by Tim Robinson
This well saved a life a few months later. Happening by, I made my usual detour to it in response to its garbled stories, and in a little dip of the ground beyond it I saw a donkey standing very quietly. Its stillness made me look again as I turned to go; its forefeet were caught in a cleft, and to judge by the pile of droppings, it had been there some days. I tried to pull its legs up but I could only release one of its hooves. It was Sunday evening, and I thought as I hurried down to the village that it would be hard to persuade anyone to leave the television or postpone the pub for a mere donkey. However the first household I called at—Katie Gill’s—was thrown into commotion by the news, and I was closely questioned as to the colour, sex and size of this donkey, matters I had not well noted. Very soon no fewer than ten of us, with pickaxes and crowbars and a bucket of water, were converging on the scene. It did not take long for the men to prize off a layer of the crag and, carefully, so as not to panic it, lift the animal free without twisting its leg. It drank from the bucket, then wandered off. The evening was beautiful, very still, as unprotesting about what had been going on in it as the donkey itself.
On our way back to the village I gathered a few more homespun etymologies of Bullán Mhaolodhair. Katie’s version was well worth hearing. A blind man from Connemara had heard tell of the well, and came to Aran to see if he might be cured. Somehow he was left to find his own way to it across the crag, and while he was groping and stumbling, he heard a voice calling his name, “A Mhíl, a Mhíl!” He followed the sound, and found the well, and found he could see. But he saw nobody near; the well itself had called.
This to me sounds like truth—truth of the mythic sort, which is strictly pragmatic, truth one can use. For instance, since the tale substitutes hearing for seeing, it proposes this well as a point from which to listen to the landscape, hushing the garrulous faculty of vision and letting the island recompose itself as music. The terrace of the well, in fact, is not only an elevation of the island’s inhabited northern aspect, but it swings back southwards around the hillside towards the heaped boulder-banks and hollow cliffs of the coast below Dún Aonghasa, and so is unusually open to both the human and the inhuman sides of Aran. If one waits by the well until the turbidity of the mind settles, then the scratching of a bramble stirred across the rock by the breeze gives one ground to stand on, and a raven tolling overhead rounds out a sky; the whine of a motor-scooter growing out of one distance and fading into the other traces the line of the road below, and draws with it the entire life history of the lee-side, while a southerly wind brings the muffled drumbeat of the ocean across from the caverns of Blind Sound. How appositely the name itself, Blind Sound, comes in!—as if to make the point that, to the making of a point, all other points are apposite. But my sense of this truth is both foundational and precarious. I have once or twice walked on this crag with my eyes closed, hoping that nobody was watching from the hillside above, which is invariably, apparently, deserted. (When I hinted to M that I had been walking Aran blind, she was rather alarmed and told me to keep my experiments for literature.) Aiming to get to the well from the field-wall fifty yards before it, I found that I could feel my way over the large crevices easily enough, but I always ended up on the sloping ground to the left, no doubt because of an unmasterable, visceral, awareness of the cliff to the right. The experiment clarified the nature of a step, though. As the foot descends through space, a surface exactly the size and shape of the foot-sole receives it; this support is the top of a column of inconceivable height that goes down and down, narrower and narrower, until it rests upon a point, a nothing, at the centre of the earth, and from that point opens up again in the opposite direction like the cone of futurity opening out of a moment, into the unsoundable.
CLOCHÁN
The road that turns north from the end of Cill Mhuirbhigh meets the main road at a junction called Na Ceithre Ród, the Four Roads. The fourth of the four is just a boreen leading down to the shoreline from which the various Hernons bring up their seaweed, or used to, at any rate. Two hundred yards down this boreen a still narrower track leads off to the west, picking its way between low field-walls and hawthorn thickets until it comes in sight of the rounded back of an ancient stone hut, as lichen-grey and ferny as any other hump of the stony ground, which is kept like a bull on its own in a little field entered by a narrow stile.
This is the largest and best-preserved of Aran’s “beehive huts.” Its name is Clochán na Carraige, the clochán of the rock; but since An Charraig (the rock), in its anglicized form “Carrig,” is used in some nineteenth-century sources for Sruthán, the next village west from Cill Mhuirbhigh, I take it that the hut is named from the area it stands in. Its basis is rectangular, about nineteen feet long by seven and a half wide, but the corners are progressively rounded off, starting a couple of feet above ground-level, to give the body of the chamber an oval plan, from which both the ends and the sides converge inwards, the stones in each course over-sailing the ones below on the inside, until the space to be closed is reduced to a long two-foot wide slit and topped off with a row of eight flagstones. The outside height is about eight feet. This corbelled construction is very stable for a circular or short oval building, since each layer is self-wedging like the stones in an arch, but it leads to a design weakness in the sides of a longer building, and this clochán noticeably bulges inwards on the west. Its walls are very thick, however, and the stones were carefully laid with a slight slant towards the outside, so that it is still stable, and only a few drops of rain or coins of sunlight can slip into the interior.
The two doorways are opposite each other in the side-walls, as in a traditional cottage. One enters almost crawling, under long, heavy lintels, for the openings are only about three feet high; and then, straightening up inside, one feels tall, and one’s head is in a shadow-zone of upside-down light. At the south end there is a little opening which probably served both as window and chimney. Looked at from outside, these dwarfish doorways and cyclops window, and the hunched masonry that seems to lift itself grudgingly and effortfully from the ground, give the hut a look of immeasurable agedness. How old in fact is it? Probably medieval rather than early Christian, but it is hard to say. The only archaeological find made in it was of some whale-vertebrae which had probably been embedded in the stonework, a mysterious but unilluminating detail. The building method is one that predates Christianity, and when, for churches and the better class of dwellings, it was replaced by vertical, mortared walls, it persisted in humbler circumstances, housing the poor, then sheltering domestic animals. In fact just two fields to the north of Clochán na Carraige is a little poirín, probably built for raising goat-kids in, oval, roughly corbelled, with a lintelled doorway, the whole just two feet high, and recognizably of the seed and breed of the old grey bull slumbering nearby.
Máirtín Ó Direáin, tutelary seer of Sruthán, asks on our behalf the question we know beforehand will not be answered:
Ceist do chuireamar ar an gcloch,
We put a question to the stone,
Ach an chloch níor labhair má chuala,
But if it heard it did not reply,
An scraith ar an díon féin
Even the scraw on the roof
Níor léir a lua ná a thuairisc
Reported obscurely its observations
Ar an té a ghabh chuige an áit
Of him who took the place to himself
Mar theampall, mar, thearmann go suarach
As church, as sanctuary in wretchedness,
Mar dhuasionad, mar shuanlios,
As sorrowing-site and slumber-fort,
Gan cuilce faoina cheann ach gruáin.
With lumpy pebbles for his bedding.
Ó Direáin imagines a penitent, an exile from the community, driven out by hot-tempered Enda, living here without even a pet bird on his shoulder. But,
Tá an chloch ina tost is ní scéithfidh a rún linn.
The stone is silent and will not spill us its secret.
&n
bsp; In fact the building is rather too grand for a hermit’s cell; it was obviously built by people of means. It does not smell of the rising damp of guilt or loneliness either. I see a good fire before the door, a row of razorbills on a spit, children playing “I’m the King of the Castle” on the roof, and inside, a pile of nets and traps and otter-spears at one end and a glorious mating going on at the other, four bare legs in a maelstrom of dry bracken.
However, if this was, or could become, a seat of eremitic contemplation, then there is enough of mystery around to engage it for eternity. Leaving aside the perfect far-off dovetailing of Con-nemara and the sky, and the twinkling profundities of the sea just half a dozen fields away, there is, for instance, a stand of Aquilegia or columbine on the limestone-flagged field one crosses to reach the stile before the clochán. The only places I have seen this plant in Aran, apart from obvious garden-escapes, are here, on a crag by the roadside to the north, and in the little glen of the donkey near Bullán Mhaolodhair. The mystery (for me, at least) is not its odd distribution, or even the botanical puzzle of whether this plant of fens and woodland is native to Aran, but this: why does the sudden sight of it as one approaches across the rough mosaic of stone and short-cropped grass—hardly even a sight, so little is there to stop the eye, only the slightest screening of what is beyond by half-a-dozen tall slender stems, the few unemphatic grey-green leaves and indeterminately blue-to-pinkish blossoms being lost at a distance—make my heart catch itself back, as from a brink? What do they look like, these stems? Like the edges of things, perhaps the edges of panes of glass set in the air; or the edges of shadows of things, shadows seen sideways on. What are these things, not recognizable from the edges of their shadows? I think the air will not spill its secrets any more readily than stone.
A POET AND HIS VILLAGE
People used not to like walking the empty half mile between the Four Roads and the village of Sruthán after dark. Old Mícheál of Cill Mhuirbhigh, Máire’s husband, told me the story of a man coming home from shooting wild geese on Oíleán Dá Bhranóg one night, whose horse baulked at a certain spot halfway along that stretch of road. The man thought he saw a dark shape near a well by the roadside, and he took out a piece of airgead croise (“cross-money,” Mícheál explained, a two-shilling coin with the cross on the back), held it over the muzzle of his shotgun and fired at the thing, which vanished on the spot. Then he galloped home as fast as he could, dropping his geese on the road. He sent his sister back to pick up the geese, and she saw nothing out of the way, but the next morning when folk going to Mass passed the spot they found the road full of ashes, or of stuff like jelly. Curiously enough, although Mícheál said he knew the man to whom this adventure had happened, and remembered seeing the gun hanging on the wall of his cottage, the well is called Tobar na Cúig Scilleacha, the well of the five shillings, which suggests that the story goes back to the time of the five-shilling or crown piece, which also had a cross on it.
Nowadays there is a bungalow on Creig an Tobair, the crag opposite the well—it was built for Mícheál and Máire’s retirement, though in the end Mícheál could not be persuaded to move in because of the area’s “sheeogy” reputation—but it is only used in summer, and so there is still an uninhabited gap between the house at the Four Roads, formerly a Hernon family’s and now a youth hostel, and the beginning of the long settlement the knowledgeable can subdivide into Sruthán, Eoghanacht and Creig an Chéirín. While it is a perfectly pleasant and by Aran standards unremarkable length of road, one does feel that this is the beginning of An Ceann Thiar, the western headland, which is quieter than the rest of the island and a little detached from it. The hostel virtually marks the limit of the tourist itinerary, which seems over recent years to have consolidated and standardized itself around the pubs of Cill Rónáin and the excursion to Dún Aonghasa. There was a little shop in Sruthán and a bigger one in Creig an Chéirín until the late ’seventies, but now there are none; indeed there are no shops west of Cill Rónáin. This change reflects the fact that more households have cars nowadays and that there is a regular minibus service along the island; but I wonder if it also means an ebbing of life from the west.
Feadaíl san oíche
Whistling in the night
Mar dhíon ar uaigneas,
As shelter from loneliness,
Már fhál idir croí is aigne
As a wall for heart and mind
Ar bhuairt seal,
Against a spell of gloom,
Ag giorrú an bhealaigh
Shortening the road
Abhaile ó chuartaíocht,
Home from visiting,
An tráth seo thiar
In the west this time
Níor chualas.
I did not hear.
Máirtín Ó Direáin’s poem on returning to his birthplace names other sounds he did not hear in the west that time: the reveler’s tipsy song, wild boasts about heroic ancestors, joyous shouts of the lads throwing the cloch neart, the fifty-six-pound weight, on a Sunday afternoon. And he concludes:
Ní don óige feasta
No longer for the young
An sceirdoileán cúng úd.
That narrow blasted reef.
But the title of the poem, “Árainn 1947,” one has to note, dates it. There has been much whistling, boasting and shouting heard since then in the west, and the villagers of Ó Direáin’s own generation I used to know here as old folk were very lively. I remember a spry old lady I met on that road to Sruthán, carrying a heavy bag of rye; I gave her a hand with it, and when I thankfully set it down on her doorstep she blessed me, and added, “It might have killed me—but what harm!” Not everyone is as sure of the necessity of their own life-world as the poet, whose mirror-lined skull brings the reflections of formative years to a focus of definitive brightness.
The sruthán or stream from which the village is named seeps out of the foot of a glen coming down the hillside from the south, forms a little turlough, disappears under the road, and reappears in other springs and turloughs here and there down the slope to Port Chonnla on the north shore. Ó Direáin’s sister Máire, a friendly old lady I used to visit, told me that before the road was built up and surfaced the water used to flow across it; in fact, she said, a lot of little streams did so, with flowers growing along their banks, “and it was very nice—at least we thought it was very nice.” Most of the remaining thatched roofs are along a boreen following the intermittent stream downhill from the road, between overgrown sally-gardens and tiny broken-walled potato-plots. A curious plant scarcely known outside of Aran and west Connemara, the wild leek, Allium babingtonii, grows here and there in the fringes of the village, and further down towards the shore there are little plots full of it. Gáirleóg is its local name, and its bulb tastes like a mild garlic. It often grows in what look like deliberate plantings; but Bríd Gillan is the only person I know of who uses it in cooking, and whether it is native, or a variety of the cultivated leek gone wild, is something botanists disagree on. It has a stem three or four feet high and as thin as a cigarette, topped in spring by a turban-shaped knob that later sheds its papery wrap to show a round mass of bulbils, from which little purplish flowers grow out on snaky stalks. Nodding out of neglected corners on its bowed or crooked stems, it accosts one like some irreducibly ascetic revenant from a monkish kitchen garden.