Stones of Aran

by Tim Robinson

  The smaller tenants of the village had their land in the western section, Ceathrú an Oicht, which used sometimes to be englished as Breastquarter, and is so called because it lies across the breast of the higher ground to the west. The boundary between the two quarters largely follows a slight notching of the stepped hillside, where erosion has found out a vulnerable major joint of the north-south set. This little glen cuts down through a line of low cliffs just above the village, and opens out into a flat space, now occupied by the factory, by the roadside. Immediately below the road, to the north, the same geological weakness has reproduced the same topography, a v-shaped recess in the rim of the next terrace, and here the naturally-provided sheltery site between the divergent cliffs is occupied by the group of monastic ruins from which the village gets its alternative name, Na Seacht dTeampaill or the Seven Churches.

  When I first came to Aran, the factory was merely a large shed of cement-coloured cladding, with a surly generator growling in a kennel beside it, and I was shocked that anyone could have thought of siting such a construction just here, where the contrast between its deadly greyness and the living grey of old limestone masonry mottled with roundels of lichen was as painful as could be. How did it come about that the most comfortably off generation Aran had ever known was responsible for the first ugly building the valley of the Seven Churches had seen in the fourteen hundred years of its history? The obvious answers, that that generation was by no means prosperous in the perspective of twentieth-century Europe, and that the shed was merely the beginnings of a development that helped to keep the community together throughout the next two decades, are true, but evasive. A proper answer would be a full diagnosis of “our wretched era.”

  The number “seven” is an invocation of the magical; there are in fact only two churches here, and the remains of probably eight other monastic buildings. They nest in the lee of the cliffs, casually clustered; all are ruins, roofless, some of them much reduced. But still, when one glances down into the site from the road it gives an impression of busyness, of concentration on its interior life; one hears the hum of these hives for the honey of the invisible. The many-cornered, uneven and overgrown spaces between them have been used as a graveyard for centuries; by the main church the ground is paved with obscurely lettered slabs, and everywhere it is hummocky with burials, so that the digging of a new grave is an anxious matter to the islanders, who hate to disturb old bones. The most recent head-stones of Italian marble, the sombre recumbant flags of the last century, and the dumb boulders marking infants’ graves, are all in an elegiac huddle with Early Christian stones bearing cryptically abbreviated inscriptions, including the famous “VII ROMANI,” romantically supposed to mark the resting-place of seven pilgrims from the Holy City itself, drawn by the echo of Aran’s prayers.

  This quiet depository of time is almost in the heart of the village. Colie Mhicilín’s cottage is set among the small plots and ragged bare rocky areas above its rim; I often called there in search of local guidance. Colie would edge me out of the kitchen, which was always billowing with daughters, into his stiff, chilly little “room,” hung with framed certificates for the five-pound and ten-pound prizes he had won at Irish-language festivals, and we would stand awkwardly at the table, looking at my maps or the lists of place-names he used to draw up for me. Then we would step out along the way he took to the cow every day: across a few yards of crag, down steps hardly more than toe-holds in a wrinkle of the scarp-face, along a path where elder-bushes hiding a neglected holy well caught at one’s sleeve, and so between the ruins, with a pause by his wife’s recent grave, to the stile leading out onto the side-road going down through a few big sandy fields to the bay. Sometimes he would stop, to give me one of his short stories in extenso, closing in on me with his watery eyes and spluttery breath. One of them was about a weasel looking through a hole in a wall at the goose it intended to kill; acting it out, Colie leaned forward, baring his yellow teeth and fixing his eyes on my throat. Paralyzed in my listening mode, I nearly despaired when he suddenly revised the story: “No, there wasn’t one goose, there were seven!,” and I had to drag his attention back to the problem in hand, the correct identification of the various “saints’ beds” here and there around the monastery.

  In the summer seasons of the ‘seventies I used occasionally to find students at work in the Seven Churches, measuring up the old buildings and taking rubbings of the carved stones; they were from University College, Galway, and it is from the report published by their director, John Waddell, that I draw most of the archaeological facts I have stirred into the following account of the monastic site. Teampall Bhreacáin, St. Brecán’s church, is the hub of the settlement. This is the largest ancient church in Aran, with a nave and chancel both eighteen feet broad and totalling about forty-two feet in length, separated by a round-headed arch. The arch and the lancet window in the east gable, with its wide internal splay rising to a slightly pointed arched head, are thirteenth-century work, transitional in style between Romanesque and Gothic, formed of smoothly cut stone in silvery contrast to the harsher and darker masonry of the walls. The round-headed door in the south wall, and the window near it, were probably inserted two or three centuries later, and are contemporary with the altar under the east window and a partition wall dividing off the west end of the nave. Looking at the west gable from inside, one sees that it was made by enlarging an older gable, which, like the north wall, is made of much bigger blocks, including one a good six feet long. On the outside, one of the antae of the original building remains, like a pillar reinforcing the north corner of the gable wall. Clearly the south and east walls of this earlier church were removed, in order to enlarge it into the nave of the present church. There is an inscription on a raised band of stone on the old part of the gable: OR AR II CANOINN, “a prayer for two canons” (the OR standing for ORÓIT). I wonder at the self-abnegation of this anonymous joint plea: do these two individuals need the same prayer?

  The other church is small and undivided, and probably dates from the sixteenth century, to judge by the slim, trefoil-headed window-light in its east gable and the doorway in the north wall, over which two undecorated curved bits of stone lean together to form the most basic gothic arch. It is tucked into the corner of the site nearest the road, where the glen narrows into a cleft, and its name, Teampall an Phoill, the church of the hollow, simply reflects its situation; no doubt it had a more arcane name once, which is forgotten.

  The domestic buildings of the monastery are of similar late medieval date. Five of them stand to a height of several feet, and the foundations of three more are traceable. They mainly have opposite doors in each of their long walls, like traditional cottages. One has two little windows with ogee’d heads cut out of single blocks, and another, a window of two trefoil-headed lights, quite simply constructed and chamfered, but richly decorative in its setting in the sober grey stonework. A curious toothy-topped wall zigzagging round the site is largely the creation of the Board of Works, who did some restoration-work here towards the end of the last century, but one stretch of it, near the stile by which one climbs down into the graveyard from the side-road on the west, is also probably medieval. The blocked-up lintelled doorway in it, Colie tells me, was once tall enough for a horse and rider to pass through; over the years, what with burials and overgrowth, the ground-level has risen.

  This, and another length of old wall with a pointed archway, between it and the big church, perhaps formed part of an enclosure around a number of “penitential stations” or leabaí (literally, “beds”), regarded as saints’ graves, at which pilgrims used to perform their devotions. The nearest of these to the arched entrance is a roughly rectangular, double-bed-sized plot surrounded by a low drystone parapet. It is called Leaba an Spioraid Naoimh, the bed of the Holy Ghost, a dedication that puzzles people, as such “beds” are usually named after their presumed makers or occupants. Colie Mhicilín told me he once heard an old man explaining to another islander that the Holy
Ghost was buried in it (“But that couldn’t be,” added Colie, “for the Holy Ghost is—God!”—with a slight hesitation, looking at me as if for confirmation of this theological conundrum.)

  Within living memory both islanders and visitors from the mainland used to sleep in Leaba an Spioraid Naoimh in hope of or to give thanks for spiritual favours, and several cures—crutches thrown away, etc.—are attributed to the practice. An elderly Sruthán villager, Cáit Faherty, told me a story about a Connemara family who brought a loaf and a three-pound slab of butter with them, which they left to hand on the parapet overnight. A thief came while they slept, and was on the point of making off with the food, when it was miraculously turned to stone. The two stones are still there, she told me, but not many people know their story, so they are usually thrown aside or tidied away somewhere, and she used to go searching for them and put them back by the bed. The loaf was of the tall, round shape they used to make in pots, and the thief had broken one pound off the lump of butter, which Cáit always fitted together again with the rest. I have never seen these stones, which may well be lying around somewhere nearby, but they are visible in a photograph of the bed taken by T.H. Mason in the early 1930s. Mason had no Irish, and all he could gather about them, from an old man who had very little English, was that the cylindrical loaf-stone had some supernatural power or origin, and this led Mason to speculate, incorrectly, that it was a cursing-stone.

  Part of the shaft of a high cross stands at one corner of this bed, and there are other chunks of it lying nearby. It is elaborately carved. On its west face, at the foot, is a square panel in which two serpents, arranged into four symmetrical whorls, bite each other’s heads; above that is a panel of six abstract knots, and above that again, the lower part of a crucifixion, with the two thieves (it is supposed) shown as dangling manikins on either side of Christ’s legs. Originally the cross would have been about seven feet high, with a ring around the intersection of the arms and the shaft, and deep cusps in the angles between them. Like two other crosses, now lying in fragments to the north and the south of the monastic site, it is similar in style to the Cill Éinne crosses attributed to a late eleventh-or early twelfth-century school of sculptors working both in Aran and Clare. Of the two fragmentary high crosses, one is on the bare craggy level above the monastery and near the main road, in a little enclosure Colie names as Leaba Bhreacáin, and which used to be regarded by the villagers as the saint’s original chapel. Just a dozen paces east of it is St. Brecán’s holy well, Tobar Bhreacáin, a natural solution-hollow or bullán in the limestone, with a little canopy of rough limestone blocks over it that sometimes serves as a hearth for the village’s St. John’s Eve bonfire. The bits and pieces of the cross were collected from around the ruins and put together by William Wilde in 1848, and unfortunately at some period they were cemented down. This cross was about twelve feet high, with a ringed head, and its visible face is decorated with panels of knots and fret-patterns. The third cross is in a low rectangular enclosure reached by crossing a field northwards from the graveyard. Only the stump is still standing, and eight substantial bits of the shaft lie beside it, having been gathered together by Samuel Ferguson in 1852. It was originally over thirteen feet high, with a small ring, and cusps in the intersections of shaft and arms. On what was its eastern face is a figure of Christ (crucified, presumably, but the arms and nub of the cross are missing), with a smaller figure on either side, too rudimentary to be definitely identifiable as the two thieves, or as the Virgin and St. John, or as the usual occupants of this position, the sponge-bearer and the lance-bearer. The rest of the shaft-face and its reverse are carved with panels of plait-work, which here and there degenerates into tangles. These errors, made in the latter stages of what must have been months of work, were no doubt severely criticized, but evidently they were not considered serious enough to lead to the stone’s abandonment, so there they lie, for me to nod at, a monument to a labyrinthographer astray.

  Next to Leaba an Spioraid Naoimh, on its south, is a low grassy platform with a stone surround, which archaeological reports refer to as Leaba Bhreacáin. By it there stands a large squarish slab with an incised cross in a double circle; one quadrant is missing, and the others are lettered thus: SCI BRE … NI, which, when the contraction indicated by the line above the first group of letters is unriddled, and the missing letters plausibly supplied, is a dedication to St. Brecán. This stone was found in “St. Brecán’s grave” in about 1825 when it was opened for the burial of some Galway ecclesiastic, but whether the grave, as opposed to the bed, of St. Brecán is this present enclosure, or one in the south-east corner of the graveyard, is not clear, for archaeologists, Ordnance Survey and local tradition are at sixes and sevens over the names of these enclosures. Underneath the slab was found a little stone cresset lamp, now in the National Museum, with the inscription OR AR BRAN N AILITHIR, “a prayer for Bran the Pilgrim,” which I mentioned apropos of Oileán Dá Bhranóg in my first volume. A fragment of another inscribed cross-slab stands in this bed, reading OR AR MAINACH, “a prayer for Mainach.”

  There are fourteen more stones and slabs with inscriptions or crosses of various forms scattered around the graveyard. The “Seven Romans” stone stands with two others by what Colie says is Breacán’s grave, in the south-east angle of the cemetery wall. It is a slab about three feet high and one across, with a broadly grooved cross dividing its face into four cantons, inscribed VII RO MA NI. George Petrie, who first recorded it, took it to be the gravestone of seven pilgrims from Rome. However, it seems unlikely that a group of seven all died or were buried together. Macalister, writing in 1913, considered that the inscription was a dedication to “the seven martyred sons of Symphorosa, who are named in the Irish martyrologies of Oengus and of Gorman, under date 27 June.” Recently Peter Harbison has pointed out that in early Medieval Latin the word “Romani” can mean those spiritually dependent on Rome, and quotes the “Irish Litany of Pilgrim Saints,” written around 800, which starts by invoking “thrice fifty coracles of Roman pilgrims.” He suggests that the stone may have been commissioned by pilgrims from Rome or, more probably, a group of Irish who had made the pilgrimage to Rome, to mark their stay in Aran. In either case he sees the stone as evidence for the thesis that Aran was an important station in an established pilgrim-route linking a rosary of the holy places of Atlantic Ireland—Mount Brandon and Skellig Michael in Kerry, St. Macdara’s Island off south-west Connemara, Inishmurray in Sligo, Glencolmcille in Donegal—all more easily reached by sea than by land. This pilgrimage would have been at its height in the twelfth century, but may have persisted until much later—it was in 1607 that the Pope granted a plenary indulgence to all who visited the churches of Aran on the Feast of Sts. Philip and James, and on the Feast of St. Peter’s Chains. If so, we can picture the long (thatched?) buildings of the Seven Churches as the hostel offices, dormitories and refectories for an international coming and going of pious backpackers.

  Another intriguing possibility, that does not preclude the above, is that the Seven Churches was an Augustinian monastery. I have come across two scraps of evidence. Firstly, a report sent to Rome in 1658 by the Archbishop of Tuam, John de Burgo, who had been expelled by the Cromwellians, stating that there was once a monastery of Canons Regular of St. Augustine in Aran, “whose name has slipped my memory in my exile in France.” Secondly, a note on Eoghanacht added to the census of 1821 by Patrick O’Flaherty: “There are near this village ruins of 7 churches and a monastery of the Augustinian Order with a burial ground annexed.” These are the only mentions of an Augustinian foundation in Aran I know of; together they amount to—a speculation.

  The Seven Churches is of course not the ancient name of this foundation; papal documents of 1302 and 1466, for instance, refer to it as “Dísert Brecan,” a dísert (literally, a desert) being a common term for the site of a hermitage. Brecán (Breacán in modern Irish) himself is one of the obscurer saints, and no early Life of him survives. Outside of Aran, he is asso
ciated with Kilbreckan in County Clare, and Cill Bhríocáin in Ros Muc, Connemara. A Brecán associated with King Guaire in Durlas near Kinvara, and another with Ardbraccan in County Meath, are perhaps not to be identified with “our” Brecán, although the latter’s coarbs or successors in Clare later asserted their rights to tribute from his namesakes’ foundations. These claims are made in a poem purporting to have been composed by the saint himself, but probably dating from the fourteenth or fifteenth century, of which the sole surviving copy is written for some reason on a flyleaf of a manuscript on astronomy dating from 1443. Brecán, on his deathbed, addresses himself to his pupil and great-grand-nephew, on the essential matter of tributes due to him and his heirs:

  Eridh suas, a Tolltanaigh,

  Arise, o Tolltanach,

  go ngabhmais tres dar salmaibh,

  and let us recite our psalms,

  a naoimh feta orrtanaigh,

  o quiet prayerful saint,

  seal beg rem cur a talmain.

  for a while before my burial.

  Do deoin Mic Dhe dénasa

  God’s Son willing,

  an gabhail seo do ragha,

  do you recite this canticle,

  scribhthar let mo scelasa

  write down my history

  & scribthar mo cana.

  and write down my dues.

  The saint’s continued protection of the ruling families in his territories, he makes clear, is provisional upon the payment of these dues to his successors: “May their enemies not destroy them, provided they pay my taxes.” The king of Meath had given Brecán his harness and saddle, and his successor is entitled to the same, which as he points out, “is not too onerous.” In Clare, Brecán had baptized the Maol Domhnaigh (Muldowny) clan, and for this his coarbs should have the right to a circuit (of free hospitality, I presume) every seven years, also a tunic from every maiden, a present from every ecclesiastical tenant, a large horn from every housewife, a lamb from every sheepfold; in return Brecán bequeaths good fortune and excellence of feasting to the handsome family and well-being to their cows. Various other clans are similarly assessed. In the Kinvara area of Doorus and Durlas he was in conflict with another saint, and had to curse the cows of the region so that “they would feel the torment of thirst at the onset of bulling and lactation,” but he got a screpall (threepence) from every household there. The contentious territoriality of this saint matches well with his role in the Aran story of his dividing the island with St. Enda. The poem ends by stamping the seal of divine authority on his testimony: