by Tim Robinson
Ag sin ní dom scelaibhsi
This is something of my story
Rí nime dam do reighid,
revealed by heaven’s King,
a hucht Ísa admuim sin
in Jesus’s name I confirm it,
denasa, a daltain, eiridh.
do it, o pupil, arise.
As me Brecan builideach,
I am the prophetic Brecán,
mac rí Muman go treighaibh,
accomplished son of Munster’s king,
d’innsin scel na fuinidech,
telling the tale of the western world,
a Toltanaigh, & eridh.
o Toltanach, arise!
Thus the poem claims royal origins for Brecán, and the medieval genealogies do indeed situate him as the son of Eochaidh Bailldhearg of the Dal gCais, who himself had been baptized by St. Patrick. The poem itself gives further details, no doubt drawn from earlier sources now lost. We learn that the saint’s original name was Bresal, and that he was a cavalry soldier before his baptism. He was fostered and reformed by Pupu mac Birn, who some old sources identify with St. Enda’s successor Nem and with Enda’s companion on the visit to Rome, Pupeus. Then he established his dísert at a place called Iubhar, where everyone was pleased when he expelled the devils. (Another medieval reference to Iubhar specifies that it was in Aran. The name means “yew-tree,” and the only Aran place-name with such an element in it today is Eochaill, yew-wood, a few miles to the east of Dísert Brecán.)
The purpose of this confabulation is clearly to legitimize the claims of the foundations ascribed to St. Brecán. The link with the royal line of the Dal gCais, which culminated in Brian Borumha, would have redounded to these foundations’ prestige. But one detail of the poem, perhaps a chance survival from a more ancient tradition, seems to give the saint a pedigree from another dimension altogether. When he came to Aran, he tells us:
Brecan crodha clairingnech
Fierce Brecán clairingnech
do bí romam san Iubhar,
was there in Iubhar before me,
a cur as ro aemhasa
I undertook to expel him
is do naemus a inadh.
and sanctified his place.
Do rinnus fan Iubharsa
I took action over Iubhar
scel bec nach coir do leighadh,
(no harm to read the little tale)
do deoin De gan díchuinnus
by God’s will and without violence
do dicuiris an gégar.
I expelled the fierce one.
This “little tale” is read by the modern editor of St. Brecán’s poem as “the account of his destruction of a reigning idol, Brecán, whose name he took, and of his conversion of the pagan sanctuary into a Christian dísert.” But that is to drag the episode out into the light of history, whereas surely we are on the cusp between history and mythology here, and what is happening under our eyes is the transformation of a local Celtic deity into a wonder-working Christian saint. This event took place in the realm of interpretations, not on the solid ground of Aran.
Some fourteen hundred years later an attempt was made to install the cult of the golden calf in the valley of the Seven Churches. Next to the grey shed I have mentioned, in which a few girls of the village made dolls for sale at Shannon Airport, an “advance factory” arose in 1973, a factory, that is, built in advance of knowledge of any prospective lessee, in the hope that the grants and tax-breaks on offer from the government would tempt some company to locate part of its operations in this highly disadvantageous industrial dísert. Soon it was announced that a Birmingham jewellery firm would be taking over the premises, for the manufacture of keeper-earrings and other little items of gold. For some reason we, like many others, were dubious about this company, but an executive of Gaeltarra, the forerunner of today’s Gaeltacht Development body, assured us that their bona fides had been checked out in Hatton Garden, which sounded impressive. An extraordinary number of public representatives and journalists were flown out to witness the opening of the new factory, and to hear the Minister say, “The establishment of such an industry in a relatively isolated region is not only a major breakthrough in the development of our Gaeltacht islands, but, in this time of world economic depression, it can be regarded as a truly historic occasion.” Apart from the factory premises, Gaeltarra was investing £170,000 in training and equipment grants in the new enterprise, which was expected to provide over eighty full-time and some part-time jobs. However, Dara the postman with his usual sceptical delivery remarked to me, “They’re all here to see it open, but none of them will be here to see it closed!”
After the ceremony we met the works manager, who was still round-eyed from the experience of coming out from Galway in the Naomh Éinne; the old tub had stopped off Inis Meáin first, and the natives had rowed out to meet it in their currachs, “like savages!” he said, obviously wondering if the values of Brum could be imparted to such anthropophagi. Relationships between the management and the indigenes were not good from the beginning. Soon an advert appeared in the papers; a foreman was required, who must be a disciplinarian. Clearly, the missioners of the Black Country suspected that certain theological concepts, such as “8.30 sharp every weekday morning,” and especially “8.30 sharp even on the morning after a Sunday-night céilí dance,” were not well developed here.
We also got to know a young worker sent across from the mother-factory, presumably as an example of what was required. Roy often called in at the Residence to reminisce about city life: the crunch of his Doc Marten boots as he walked down to the Bull Ring on a Saturday night; the roar of his motorbike when he was tormenting the bourgeoisie of the suburbs on a Sunday afternoon. We heard about his unrequited love for an island girl employed in the factory. She complained that the dance he performed in the Community Hall was too violent; but, as he tried to explain, it had to be violent because it was the Angel Dance. (Roy was a Hell’s Angel, or had cherubic aspirations to be one.) One Friday afternoon when she was working a press that stamped out small components one by one, Roy offered to help her finish off a rush-job. The machine was controlled by two buttons, one on either side, which had to be pressed simultaneously, thus keeping the operator’s hands out of harm’s way. Roy kindly showed her a method of speeding up production: he would press one of the buttons for her, while she positioned the blanks and pressed the other. Inevitably she nearly lost a finger, which blighted his chances for ever.
The proprietor of the business used to fly in occasionally with his teenage mistress and stay at a nearby guest-house. As it happened, we never met them, although Roy told me, man to man, that it would be worth while strolling up to have a look at the girl. Soon the guest-house owner was getting sick with anxiety as unpaid bills mounted up. We wrote letters on his behalf, to no avail. I remember the anguish in his voice, trying on the telephone with his limited English to get through the practiced evasions of a receptionist in Birmingham, shouting at her, “Tell him to tell him I told him to tell him!” Aer Árann were in a stronger position to get their dues; once when some factory executives were waiting in the plane for take-off, the pilot ordered them out, and left them stranded. It was only about a year before the bubble burst. No more than about twenty-two had been employed, and suddenly they were told to take a week’s holidays. Anxious renegotiations of terms took place between Gaeltarra and the management, but finally Gaeltarra had to move very quickly to prevent them shipping out machinery bought with the taxpayers’ money. Dara’s prophecy was fulfilled exactly. There was scarcely a word about the collapse in the papers. We wondered how much cultural damage had been done by the barbarian invasion brought down upon Aran by the official protectors of its well-being, but in the event, the island remained philosophical about its proven insufficiency to modern times.
An Irish company, Telectron Ltd., soon took over the factory, with similar fanfares, for the assembly of telecommunications gear. I never knew much about the factory’s internal drama
s after that, but I believe it served the community well, to the tune of twenty to thirty reasonable jobs, until the interminable recession of the late ’eighties ground down the parent company and left only a tiny rump of it under local management in Aran. In its steady years it even enhanced the valley of the Seven Churches, for its gleaming paint and glasswork eclipsed the slovenly grey shed. Whenever I cycled by, hands were raised to wave behind the big plate-glass windows, and there were faces, difficult to put a name to among the reflections of old Aran’s cloudy stones and lichenous skies, but smiling.
LOOKING OUT OF ARAN
Three hundred and fifty-four feet is no great height, but in attaining to it on westernmost part of its tripartite plateau, Aran seems to gather itself up as if to crane over the horizon. Beyond the Seven Churches the road begins to negotiate the scarps obliquely, one by one, and at the top of each rise a boreen turns off to the left, to scale the hillside directly. The first little carcair is by the modern chapel of Sts. Patrick and Enda, two hundred yards beyond the last old cottages of Eoghanacht village. The boreen that goes off round the west gable of the chapel and up the face of the hill is Ród na Creige Móire, the road of the big crag, and the big crag itself is the rim of the terrace that provided the site of the chapel. This was one of the customary places for erecting small funerary cairns, and there were also two, perhaps more, of the bigger, inscribed, monuments on the crag, which were destroyed when the chapel was built in 1958. Two plaques from these have been set in the roadside walls; they are dated 1814 and 1811, and since the latter (together with the much more elaborate and probably imported Eochaill example already mentioned) is the earliest of them all, I transcribe it—
O Lord have mercy
on ye Soul of Thos.
Coneely died in
ye 25 yr. of his
Age 1811
—not so much in honour of Thomas Coneely, but of his mourners, who perhaps initiated the custom, and whose creative act in so doing is, as mentioned in my earlier chapter on these monuments, one of the many aspects of Aran that thwart my understanding.
Tucked into the farther corner of the third field uphill from the chapel is another frustrated line of enquiry. Colie Mhicilín, conducting me up the boreen once, pointed out a spring well there, a seepage from between two layers of rock where the ground steps up a few feet at the back of the field, that collects in a water-worn channel and fills a beautiful natural basin. In a cleft beside it, and among the water-weeds of the pool, is a collection of small things left there by the clients of this well, which perhaps is not quite a holy one: a big whelk-shell for supping the water from, scallop-shells, a broken comb, rusty horseshoe nails, shards of pottery, a clay pipe-stem, buttons and coins (of which the most recent was dated 1974). It is called Bullán na Caillí, the rock-bowl of the old woman, a name which connects it with a bean feasa or woman of knowledge, a herbalist, a hag, a witch—the range of meanings of the word cailleach reflecting the perception that an old woman is always something more than just an old woman. In the middle of the last century there was a herb-woman living quarter of a mile or so farther west; this is how an old man spoke of her to Ruairí Ó hEithir when he was researching Aran folk medicine in the 1970s:
In Creig a’ Chéirín there was Máirín a’ Chaiptín, who was married to Seán a’ Dochtúra. She used to be going about the crags at night, gathering herbs probably. She was another one who would know beforehand about things that were to happen. She died about a hundred years ago.
One of her specialties was a cure for wind: she would inflate a sheep’s or pig’s bladder and let the air out slowly as she passed it over the sufferer’s stomach, and the pain would disappear. She also had an inexhaustible supply of turf in her loft, until one day her father disobeyed her by going up to fetch turf from it himself, and found the room empty. (Perhaps it was not just herbs she brought home from her midnight prowlings.) Ruairí Ó hEithir suggests that she is likely to have been the practitioner of disease-transference Nathaniel Colgan heard about when he was botanizing in Aran in 1892. However Colie could not, or perhaps did not want to, tell me anything about the well beyond its name, and could not confirm its connection with Máirín a’ Chaiptín. Also, while he had heard of diseases being transferred to donkeys, and seemed to believe in that as a possibility, he would not allow that they might have been transferred to other human beings. I was left slightly irked by the refusal of all these hints to cohere into the story of this well.
In fact Colie was rather evasive on the topic of magic, which naturally arose as we walked on. A few fields further up the hill we saw a scrap of blue plastic material fluttering from a cranny in a wall. He said that some people would leave a rag like that in the corner of a field to ward off ill-luck. But I could not get it clear from him whether that particular rag was there to scare birds or fairies, or indeed whether or not such things were still done. I felt that if I had had some training in folklore research I would have heard—what I wanted to hear, that magic’s writ still runs in Aran.
After climbing a scarp a quarter of a mile up from the road, and then another, Ród na Creige Móire suddenly sprouts four limbs, all elbows and knees, and then one or two more, with which it swarms over the brow of the hill and sprawls to its many ends, all a long way from anywhere; I remember how wearisome I found it, tramping out these rigmaroles one by one for my map. In a field full of brambles separated by another field full of brambles to the south-east of the first turn to the south of the first branch to the east of this aporia, are very indistinct remains of a stone hut called Clochán an Airgid, which houses the same vague tale of buried treasure as the Clochán an Airgid I described south of Mainistir. (I have to admit to myself that I sometimes found Aran boring and repetititious.) And half a mile up the second branch to the south off the westernmost branch, where the boreen stops for the space of a few fields and then starts again for no apparent reason, there are two clocháin with roofs and windows, the details of which I will not trouble to record as they are largely the result of an outburst of creativity on the part of the Office of Public Works’ local employees in the 1960s.
And once again, beyond the nerve-ends of this boreen-system, now to be visited for the last time so far as this book is concerned, is the unnerving landscape of Na Craga, the familiar mesh of countless stony fields, all clenched and gnashed together like the cogs and ratchets of an antique clock long ticked to a stop, its key lost. Sometimes the tense stillness is more than stone itself can bear; as when a stone lying in the thin grass hears me coming, holds its breath hoping I won’t see it, and at the very last moment as I am about to tread on it, snaps with anxiety and goes panicking off, a snipe, staggering up the sky, dodging imaginary gunshots, and flutters down as if exhausted into a distant field.
In retrospect now, I see these lonely quarters in high summer, with restless harebells reluctantly tethered against the breeze by their slim stalks, and all the other vegetation gone course and seedy: the knapweeds and hardheads, which after the purple thistle-like flowers have withered turn out their ruffs of silvery sepals that glint like mirrors; the scraggy devilsbit scabious and bartsia and yellow rattle. Down in the crevices, dewberry fruit, like blackberries but with just three or four big sachets of sweetness; the Araners call them crúibíní, trotters, from their shape. Aimlessly here and there about these light-scoured expanses goes the loosely fluttering grayling butterfly, that alights beside me as I sit on a rock, closes its wings to show the little eye-like roundels on the underside of the forewing for a moment, and then when no enemy has betrayed its presence by a move, covers them with the mottled grey hindwings and leans over, away from the sun, almost flat to the ground and looking so like a flake of lichen-covered limestone that it effectively disappears. Sometimes there are dozens of dark green fritillaries too: big, fast-flying butterflies, reddish-brown and black above, green and silver below, that dash from field to field with an impatient rattling of wings. On hot days these crags sizzle like frying-pans with insect l
ife; grasshoppers spark to and fro, caterpillars ready to pupate have tantrums in their too-tight skins, the clover-heads are bowed under swooning clusters of six-spot burnet moths, rose chafer beetles like half-inch nuggets of green gold orbiting with the inertial fatalism of asteroids crash softly into purple beds of hemp agrimony. Everything is burning with particularities: I fly like this, I jump like this, I eat this, my wings have six red spots on black, nothing else is like me! And of each of these tiny egos, there are millions of replicas. They fly up from disturbed bushes like the contents of a jewellery-shop fleeing a blaze; they swarm and pluck at me in their paroxysms of individuation: am I not going to mention them, the small copper butterfly I saw at Clochán an Airgid, the unspotted form of the six-spot burnet, the cinnabar moths, the sapphire-bright common blues? And they will never understand, and if they could understand would never accept, that my book can only achieve its end by relinquishing its all-inclusive aspirations.