Stones of Aran

by Tim Robinson

  Before entering, however, I will diverge from the approach to the dún, and look at certain obscure remains almost in its shadow, one minor step of the slope down from it to the north-east. Among brambles and bracken and a spider-web of field-walls are some hummocks and ridges of half-buried stone, which an archaeological team under Dr. John Waddell of University College Galway, in 1973, tentatively deciphered as collapsed clocháns, the foundations of a little chapel, and part of a surrounding cashel wall. The most interesting feature of this very decayed monastic settlement is a triangular flagstone standing up among other broken flags that lean and lie around it, the remains of a sort of reliquary. Such “slab-shrines,” tent-like shelters about a yard high made of two rectangular flags leaning together with triangular flags closing either end, were not uncommon in the west of Ireland, and two almost complete ones can be seen at Teampall Chrónáin in the Burren. The possible chapel wall is ten paces to the north of the shrine, and about nine paces long. The site is marked “Kilcholan” on the OS maps, and O’Donovan took down its name as Cill Chomhla or Cill Chonan. He heard that it was regarded as the grave of a saint. I talked to the old lady who owned those fields, Grannie Hernon in Cill Mhuirbhigh, and her pronunciation of the name would agree with O’Donovan’s first version. She also told me that there is a pot of gold buried there, guarded by a black cat which she often saw when milking the cow. And once, when some men were about to disturb the old stones in order to mend the wall between her land and Concannon’s to the west of it, they stopped when a voice said to them, “Éistigí! Éistigí!” (Listen! Listen!). I could not have expressed the essential more succinctly myself.

  Dún Eoghanachta seems to dominate the sky above these ground-hugging monkish remains, for its rampart comes close to the break of the slope and stands twenty feet high at that point. A little west of Cill Chomhla, near another boreen passing up the hill from Eoghanacht village, is a large grassy hummock in which, according to the owner of the land, the Fir Bolg are said to have buried their tools after completing the fort. (In fact this hummock seems to be a settlement site, or a fulacht fia, a cooking site, perhaps of the Bronze Age.) He had heard this from Micilín Ó hIarnáin, the father of Colie Mhicilín, whose short stories of Aran life I mentioned in my first volume. Colie himself was the nearest to a seanchaí, a custodian of traditional lore, that we had in Eoghanacht—at least, his Sruthán neighbour Máire Pheige Cuaig used to refer to him as “him that has all the talk”—and he held that the settled belief of the old generations was that the forts were built by the Danes. Colie told me about the Danes in the course of a long walk up the boreen from Eoghanacht onto the high plateau to the south. In a field a little beyond the point where the boreen gives up and leaves one to clamber over wall after wall towards the Atlantic cliffs, we looked at the traces of some very wide ridges. We agreed that flax had probably been grown in them, but Colie said that such ridges used to be “put down to” the Danes, who it seems were secretive about their skills. They had some sort of manure; what it was, nobody knew, but it was supposed to be i gceann an iomaire, in the head of the ridge, and it saved them going down to the beach for seaweed. He had a story about it, which after some pressing I got out of him, though only as a deprecating aside about “foolish beliefs.” When the Danes were dying out and there was only one man and his son left of them, the Aran people were anxious to learn the secret of this manure, so they captured the man and the boy and threatened to put them to death if they would not tell it. The Dane eventually promised to tell, on condition that they first kill his son so that he would not hear him betraying the secret. So they killed the boy, and then the Dane said, “You may do what you want with me now, for I will never tell the secret.”

  I had read of a similar folktale, widespread in Ireland, in which the Danes’ secret is the recipe for making beer from heather; evidently Aran’s preoccupations differed from those of the mainland. This Aran version was new to me, however, and I asked Colie why he had never told it to me before. “I thought you wouldn’t be interested in that old rubbish,” he replied.

  Dún Eoghanachta has not been examined in detail since Westropp’s day, and the dating-methods of modern archaeology have not been applied to it, but from its general appearance the cashel as we see it now is probably of the Early Christian centuries. It consists of a single massive ring-wall, most of it over sixteen feet high, except to the east, where the entrance is rather broken-down. It would take about a hundred and twenty good paces to walk round it. As it did not need to be buttressed like the other cashels when the Board of Works restored it in 1884, it has retained its original simplicity; it can even appear rather dull in its severity. The wall has a slight “batter” or inward inclination, and vertical joints running up the entire height of it show that it was constructed in a number of lengths, perhaps each the work of a separate team. Many of the stones in it are three or four feet long. The total thickness of the wall is about sixteen feet, and, like the principal ramparts of the other cashels, it consists of three separately faced layers; the innermost layer is only brought up to a height of four to six feet and forms a terrace around the interior, but the outer two have been finished off (perhaps in the restoration) to a common height, and the distinction between them is obscured. O’Donovan in 1839 made out that the doorway originally had been only three foot four inches wide, but its height and other characteristics could no longer be determined; Westropp in 1910 noted that it had been rebuilt and was about six feet wide. The interior space or garth is a very nearly circular plot of nibbled-down grass about ninety feet across. Apart from the low foundations of three straight-walled huts against the inside of the rampart, the garth is bare and flat; it seems to lay itself out for pacing to and fro. At five points of the circumference, steep ladder-flights of steps lead up to the terrace, and three of them, according to Westropp, were continued to the top of the parapet by diverging pairs of smaller stairs set sideways into the wall. One of these pairs is still quite clear, but the others are very delapidated. Otherwise the general appearance of the interior is of Board-of-Works efficiency, tidy, disappointing.

  If in average daylight the dún seems to regard the past with a bored and disabused eye, one should revisit when wisps of mist are blowing through it, as I saw them once, a cantering procession of the near-invisible. Or one should attend to its name, which is one of those that says “Éistigí! Éistigí!” Here is a thread of the Eoghanacht story, teased out of a tangle of myths:

  Not long before history began, when Conn of the Hundred Battles, ancestor of the Connachtmen, was King of Ireland, a rival hero, Eoghan Mór, seized power in Munster. Eoghan means “good conception,” and he was to give rise to the dominant sept of early medieval Munster, named after him the Eoghanacht. He was also highly regarded in mythological retrospect by Leinster, which believed that during his fosterage by a Leinster king he had helped to build a fort, by throwing into position a great stone no one else could shift. The builder of the fort was Nuadhu, ancestor-god of the Leinstermen, and by this deed Eoghan earned another of his several magical names: Mugh Nuadhat, the servant of Nuadhu. Thus Eoghan represents the entire southern half of Ireland, immemorially embattled against the north.

  When Conn brought his forces against Eoghan at the battle of Carn Buidhe (near the present Kenmare), Eoghan would have been killed but for the magic of Éadaoin, a famous beauty of the otherworld, who made rocks appear as soldiers in the eyes of Conn’s army, spirited Eoghan and his men away to her seven ships, tended their wounds, and allowed them to sail off to Spain. The princess of Spain fell in love with Eoghan, and gave him a cloak of the skin of a wondrous salmon she had caught; hence his third magical name, Eoghan Taidhleach, from his bright (taid-hleach) cloak. He married the princess, and when after nine years he became homesick, he brought her back to Ireland with a fleet and an army supplied by her father. There he united the southern provinces against Conn once again.

  After many battles Conn had to agree to divide Ireland with Eo
ghan. The boundary ran from the head of Galway Bay to Dublin Bay, the north being Leath Choinn or Conn’s half, and the south Leath Mhogha or Mugh’s half, and the boundary itself being the glacial gravel-ridges of the Eiscir Riada, that provided a winding route across the central boglands. But they fell out again over the division of Dublin Bay; Conn attacked and routed Eoghan’s army, Eoghan and Conn wounded each other, and finally Eoghan was speared to death by Conn’s warriors. However, his son Ailill Ólom secured the territorial rights of the Eoghanacht, by mating with (raping, according to a hostile version circulated by the Connacht interest) the goddess Áine, tutelary deity of Cnoc Áine in the middle of the fertile plains of Munster.

  The dawn-light of history shows an Eoghanacht dynasty ruling from the great rock fortress of Cashel, and establishing its collaterals and its subject-peoples throughout Munster. They expanded north-westwards to Galway Bay, ousting the Connachta from that region with the aid of their vassals the Dal gCais, suppressing the indigenes of Ninuss, which seems to have comprised Corcomroe, the Burren, and the Aran Islands, and establishing in their place a branch of the sept, the Eoghanacht Ninussa. This probably happened in the fifth century, for it is reflected in the legend of St. Enda’s being granted Aran by the king whom St. Patrick himself had converted at Cashel, Oengus mac Nadfroích. Eventually the Eoghanacht lines were to be supplanted by the Dal gCais, from whom Brian Borumha, and so the O’Briens, descended; but in its prime the Munster of the Eoghanachta was probably the most advanced and peaceable part of Ireland, cultivating the beginnings of writing in Irish, trading goods and ideas with Aquitaine and Gaul.

  Of the seven Eoghanacht septs, the least known to history is the Eoghanacht Ninussa. They had evidently lost their territory to the Corcu Modruad, the aboriginals of Corcomroe, by 1016, when the latter’s king was killed by the Conmaicne (presumably those of Connemara) in the Battle of Aran, in the bay below Mainistir. References to the Eoghanacht Ninussa in the annals and genealogies for the intervening four hundred years are very sparse, and the name of Dún Eoghanachta is one of the few memorials of their reign. Another is The Voyage of Maol Dúin, one of the great immrama or voyage-tales, which after long oral evolution was written down in the ninth century by Aed Finn, chief sage of Ireland, “for the elation of the mind and for the people of Ireland after him.”

  Aran knows nothing of Maol Dúin or indeed of the Eoghanacht, but this fantastic story may even be rooted in Aran, for the hero’s father, Aillil Ochair Ágha, is described as a warrior of Árainn. I leap to the conclusion that he lived in Dún Eoghanachta. Maol Dúin’s mother was a nun; again it is intuitively obvious to me that she lived in one of the huts of Cill Chomhla, in the shadow of Ailill’s ramparts. Ailill had died before the child was born, and he was given to a queen of some other realm and reared in company with her three sons. Maol Dúin excelled them in all things, so that they became jealous and teased him with his ignorance of his parentage; this drove him to discover that his father had been killed by men of a Leinster sept. A druid in Corcomroe advised him to build a boat and go with a crew of exactly seventeen men to seek revenge. His three foster-brothers insisted on joining the crew, and he accepted them reluctantly. They arrived off an island where they overheard a man boasting that he was the slayer of Ailill, but because the druid’s council had been violated, a storm erupted just as they were about to land, and swept them out to sea.

  The involuntary pilgrimage that follows perhaps represents an expiation of Ailill’s sin against the Christian community, and the descriptions of some of its stations are allegories as crystalline as those of Bunyan. But mingled with these are dream-like episodes that read like the return of the suppressed matter of Celtic belief, and are both enigmatic and disquieting. It has been suggested that what we have here is the tattered remains of an oral, Celtic, equivalent of the Tibetan or Egyptian Books of the Dead, a chart of the successive states the departed soul passes through. This guide-book to the adequate death touches upon thirty-three visionary sites, and only a full list can do justice to them:

  An island of ants as large as foals; an island of great birds; an island of a horse with hound’s claws; an island of giant horses running a race; an island in which salmon are hurled by the sea through a stone valve into a house; an island of trees, from which Maol Dúin cuts a rod that bears three apples, each of which sustains him for a fortnight; an island with a beast that can turn its body round inside its skin; an island red with the blood of carnivorous horses that rend each other; an island of fiery swine; an island with a treasure-house guarded by a little cat that leaps right through one of the foster brothers when he tries to take a necklace, and reduces him to ashes; an island with a palisade separating white sheep from black, and a guardian who sometimes moves a sheep from one part to the other, whereupon it changes colour; an island of giant cattle and swine separated by a river of fire; an island with a mill in which is ground “all that men begrudge to one another’; an island of mourners in black, where one of the foster brothers becomes unrecognizable through grief and is left behind; an island with fences of gold, silver, brass and crystal, segregating kings, queens, warriors and maidens; an island with a fortress approached by a glass bridge, where a beautiful maiden seems to have expected their coming, but when they try to woo her for Maol Dúin she puts them off, and they wake next day to find themselves far at sea again; an island of birds that shout; an island with many birds and an anchorite clothed only in his long hair, who had come there sailing on a sod of his native land, which by God’s will had grown by one foot’s breadth and put forth one tree every year since then, the birds being the souls of his kindred awaiting Doomsday; an island with a fountain that yields water and whey on Fridays and Wednesdays, milk on Sunday and certain feast-days, and ale and wine on other feast-days; an island with a forge worked by a giant; a sea of glass of great splendour and beauty; a sea like a transparent cloud, through which they look down on a land in which a monster preys on a herd of oxen; an island where the people shout “It is they!” as if they had expected their coming and feared it; an island with an arch of water like a rainbow full of salmon over it; a silver column rising out of sight, with a silver net hanging from it, from which one of the voyagers brings home a piece to offer on the high altar at Armagh; an island on a pedestal with a door at its base; an island of women who try to seduce them into a life of perpetual youth and pleasure, which bores them, so that they leave after three months that seem like three years; an island with trees of intoxicating and soporific berries; an island with a hermit and an ancient verminous eagle, which renews itself in a lake; an island of mirth, where the last of the foster brothers is overcome by laughter and has to be left; an island with a revolving rampart of fire, through the doorway of which, when it comes round to them, they glimpse a life of luxury and music; an island where a monk is doing penance for robbing the church, who advises Maol Dúin to forgive his father’s slayers; an island where they see a falcon like the falcons of Ireland, which guides them homewards.

  Finally, they come back to the island of the slayer of Ailill, where their arrival is being discussed at that moment, and are made welcome.

  Separation of absolute essences seems to be a theme of this bizarre itinerary. Perhaps Maol Dúin’s voyage takes us behind the scenery of this life, and shows how crudely and arbitrarily it is tacked together out of such opposites and abstractions as black and white, warriors and maidens, laughter and grief, solitude and company. If so, like all visions of the otherworld it is a reductive and delusory account of this one. The wonders Maol Dúin encountered are as nothing to those of his native island, if that was indeed Aran; our salmon-leaping rainbows match his,. In fact with a little ingenuity I could show that each of the islands he saw was Aran, approached from a different direction.

  Pilgrimage, the ritual of attending to things one by one as we come to them, enacts a necessity forced on us by our limitations, our lowly evolutionary stage of mind. In reality everything is co-present (or at least, a
nd so as not once again to oversimplify, an uncountable number of stories struggle competitively through every event of space-time). Even a pilgrimage narrow-mindedly devoted to the one end is endlessly ambushed and seduced by the labyrinth it winds through, while the most comprehensive course we can chart through the incomprehensible is an evasive shortcut. Here, standing in this boring dún of Eoghanacht, I am trampled down by all that I might have bethought myself to say of it, as by the phantom horses of the streaming mist. But I am the servant of finitude, and must press on.

  SEVEN CHURCHES AND A FACTORY

  Two jagged strips of land running from north coast to south correspond to two subdivisions of the village of Eoghanacht; each has its boreens running downhill to its share of seaweed in the bay of An Gleannachán, and uphill to a thousand fields of Na Craga. The eastern section is Ceathrú an Turlaigh, the quarter of the turlough; this was the land contentiously acquired by Patrick O’Flaherty and from which his son James’ stock was driven over the cliffs. In the time of the Johnstons, the two-hundred or so acre holding was sold off for £400 to an islander from Inis Meáin who had returned from America with money. Máirtín Ó Concheanáinn was a brother of James Concannon, owner of the Concannon vineyards in California. The curious mansion he built for himself in 1903, like a flat-roofed version of Kilmurvey House, is set back from the road, on the right a little beyond the turning down to the old Ó Direáin cottage. As a child Máirtín Ó Direáin himself used to marvel at this big house next door, which his mother told him was like houses she had seen in America. He also saw with amazement the straw hat worn by a visitor to the house. Later he heard that some of the people staying there spoke Irish; in fact another of the Concannon brothers was Tomás Bán, the famous Gaelic Leaguer, and no doubt he often visited.