Stones of Aran

by Tim Robinson

  Father Francis is poor. The unglazed windows of his humble cottage, and the threadbare appearance of his antique garments, bespeak a poverty beyond even that of most of his flock…. This is not the fault of his parishioners, by whom he is ardently beloved. They would gladly lessen their own comforts to increase his, and have frequently tried to force on him a better provision, which he has as often refused. “What,” said he on a late occasion to Mr. O’Flaherty, who was remonstrating with him on this refusal—“what does a priest want more than subsistance? and that I have. Could I take anything from these poor people to procure me comforts which they require so much more themselves? No, no, Pat,—say no more about it.”

  The figure of the priest is unique in appearance, from the peculiarity of his costume…. He wears a long coat of antique cut, and over that a similar one of larger size; both are of the same dark blue colour, and are, I should suppose, the only habiliments of the kind on the island. They are characteristic of their owner, old and almost worn out, but still uncommon and respectable.

  I saw Father Frank frequently, sometimes near his cabin, moving along slowly, supported by a stick that was once the handle of an umbrella, and attended by some of the islanders receiving his advice; at other times in the morning, on a rugged pony, similarly attended, descending some rocky path to his home, after passing the night with a sick, or perhaps dying, islander.

  At the time of Petrie’s departure for Inis Oírr, Fr. Francis was suffering from a severe cough which was depriving him of sleep, and Petrie had exhorted him to keep to his house. Sailing past Cill Rónáin in Patrick O’Flaherty’s boat on a squally day, Petrie fondly pictured the priest reposing by his fire after his week’s exertions, and little supposed that he would ever see him again. When the boat arrived off Inis Oírr the breakers were too high for them to venture near the shore, but they saw a number of men descending the cliffs towards the beach, among them Fr. Francis O’Flaherty, come to attend to some sick person; “Thus it was that he was nursing himself!” Later in the day, when the weather abated, they brought the priest back to Cill Rónáin:

  The old man, exhausted by the day’s fatigues, and too feeble to bear the pitching of the boat, except in a lying posture, stretched himself on a small mattress in the cabin, where he lay for some time apparently slumbering—his limbs stretched, his eyes closed, and his hands locked in each other and resting on his bosom, reminding me forcibly of some of those dying saints which the Italian painters have so often imagined. But though his body was at rest, his mind was not so; for it was concerned with the welfare of his flock. He had received, on the preceding evening, for the poor of his parish, thirty pounds of that money which the benevolence of England had supplied to her suffering sister, and he was anxiously considering the best way of discharging the trust reposed in him. After some time I heard him call Mr. O’Flaherty in a low tone of voice, and on consulting with him, it was agreed that he should send, on the following day, to Galway for the worth of the donation in oatmeal.

  When I parted from this venerable man, I did not think it probable that he could outlive the coming winter. It gives me great pleasure, however, to add that he still exists, and is at present in tolerable health.

  In fact Fr. Francis died just a few years later, in 1825.

  To frame Petrie’s sanctimonious picture, here is a fascinating glimpse of the “Ferocious O’Flaherty” background to Fr. Francis’s priesthood, preserved by Fr. Killeen:

  The constant tradition of the island is that Fr. Francis’s predecessor whose name is related to have been Stanford was by force driven away in order to secure the parish for Fr. Francis. Those who were instrumental in this act of violence were a Killeany family of the same stock as Patrick O’Flaherty gent, of Kilmurvey and related also to the priest. It is handed down that there were 21 men concerned and that they were the finest lot of men one could wish to see, all six-footers and of commanding appearance. But their size and strength availed them nothing. Within a year after the expulsion of Fr. Stanford 20 of them were dead of whom some were drowned, some killed in various ways. An islander who happened to meet Fr. Stanford in Galway was asked by the priest how were the O’Flahertys faring. The Aran man replied that 20 of them were dead and one alive. The priest said that one too would soon meet his end. And he was right. The last of the gang died soon afterwards.

  Apart from Fr. Francis, the earliest of the “respectable” O’Flahertys I can document in Aran are named on a big gravestone lying before the altar in the ruined church of St. Brecán in Eoghanacht. The coat of arms heading it distinguishes these O’Flahertys from the commonalty of the name, but the prime site occupied by their memorial means that it has been much knelt on and walked over, so that it is hard to read. (There is a parable on For tuna here.) With some difficulty I make out:

  The Almighty God have

  mercy on the Soul of Anth

  O Flaherty jun

  a youth who

  was Endowed with Filial

  piety and promys Accomp

  lishment. Departed this Life on

  the 27 day of Octr 1795

  Orderd to be Cut by his

  Unkle Anthy O Flaherty

  Islanders tell me that the forbears of Patrick O’Flaherty lived in The Seven Churches or Creig an Chéirín, until they bought the lease of the land in Cill Mhuirbhigh from a Stephen King. The story is that Patrick’s father was an Aran farmer just like any other except that he was married to an outsider, and when news came that a wealthy relative of his had died, it was the wife, the more capable one of the couple, who went off to secure the inheritance. When she returned with the money, “O’Flaherty hit a bang of his spade off a big rock and said ‘I’m finished with you for ever!’” The Christian name of this O’Flaherty has not been preserved even in Kilmurvey House lore; filial piety lapsed when the genetic thread came to an end in the 1950s, and as Bridget often told me with regret, a new era was marked by a bonfire of old papers. So I was at a loss in trying to link Patrick O’Flaherty with the “unkle Anthy” of the inscription. However, on revisiting the house recently, I found that a bundle of documents, carried off by a researcher into some other question of Galway history twenty years ago and long forgotten, had just been posted home from oblivion. The parcel was delivered into my arms, and I bore it off with mixed feelings, reminding myself of the man who carries a heavy packet of labyrinths on his back, in a poem by Tristan Tzara. Since then I have wormed out of these crabbed, yellowish screeds a few hints of Kilmurvey House history, which I incorporate in what follows.

  Patrick O’Flaherty, one can deduce from his gravestone and the census returns, was born in 1781. The earliest of the documents concern a Catherine O’Flaherty, spinster, of Galway, who in 1796 obtained judgment against a Walter Lambert of Cregclare for £2200 on a bond of the previous year. The Lamberts were major Galway landowners, and of course at that time £2200 was great riches. Under Catherine’s will, dated 1799, small sums go to her brothers John and Anthony O’Flaherty and her sister Mary. A letter of 1804 from William, Archbishop of Armagh and President of the Court of Prerogatives Ecclesiastical, appoints Patrick O’Flaherty as administrator of this will, and, reading between the lines, one gathers that the original administrator and residual legatee had been John, who, having “intermeddled” with the matter for some time, died; also, that Patrick was Catherine’s nephew. Hence, most likely, Patrick was John’s son, nephew to Anthony, and brother to the youth of unfulfilled promise. Another clutch of old papers refers to a complex law-case which Patrick, as Anthony’s heir and administrator, pursued for some years after 1813, against Sir John O’Flaherty’s son Thomas Henry; it concerns money claimed to have been lent by an “Alise” O’Flaherty to Sir John for the completion of the mansion of Lemonfield. Whether this money was ever recovered, and what became of the money owed to Catherine by the Lamberts, does not appear, but here is the substance of the Aran legend of the O’Flahertys’ inherited fortune.

  I cannot learn exactly when Patric
k established himself in what was to become Kilmurvey House; the Digbys first leased him one and a half quarters of Kilmurvey, for twenty-one years at £140 per annum, in 1812, “on surrender of his existing interest in the property.” In fact according to the inscription over its door his walled garden or orchard was made in 1809. Also, at the back of the orchard there is a natural recess in the cliff-face, to which a front wall and a little door has been added; perhaps originally this was a sweat-house as I have heard suggested, but it has served more recently as a potting-shed. Family legend says that a French officer, on the run after the invasion of Mayo in 1798, was given shelter, or was held to ransom, in it by the O’Flahertys, and that he married a young woman of the family, or at least had a child by her called Marcella, a (French-sounding, in Aran ears) name that has been handed down among her descendants. If this bit of romantic costume-drama is true—and to prove it, the Frenchman’s rusty sword lay on the hall table in Kilmurvey House until a guest stole it some years ago—then it seems that the O’Flahertys were already established in Kilmurvey when Patrick was a child. However, some details cannot be correct, for the Kilmurvey House documents show that Marcella O’Flaherty married Francis Macnamara of Doolin in 1810.

  The census of 1821, taken by Patrick himself, states that he had five cartrons of land (most holdings in the village were of a half cartron). His household consisted of:

  Patrick O Flaherty 40 Gentleman Farmer

  Mary O Flaherty sister 37

  John McDonough 34 house-servant

  Owen Rieley 23 do.

  Tom Kane orphan 4

  Biddy Tool 50 Cook

  Pegy McDonough 17 Kitchen Maid

  John Boyle 78 Piper

  The descendants of the aged piper, who sounds a note from the days when music had a place at the chieftain’s table, were known by such nicknames as Mícheál an “Pipe” down to the end of the century at least. A more up-to-date feature of the house is indicated by “Bryan Flaherty, 55, gardener to Mr. O Flaherty,” living in the village. (This man would have been just as much a descendant of the original Flaithbheartach as his master, of course, and so an Ó Flaitheartaigh like any other, but Patrick O’Flaherty makes the distinction between his own and the common sort by allowing the “O” only to his immediate family and to Fr. Francis.)

  George Petrie stayed at Patrick O’Flaherty’s in that year of 1821, and left an account of the house’s good cheer. This fervent Celticist and romantic did not look at his host with the cold and calculating eye Mr. Blake had cast on the O’Flaherty of Renvyle just a decade earlier:

  Would that I could convey to the mind of my reader even a faint outline of the character of our never-to-be-forgotten host!… Such is the unaffected grace of his politeness, the mild charm of his conversation, and the sincere warmth of his hospitality, that though uninvited strangers, we were but a few minutes in his house when we felt all the full freedom of enjoyment that could belong to our own firesides, with old and congenial friends to share it…. His house, however, bespeaks the simplicity of the place, as well as the usages of remote times. It is an oblong, thatched cottage, without a second story, containing five or six apartments, with a long porch, forming a kind of hall, attached to the centre of the front. The parlour is not boarded, nor do the chairs present the luxury of a soft seat. In the parlour are a few pictures, two of which, the portraits of a fine gentleman and lady, the work of a court painter, excited my curiosity. “That,” said Mr. O’Flaherty, “is the portrait of an uncle of mine, and the other that of his lady. He was one of six brothers, all men of fine and striking appearance. He went to England to seek his fortune, and that lady, who was daughter to Sir Henry Englefield (a respectable English Catholic), and who had a large fortune, fell in love with him and married him. He was much attached to my father, and had those pictures painted for him.

  I interrupt Petrie to report my following-up of this clue to Patrick’s ancestry, which I spent an afternoon pursuing through the shadowy bookstacks of the London Library. I found the Englefields in a seldom-disturbed tome, Burke’s Extinct and Dormant Baronetages of England, Scotland and Ireland. The Englefields of Wotton Bassett were indeed “respectable Catholics.” The title was created in 1612, and a Sir Francis Englefield obtained a letter from Charles I protecting him from the penalties of recusancy, that is of denying the authority of the Church of England. Sir Henry Englefield, who died in 1780, had three sons and two daughters; thus I know that the lady in the portrait Petrie saw is either Ethelinda-Catherine or Teresa-Anne, but unfortunately the name of her husband is not given. Sir Henry’s heir and the last of the line was Henry-Charles, also known in his turn as Sir Henry. Eminent enough to have been written up in the Dictionary of National Biography, he was a Fellow of the Royal Society, Secretary of the Society of Dilettanti, and, until he was objected to as a Catholic, President of the Society of Antiquaries. He published papers on astronomy and geology and even on a dyestuff (“The Discovery of a Lake from Madder,” for which he won a gold medal from the Society of Arts). He was a friend of Charles James Fox, was painted by Sir Thomas Lawrence, and had a hand in the drafting of the Catholic Relief Bill of 1791. I was intrigued to find in the Catholic Encyclopedia a reference to a Life of Sir Henry Englefield by William Sotheby, London 1819, which I felt sure would tell me the only fact about this man of parts that concerns me: what was the parentage of his brother-in-law? But not even the catalogue of the British Library will admit the existence of any such book…

  To conclude Petrie’s panegyric:

  Mr. O’Flaherty is a native of Aran, and he has never been further from his native rocks than to the city of Galway and the adjacent coast of Thomond…. He is deeply religious, but altogether free from narrow prejudice. His religion has something of a romantic character, and he feels his piety more excited in the little, deserted, roofless temple, among the rocks, beside his own house, than it possibly could be in the most crowded and magnificent church. In this solitary ruin he offers up his morning and evening prayers; and his figure in the centre of the nave, looking towards the mouldering altar, in the act of adoration, as I saw it once by chance, will never be effaced from my recollection.

  Mr. O’Flaherty may be justly denominated the pater patriae of the Araners. He is the reconciler in all differences, the judge in all disputes, the advisor in all enterprises, and the friend in all things…. In 1822 a great number of the islanders had determined to emigrate to America. A ship lay at anchor in Galway to convey them, and they proceeded thither accompanied by Mr. O’Flaherty, to aid them to the last with friendship and advice. Several days elapsed before the vessel was ready to set sail, and Mr. O’Flaherty still continued with them; but at last the hour to bid an everlasting adieu arrived…. Men and women all surrounded him—the former with cheeks streaming with tears, and the latter uttering the most piercing lamentations—some hung on his neck, some got his hand or arms to kiss, while others threw themselves on the deck and embraced his knees. It is no discredit that on such an occasion the object of so much affectionate regard was more than unmanned, and it was a long time before his health recovered the injury, or his face lost the sorrowful expression caused by the grief of that parting.

  My viewing of this touching genre-picture is troubled as if by an intrusive reflection, in the light of the bitter conviction of several villagers I have spoken to that their ancestors were turned off that good land under the scarp at Cill Mhuirbhigh to make room for the O’Flaherty garden, and that many islanders were forced to emigrate when the whole of Ceathrú an Turlaigh to the west was emptied by the landlord’s agent and leased to the O’Flahertys. (It seems that the latter event happened at some period before Thomas Thompson succeeded his father as agent in 1848.)

  As to Patrick O’Flaherty, “judge in all disputes,” this position was made official in 1830 or ’31 when he was appointed Justice of the Peace. A later magistrate for the district including Aran gives this account of Patrick’s sittings, which he probably gathered from the oral lore of l
egal circles as well as from that of the islanders:

  He was the only magistrate in the islands, but ruled as a king. He issued his summons for “the first fine day,” and presided at a table in the open air. If any case deserved punishment, he would say to the defendant, speaking in Irish, “I must transport you to Galway gaol for a month.” The defendant would beg hard not to be transported to Galway, promising good behaviour in the future. If, however, his worship thought the case serious, he would draw his committal warrant, hand it to the defendant, who would, without the intervention of police or anyone else, take the warrant, travel at his own expense to Galway and deliver himself up, warrant in hand, at the county gaol.

  This was published in 1887, and J.M. Synge would probably have read it before his visit in 1898. Synge’s own version also draws on the reminiscences of the old islanders with whom he discussed ancient justice and injustice: