by Tim Robinson
All these identical fields of shaggy grass and herbs struggling up through shattered rock are fiercely individualistic too, if one makes the mistake of paying attention to them. Thousands of names must have been given to them over the centuries, most of them forgotten; I have only recorded a few dozen. By the two restored clocháin is one called Creigeán na Banríona, the queen’s crag-cum-field; Colie cannot tell me why. To the east of the end of the eastern branch of the boreen coming up south from Clochán an Airgid is Scrios Buaile na bhFeadóg, the open tract (this seems to be the local meaning of scrios in this context) of the pasture of the lapwings; and there are often lapwings on this plateau, or soaring above it, screeching and tumbling as if perpetually let down by the properties of air in their efforts to be free of the ground of Aran.
The one place-name that best stands for these uplands in my mind, or for the tensions I associate with them, is Creigeán an “Lookout.” This is the third field south of the final angle of the westernmost of the four branches of the boreen (I only specify this to convey the maddening intrication of place up here); it is close to the highest point of this end of the island, and is the first place one reaches, coming up from the village, from which the whole western sea-horizon is visible. Certain families used to keep a lookout posted here for sailing vessels inward bound for Galway, so that their menfolk could row out in their currachs to meet them and propose themselves as pilots through the rocks and shoals of Galway Bay. (Jokes were made about these Aran pilots. For example: the Araner assures the captain of the ship that he knows every rock in the bay, and is taken on as pilot. Soon afterwards the ship shudders to a halt against a rock. Captain: “I thought you said you knew every rock in the bay?” Araner: “I do—and that’s one of them!”)
I too often looked out of Aran from these heights, and sometimes, especially latterly, with a sense of longing. I learned the name of Creigeán an “Lookout” not from Colie—it was almost outside his territory, being on the borders of Creig an Chéirín—but from an old man called Tomáisín Jamesie. Creig an Chéirin is divided into two quarters, Lios na dTrom (“the fort of the elder-bushes” is most probably the sense of this) and An Sliabh Mór, the big mountain, farther to the west. In broad terms the boundaries of these subdivisions run approximately Aran-north-south across the island, which is just under two miles wide here, but in detail they are extremely tortuous, and Tomáisín would trust nobody but himself to make sure I marked them down correctly on my map. I became obsessed with this problem, returning to the hunt for certainty again and again, struggling from field to field to field with Tomáisín, or by myself in accordance with notes taken down from his voluble directions, trying to identify a field-wall that was slightly thicker or more ivy-grown than the rest, or one that had no “gaps” in it and therefore separated two holdings and probably two quarters. Sometimes I felt that I was in caught in the knot of these obsolete and well-forgotten discriminations, so that, to lift my head from their tediously predictable and yet impenetrable dodges and tricks-of-the-loop, and look out at the distant great world, was almost an escape. Connemara in particular attracted me; at that period I was already mentally stretching a new, broader, canvas for myself there. Aran felt too small, though I knew I would never get to the bottom of it. Sometimes, on returning to the island after a short absence, I would cycle to one end of it and look out, and the next day cycle to the other end and look out, and wonder how to get through the next few months. Also, there was something unsettling and illicit about the calm in which I lived here. Aran has had its famines and oppressions, even, on a small scale, its wars, but for a long time it has had only private troubles, and the great causes seem far away. I would read in the newspapers, several days late, about a world so full of horrors that my seclusion seemed to tempt fate; the sky when I looked out from Aran was rimmed with black, like blood under a bruised fingernail.
But if I had doubts about the worth of what I was doing, seeing myself against that horizon of deadly debate, Tomáisín did not, and was happy to accompany me on afternoons of rambling. Or did I delude myself? Was it merely that, as he told me once when I found him standing becalmed at the gate of his cottage, “Níl tada le deanamh ag seanfhear” (there’s nothing for an old man to do)? In any case, my reading of the lines of his land gave him the gratification a palmist would have offered him: the tribute of attention, loading the worn traces of his everyday life with significance—and what that significance was, perhaps hardly mattered; it was in itself significant. So, when he could delight me by leading me through ever narrower róidíní to something worthy of being marked on a map, he was delighted with himself. Coming back from Boithrín an tSléibhe Mhóir, the main path running south across An Sliabh Mór, we took a crooked little shortcut into Lios na dTrom territory called Bóithrín Thobar na hEochraí, the boreen of the well of the fish-spawn (that at least seems to be the sense of the name), and when he reached the well itself Tomáisín, who was ahead of me, turned round with the air of a showman, and pointed out a ruin hardly bigger than a dog-kennel hidden in the bushes. Unfortunately he saw that I had guessed what it was before he opened his mouth, and his face dropped; I regretted that. It was an old poitín still, like those I had been shown hidden away in similarly discreet corners of Connemara. In fact this one had been built by a distiller from the Maigh Cuilinn area who settled in Aran just after the Napoleonic wars, Pádraig Ó Tuathail. Poitín is still made in Connemara—in thousands of gallons, at least until the recent stiffening of the law against it—but not with the patient attention to quality of the old days. Ó Tuathail would have been a craftsman, selecting his barley-grain with care, steeping bagfuls of it in the well, then letting it sprout (perhaps burying the bags in a dunghill or a heap of turf-mould), drying it over a small kiln, grinding it with a hand-quern, soaking it in hot water and drawing off the “ale,” adding yeast and flour, and finally watching over the slow repeated distillation, the singleáil and the dúbláil—all this to be done without attracting the attentions of the police or the coastguards. On one occasion he failed to keep a good look-out, and the smoke of the still was seen from a naval vessel offshore; three or four men were put ashore in a row-boat, crept up the hill and surprised him at work. He was arrested and taken back to the ship. Fortunately one of the crew knew him, and after walking past him once or twice took an opportunity of whispering to him in that language the foreigner does not know, “A Phádraig, cá bhfuil do chuid snámh?” (“Patrick, where’s your swimming?”) Ó Tuathail took the hint, leapt overboard and swam for it; a couple of bullets were fired over his head, but he was let get away.
Tomáisín was pleasant to be with, lively in speech, agile over walls, a neat and trim little man who despite his ordinary countryman’s dress of flat cap and tweed jacket reminded me of Máirtín Ó Direáin’s old traditionalists:
Maireann a gcuimhne fós i m’aigne:
Their memory still lives in my mind:
Báiníní bána is léinte geala,
White bawneens and bright shirts
Léinte gorma is veistí glasa,
Blue shirts and grey waistcoats,
Treabhsair is dráir de bhréidín baile
Trousers and drawers of homespun
Bhíodh ar fheara cásacha aosta
Worn by venerable old men
Ag triall ar an Aifreann maidin Domhnaigh
Going to Mass on Sunday morning
De shiúl cos ar aistear fhada,
Walking all the long way,
A mhusclaíodh i m’óige smaointe ionamsa
Who woke the thoughts of my youth
Ar ghlaine, ar úire, is fós ar bheannaíocht.
To the clean, the fresh, and even the pious.
Unfortunately, despite his impeccable credentials as village ancient, I came to the conclusion that Tomáisín’s version of the boundaries was logically incoherent, and I had to search out an old bachelor I particularly disliked, and go over them again. Sometimes I suspect that folk memory owes its reputatio
n to the fact that there is nothing to check it against; the guardians of oral lore got it wrong in the first generation, and every generation since has added its quantum of error.
Returning from such expeditions I sometimes came down to the village of Creig an Chéirín by a rather precipitous track called Ród na gCaiptíní, after the nickname of the family whose land it served. Na Caiptíní (the captains) were McDonaghs (as were sixty of the one hundred and twenty-one inhabitants of the village in Ó Tuathail’s time, for example); the wise woman Máirín a’ Chaiptín was one of them, as was her namesake and contemporary, Máirín an Chaiptín, the midwife, from whom the back-road in Cill Rónáin is called Bóthar an Chaiptín. As I have mentioned, most Aran families have nicknames, which distinguish them better than the limited number of surnames can do, but since most of them originated in some anecdote that has been repeated for generations with a teasing or spiteful intent, they are not usually used in the presence of those named, and it is difficult for me to discuss them here. However, this particular nickname is not offensive. Mícheál the blacksmith told me how it was won. A party of little boys were chasing a wren; one lad outran the rest and caught the bird, and an old man looking over a wall at them cried out “Is tusa an caiptín!” (“You are the captain!”).
Ród na gCaiptíní joins a more important one, Ród Charn Maoilín, which comes down from the highest point of the plateau, Cam Maoilín (meaning something like “cairn of the flat-topped or bare summit”), and where this in its turn joins the main road at Carcair Chreig an Chéirín, there stands a rather faded-looking ’fifties single-storey house I often used to call in at. It was built by Éamonn Ó Tuathail, great-grandson of the poitin-maker, who used to teach in Eoghanacht school until he left the island as a consequence of some row with the priest. (I never met him, but in his last years we corresponded, and in the remissions of his terminal leukaemia we mentally revisited all these boreens, one of us in Dún Laoghaire and the other in Connemara, and he wrote out their names for me with voluminous and erudite elucidations. For several exiles, I am happy to hear that looking into Aran in this way, to help me improve the map from edition to edition, has been a passionate solace.) The present occupants of the house, who used to fortify me with tea for my cycle or walk home, are an Englishman, Arthur, and an Aran woman I think of as “Arthur’s Máireád” to distinguish her from mine. For many years she was only intermittently at home, as she had to be taken into the huge Victorian psychiatric hospital of Ballinasloe for a month or two now and again. An excessive number of people used to have to make that eastwards journey by train or taxi, many of them for no better reason than that they were elderly and a little confused, or at odds with their relatives. It used to be regarded as natural that living in the west, and especially on an island, drove one crazy, and in Aran the commonest way of saying that something is maddening or aggravating is still “Cuirfeadh sé sin soir thú!,” “That would send you east,” that is, to Ballinasloe. So Arthur’s Máiréad was lucky that she had someone to go and fetch her back from the hospital, which she feared; it was “rough,” she told us. She was born in Aran, and it seems she had fallen off a cliff in her childhood and had never been quite right since; nevertheless she had left the island as a young woman to stay with her brother Josie, who ran some boarding-houses in London, and skivvied for him as well as working in a Lyons’ Corner House. There Arthur saw her, a slender, exotic, beauty, and fell in love on the instant. He was a printer on a newspaper, separated from his wife. He took Máiréad under his wing; she was half-starved and he had difficulty persuading her to eat. Then they won a prize on the Irish sweepstake, and suddenly had enough money to buy the Ó Tuathail house. Now, twenty years later, Máiréad was big and heavy, with the pale blondness of an evening cumulus cloud. Whenever I called in, Arthur would shout for her to come out of the bedroom she lurked in and make me a mug of tea. “Ask him if he wants a biscuit!” he would add. She would take a packet of biscuits from the cupboard and say to me in a sudden, mechanical voice, “Will you eat—three?” I would answer, “I will!,” and she would plank three biscuits on the kitchen table.
Arthur is short and square-faced, with a bristly sergeant-major’s moustache and bright terrier eyes, and his head is stuffed with facts like a tin full of assorted nuts and bolts. He had a little car and used to drive with Mairéad into Cill Rónáin on steamer-days. Often he would collect our Sunday papers from Powell’s shop—we used to save them to read on the following Sunday—and on the way home he would pull up at our gate and strut down the garden-path with them, crying out like a Cockney newsvendor, “Star, News and Standard!” Then he would sit by our fire and bring us up to date with news from the west—drownings, thefts of cabbages, constipations of many weeks’ standing. Máiréad would rarely come in with him, preferring to wait in the car, but sometimes we would hear her stumping round to the yard behind the house. A London friend visiting us during the winter, who was puzzled by the incongruity of Arthur’s cheerful pragmatical presence in this darkly self-questioning island, once asked him why he stayed here. Arthur had no answer at the time, but a fortnight later he told me that he had been thinking about the question, and that the answer was: “Love; Faith; Honour.”
When we first came to Aran, Arthur was the only non-islander living there permanently. He was more active then, and used to go fishing for mackerel from An Grióir under the western end of the cliffs, so regularly in fact that I added a dot and a squiggle representing him to that point of my map, an almost microscopic memorial that delighted him. Nowadays he is too wobbly on his legs to clamber along the shingle-banks to An Grióir, and he has also had to abandon his vegetable patch. But he still holds out, long after I have left the island, and still holds his Máiréad back from that grey hole gaping in the east. That’s Arthur: loving, faithful, honourable.
RUNNING OUT OF TIME
Followed from east to west, the topography of the island goes down to its end with the assurance of a queen. Having climbed in steeps and stops for breath for over a mile, the road swings around a cliffed cape of the plateau on its left, and discloses a landscape of grand finality, descending in four majestic steps to the tidal streams around the last low fragmentary islets and the lighthouse, beyond which is nothing but the sea’s blue mantle, twitched by the desire of horizons.
From the bend at the highest point of the road one looks down into the village of Bun Gabhla, lodged in a shallow depression of the terrace below like a clutch of eggs on a plate. Behind the village this hollow gathers itself into a narrow valley running through slightly higher ground southwards as far as the Atlantic cliffs. It is this cut across the limestone strata that provides the village with the spring-water accumulating in a marshy dell of sally-gardens among little rye-fields, and probably also with its name. In Connemara I find that place-name elements deriving from gabhal, literally a fork or fork-shaped thing, often refer to a v-shaped valley or ravine, and so here it seems likely that the village name means “foot of the valley.” But if this is so, it is not generally understood, and the name sounds a little odd even in the ears of the islanders, adding to their perception of Bun Gabhla as a place apart. Hidden from the rest of the island as it is by the corner of the plateau, exposed to all the frightful glories of the west the other villages cower away from, its very existence seems a little fabulous. For me too, it is remote and unfamiliar territory. Once or twice I called in on Maggie and Marcus there (Marcus was one of those I had in mind when describing the fishermen of Bun Gabhla in my first volume), and found their old uncle Tomaisín Jamesie lavishing the Irish language’s treasury of comic endearments on their new baby, but theirs was the only cottage I knew. I remember that the first steps I made towards my first map of Aran were to walk up to that high corner of the road and sketch the relative positions of the ten houses laid out in an already map-like perspective below. As I worked, a mist rolled in from the sea and encircled the village. I saw a woman running out to fetch in the washing hanging behind her house, and a go
ose stretching its neck to hiss at her; then the mist obliterated the little scene, and a few drops of rain blurred my penmanship. I felt then that I would never know anything of the life of that place, and so it has turned out. I can only speculate, for instance, that the beam of the lighthouse sweeping over the rooftops gives night a pulse so familiar that its cessation in dense fog must wake the village, as one is woken by a ticking clock’s falling silent. More clearly, I can feel how that cone of light, or as much of it as has failed to contact rock or ship or human eye, sails on over the horizon to drown itself in infinite space.
Below the village, the terraces of the island’s north flank sweep round to the south-west, each broadening out into stark rock-floors several hundred yards wide, softened here and there by grassy hollows divided into fields. It is a sublime landscape—the adjective is inescapable—in its scale and clarity, and I often have it to myself; few tourists penetrate so far, and the villagers are usually off in their currachs or busy in the gardens near their homes. Salty gales scour across the wide-open surfaces; plants keep to the crevices. Rose-root, an arctic and montane succulent, is abundant, its sunset-coloured seed-heads ablaze in the late summer, almost down to sea-level. On a recent visit I was brought up short in my striding by a row of tiny greenish darts sticking up out of a fissure: the adder’s tongue fern, a very rare plant on the islands, within a quarter of a mile of the western point. While I do not have the foot-by-foot knowledge of these crags that I do of the one over the back wall of the Residence, I have crossed them dozens of times and accumulated a stack of notes about their flora, and the Bun Gabhla people have given me much place-lore. Tomaisín has a tale of fairies seen dancing at midday down on An Scrios Mór, the terrace by the shore north of the village, and I have heard a few lines of an otherwise forgotten song about a strange mound, too big to be just a ruined clochán and said to be haunted, down Bóthar na gCrúibíní, the road of the “crubeens” or dewberries, just south of the village. Also, Conor MacDermot has pointed out some geological features unusual in Aran: on Scrios na gCapall by the north-western shoreline, a long undulating channel cut into the limestone pavement by water flowing at pressure under a melting glacier; a small rift-valley enclosing Loch an Mhuirbhigh, the brackish lake at the western tip of the island, formed where the ground between two parallel faults has dropped a few yards … But, at this point in my book, the tension between its sprawling content and its formal symmetries has to be contained; to cap this Neoclassical can of worms I need to reduce my ultimate steps on Aran to the elemental and emblematic.