one about being on the cliff-face and the rope breaking, and one about being charged by a bull. We both felt relieved and happy, coming back from Cill Mhuirbhigh in the evening sunshine. As we processed triumphally up the hill, Bobby Gill swerved his mini-van close in beside me and shouted boisterously, “Did you get the job done?” My activities as farmer’s boy were often a source of fun for the neighbourhood.

  Coming back from Cill Mhuirbhigh!—I could write a chapter on that too, but I will restrict myself to a note on a field I forgot on the way down, one of the big Kilmurvey House fields, to the north of the road just before one reaches the village. The white campion flowered in it very plentifully one summer, and then gradually declined from year to year; it must have been introduced in hay-seed, for I saw it nowhere else in the island. The last of the corncrakes was heard in this field too, in 1978; I believe some kind soul from the village tried to find the nest to move it when the hay was due to be cut. I only once caught a glimpse of a corncrake, a nondescript buff-coloured fowl scuttling along the margins of this field. They are furtive creatures that rarely take to the wing once arrived in their breeding-grounds, and their presence is only revealed by the nocturnal, rasping calls with which the males advertise their territories to potential rivals and mates. The Romans borrowed the sound to call the bird crex, and science even more accurately calls it Crex crex. We used to hear this strange repeated name, like the grieving of some rusty little machine, when we were late in returning from Conneelys’ or were wandering the boreens in the midsummer twilight. We did not know at the time that the western seaboard is one of the last haunts of the corncrake, and that it is approaching extinction even here, because so much grass is now cut green for silage when the birds are still nesting, rather than left to ripen as hay; perhaps also because the Sahara, which it has to cross in its migration, is widening southwards by the year. To us the plaintive creaking of the corncrake, repeated as endlessly as the distant whispered thunder of waves falling on the beach, was part of the natural pulse of the night. Neither of us liked to be too long abroad in those still evenings; their perfection felt so finely balanced that it made one’s own mood vulnerable to falling into sadness. Perhaps we would have dared to listen longer in them if we had realized that their most characteristic music was soon to fall silent, probably for ever. What was it like, the sound of the corncrake? To a future generation that will not have heard either, I would say that it was like a very old clock being wound up with careful turns of the key. If I speculate that this clock was the nautiloid coiled in its crag, and its key the one I was told of that people used to step over in the boreen long ago, it might seem that I did indeed spend too much time out in those bewitching nights, that wrapped the island in mystery like a whole gently fallen skyful of meteor-paper. Magic, enchantment—I am reluctant to use such words, so full of meaning and empty of understanding, about Aran’s lucent obscurities, but one must be realistic about what is expressible. Mícheál used to say, with simple truth, that there is something about the noise the waves make on the shore at night that is “hard to discuss.” And there are things about those evenings, coming home from Cill Mhuirbhigh between the blue-black waters of the bay and the honey-scented meadows, that I could not write down if all the sky were paper and all the sea were ink. The sound of the corncrake is among them.

  ANCIENT HISTORIES

  As one reaches the top of the little rise by the cemetery, the village of Cill Mhuirbhigh comes in view ahead, fronted by a long flat-faced single-storey building the road gets past by jinking to the left, and the gaunt hulk of Conneelys’. A muddle of small two-storey houses, one or two bungalows, old cottages, and still older cottages now degenerated into outhouses and barns lie behind these, while Kilmurvey House keeps itself to itse
lf off to the left. The long house almost denying entry to the village originated as a Protestant bible school perhaps as early as 1826; in 1855 the (Protestant) Church Education Society was leasing it from (the Catholic) Patrick O’Flaherty, and it was open intermittently down to the 1870s. Locally of course it was known as Scoil na Jumpers. During the Land War of the 1880s, when the O’Flahertys needed protection close to hand, it became a barracks, and later inhabitants were all nicknamed from this memory; thus Mikey whose loss with his boat Lively Lady I have mentioned was known as Mikey an Bheairic. Just behind this house a grassy track makes a short loop to the right between broken-down cabins, some of them patched up as sheds and others reduced to knee-height and full of rampant nettles, past two or three cottages the thatches of which were sagging and weed-grown in our time, and which have since been re-roofed and whitewashed. The track is Róidín na Sligeach, the little road of the shell-heaps, indicating that the poor folk who lived here formerly subsisted largely on shore-food. It rejoins the road just beyond Conneelys’; after that there are only a few more dwellings increasingly spaced apart among fields, and an old ball-alley wall on a flat bit of crag, and one is already at the end of the village.

  Of the ten households extant in the 1970s, six were surnamed Ó hIarnáin, anglicized as Hernon. The Uí Iarnáin were a sept of the Uí Fiachrach, a people prominent in the early history of Connacht, and one finds the name still in Connemara. According to a brief history of his family written by Colm P. Ó hIarnáin of Eoghanacht (known as Colie Mhicilín to distinguish him from two other Colie Hernons), the first Ó hIarnáin to settle in Aran was from An Cnoc in the south Connemara island of Garomna. Beartla (Bartly or Bartholomew) and his brother used to bring turf across in their púcán, a wooden sail-boat like a small hooker, some time before the Great Famine, and on one occasion they were invited to a wedding in the village:

  Aran in those days was more prosperous than Connemara and a wedding was a great social occasion with plenty of food, drink and jollification. Whatever happened, whether it was the food, drink, or romance Bartly was reluctant to return home and his brother had to return without him. At the time Inishmore was mostly inhabited by O’Flahertys and Dirranes. Bartly was employed by one of the O’Flahertys in Kilmurvey who had two daughters and no male heir. He was reputed to be a very hard-working and likeable young man, and within a year he was married to one of the O’Flahertys and inherited the farm. In the meantime he invited his brother Michael to join him on Aran where the prospects of making a living were better than at home. Michael came to Aran and in due course married one of the Dirranes of Kilmurvey, he also inherited the holding.

  In the census of 1821 I find Bartly Hernon, farmer and labourer, aged forty-seven, his wife Anne, a flax-spinner, and five children of whom the oldest is twenty-four; this indicates that Bartly came to Aran in the 1790s, earlier than Colie thought. His brother Michael was sixty-five in 1821, and his youngest son, another Bartly, was eight. One of the roadside cenotaphs down near the pier in Port Mhuirbhigh commemorates a “Bartholomon Hernon” who died “in the 50 yer of his age 1863,” and “also his Dather died in the 21 Yer of her age 1871.” Clearly this is Michael’s son Bartly. Colie’s history goes on to say that the Hernons were very clannish and also ambitious to educate their children; as a result, the first Bartly’s youngest son Martin was able to take on the job of administrator for the landlord, and became known as “the Colonel”:

  Times were hard in those rack rent days, poor people who could not afford to pay the rent were evicted and the land taken from them and sold, very cheap at times, there is a story told to this day that a fourth of land (16 acres) was sold for a spade. Martin Hernon as administrator was in a position to help his brothers and relations to buy land and as a result of this when the third generation of Hernons arrived they had established themselves all over the island and practically owned Kilmurvey.

  I have been told that the Colonel died in most peculiar circumstances: he was found dead, still riding his donkey, and it was thought he had been strangled by some Connemara people he was turning out of the island. Colie glides over the history of the Hernons as bailiffs, but their name crops up repeatedly in Antoine Powell’s detailed chapter on the period. In 1867, he tells us, the Poor Law Commissioners were complaining about Martin Hernon’s having driven a household out of the island, and in revenge for this complaint he evicted thirteen families, though they were all let back into their homes bar two. A Beartla Ó hIarnáin was bailiff in 1879 (Colie lists a Bartly as the second of Martin’s three sons). At that time the agent Thompson was having the main road widened and repaired; all the tenants had to work on it, unpaid, except of course the main tenant and middleman, James O’Flaherty. Ó hIarnáin announced that everyone through whose land the road passed was to put clay on it at their own expense, but an anonymous notice appeared on the court-house door threatening with punishment anyone who complied, and even the priest advised his flock not to work on the road without pay. In the event the only tenants to put clay on the road were Charde the Protestant shopkeeper, and Ó hIarnáin. In 1880 Ó hIarnáin applied for the post of Relieving Officer (the assessor of people’s eligibility for relief) with the support of Thompson and James O’Flaherty, and another notice appeared on the court-house door threatening anyone who backed his application. As a “land-grabber” and a creature of the landowners, he was the enemy of the Land League, then becoming active in Aran. His woodpile was burned, his sheep and his mare were stolen, he was boycotted, and the only place he could drink was in his brother-in-law John O’Brien’s pub in Cill Rónáin (O’Brien had got his licence in the teeth of opposition from the priest, but with the support of Thompson, Kilbride and James O’Flaherty, because the other pubs were refusing to serve non-members of the League). In the darkest days of the Land War, a few months after the O’Flaherty cattle had been cliffed and when James O’Flaherty was dying in Galway, someone fired a shot at Beartla (from the cover of the Mullán Mór in Fearann an Choirce, I am told); a Gort na gCapall man was arrested for it, and since Aran was so disturbed that no judge would come out to hear the case, was taken to Galway, where he was sentenced to a short prison term. In 1886 Beartla was defeated in an election to the post of Poor Law Guardian by the candidate of the Irish National League, which by then was in the ascendant in Aran. Beartla had also retired as rates collector by the time of the battle of An Charcair Mhór in 1887, when the islanders drove off the rates collector from Galway and his police escort.

  Not all the Hernons were on the side of the land-grabbers, though. It had been discovered that the branch of the family who had the post office in Cill Rónáin were spying for the Land League by opening letters to Charde and others, but the police took no action against them for fear of retaliations against the Chardes. And in 1897 a Pádraic Ó hIarnáin was a leading opponent of Fr. Farragher when the priest was urging the tenants to pay the fine laid on the island for the damages of the Land War.

  But all that is ancient history. For seven generations the Hernons have shared the lot of other Aran families, farming and fishing and emigrating (one of them—irresistible facteen, this, from Colie’s history of the family—became Ladies’ Tennis Champion of Korea). There are today about twenty Hernon households in the island. Colm Ó hIarnáin of Cill Rónáin is as much of a notable now as he was when I wrote about him in my first volume. Colm P. Ó hIarnáin, author of several short stories and the ms. history I have quoted, died in 1989; I shall write about him too when I come to the Seven Churches where he lived. And it is when I think of the various elderly Hernon men and women of Cill Mhuirbhigh whom I used to meet on the shore and in the boreens, and who, named or unnamed, figure here and there in this book, and are now in Reilig an Chochaill, that I realize how precarious the future of the village was at the period of our frequentation of it, throughout the ’seventies and early ’eighties. As the old folk died and young ones emigrated, few were born to take their places. There were untimely losses too: Mikey of the Lively L
ady, another young fisherman who slipped into the dark between a trawler and the quay at Ros a’ Mhíl, a bride struck down on her honeymoon by some rare ailment; these individual tragedies sapped a community already reduced below the threshold of statistical recovery. However, a couple of families back from England with their children have moved into the village in recent years, and brought some cheer into its neglected old age.

  Perhaps in our earlier years in Aran we were not fully aware of the decline of Cill Mhuirbhigh because Conneelys’ was our Mecca, and Máire Conneelys daughters, sons, daughters-in-law and grandchildren were in and out of its big, welcoming kitchen all the time. It was Máire who taught M how to bake bread in our first days here when we were puzzled by basic problems of survival, and who a year or so later said to me, “Tim, why don’t you make a map of the island?,” so diverting me into my present walk of life, or at least a twenty-year-long detour from it. Her own life had been turned aside from a path already decided upon, in 1932 when she was well on the way to becoming a nurse in England. She was asked to do some cooking for the household of Robert Flaherty the film-maker, in the house they had rented by Port Mhuirbhigh. Mrs. Flaherty gave her a cookery book, the first she had ever seen, and taught her how to make waffles. Máire stayed on instead of returning to England, and so met and married Micheal Ó Conghaile, who worked for James Johnston, the O’Flahertys’ successor, on the Kilmurvey farm. With Máire’s earnings they bought their first calf, the basis of their future independence. (Johnston allowed them to put it in one of his fields, but his bullocks bullied it, and the memory rankles to this day, as does that of Mr. Johnston’s gentlemanly habit of shouting for Micheal and expecting him to drop whatever he was doing on his own bit of land and come running.) James Johnston’s younger brother, Captain George, had built himself a cottage on the village street, on a site that backed onto the immediate grounds of Kilmurvey House, and then in an hour of need sold it to Mícheál for a bottle of whiskey. The growth of Conneelys’ from that beginning—first the shop, then the post office, then the guest-house—coincided with the decline of Kilmurvey House, and the mushrooming extensions of the cottage were no doubt seen as eyesores and impertinences. When the big two-storey wing went up, with windows looking out over the boundary wall, Mr. Johnston had a barn built in front of it, only a foot or so from the windows, and Máire’s lads had to be restrained from going out by night to burn it down. This class warfare was over long before we came to the island, and the two houses were on neighbourly terms, though the Conneely windows still have to look out through the skeleton of the barn. But now Máire has retired to a bungalow in Sruthán, her daughter Mary, who took over much of the running of the place towards the end, is nursing in Saudi Arabia, Máirtín, who inherited the house, has a trawler and lives in Ros a’ Mhíl where his wife is a teacher—and Conneelys’ lies empty and boarded-up, until the younger generation see their way to redeveloping it. Kilmurvey House, on the other hand, has entered into its happiest phase, as will appear.