Stones of Aran (30 page)

At high tide, and especially in calm weather, Port Chorrúch is a place of grand simplicity. The sea follows close below the coastal road that comes from the west to pass before the factory ruins, where the massive shinglebank begins to swing out to the north, the sea curving with it as evenly as wine in a glass, to the farther arm of the bay, a submerged
cora
pointing back to the west, marked even on the stillest days by a ceaseless white pleating of the waters. But as the tide falls the bay becomes more
complicated
; amorphous areas of sprawling seaweed, sand and rock
appear
, and only a more prolonged attention can give it back a topography. Here, though, one can be directed by countless
previous
acts of attention enshrined in placenames. “If you write down the names of all the places here,” said the Corrúch man whom I was questioning about them, “your map will be all black!”
Certainly
the dozen or so that I have recorded represent only a
fraction
of that antique apparatus, functional in its day but now
rusting in disuse, which permitted such a fine discrimination of place on this intensively worked shore.

To begin with, there are two bays, not one: Port Chorrúch Beag, the small one, by the roadside and facing north, a quarter of a mile west of the old factory, and Port Chorrúch Mór, the large one, facing west and backed by the shinglebank. They are
separated
at low tide by a muddle of stone and water. To sort out the muddle, one can follow in the steps of the shore-workers who cropped it every year. They would have approached it from the road by means of a boreen no more than a dozen yards long
leading
down between two little fields, which is called Bóithrín na Gairleóige from the tall
gairleóg
or wild leek plants growing in it. It is also called Bóithrín na Scailpe because at the end of it one has to scramble down a little rock-face from which this fraction of the shore gets its name, An Scailp—the word
scailp
covers a variety of rocky clefts and slants. A shallow terrace of the shore that makes a little promontory here at half-tide is An tUlán Buí, the yellow ledge, and as in many other similar situations the yellowness is that of the slimy
Enteromorpha
seaweed marking an outflow of fresh water from a seepage at the foot of a
scailp.
Off the end of this ledge is a patch of sand, Trá na Lugaí, the beach of the lugworms, which provides bait for the Corrúch lads’ fishing lines. To the left of this rise two wide steps of rock cut by the waves out of strata of different qualities; the lower has been pocked and fretted by the sea, while the higher (by only a foot or two) has been smoothly polished; they are An tUlán Garbh, the rough ledge, and An tUlán Mín, the smooth ledge. None of these features is more than a few paces across; their names attend closely to the feel of those paces.

To the east of this no-longer amorphous little headland is Port Chorrúch Beag and to its west the inner reaches of Port Chorrúch Mór, interrupted by a scattered reef called Carraig an Choileáin, the rock of the puppy-dog (what small tragedy or comedy has been forgotten here?). A roundish boulder lying on the lower slopes of the shinglebank nearby is An Chloch Mhór, the big
stone, and its significance to the shore-workers was that at
half-tide
the water just laps around its base, announcing that there is just over three hours to go before full tide or low tide. “Isn’t it a strange thing, now,” said my guide, “that on every shore of Aran there’s a boulder marking half-tide!” It seems strange to me that a result of our human ingenuity in using Nature as clockwork when other clocks are lacking should be interpreted as a beneficent
ordinance
of Nature itself; but the Aran man has an easy acceptance of the strangeness of things that I cannot share. Next, halfway round the curve of the bay, one might or might not notice a little spur of rocks far down on the shore: An Chéibh, the quay; the name points it out as the natural (or is it in part artificial?) landing-place for boats coming into the bay at low water. Just beyond it is
another
sandy patch, An Trá Bhig, the small beach, and then a large, strange, dark boulder the name of which I will return to in a
moment
, and which is the perfect back-rest for anyone tired from cutting weed on the great
cora
that stretches for nearly a third of a mile out to sea west and north-west of this spot. I can rest here too, and point out a last few features of the coast nearby. As the tide rises it cuts off the outer reaches of the
cora
by creating a
shallow
channel, Bealach na Carraige, the way of the rock, through which a currach coming from the north or east can with caution enter the bay, thus saving a long row around Barr na Cora, the tip of the
cora.
And finally, if the tide is indeed coming in, it is already too late to go on another two hundred yards to see the lovely little inlet in the lower shore below the point at which the coast turns east again, for its floor will be flooded and its distinctive feature, a marble-white line running exactly down its centre and out to sea, will be hidden. This is one of those very characteristic inlets of this northern coast which all run inland on the same bearing, about south-south-east, and have been produced by the sea’s working its way into a joint of the major set, and abrading it out with rolling pebbles and churning water until it is all sleek, grey, seal-like curves. In this particular instance the joint has a vein of calcite a few inches thick in it, which can be traced across the upper shore
to the head of the inlet, into which it plunges to pursue its ruler-straight way along the swellings and hollows of its floor, like the white line in the centre of a road subjected to some dream-transformation. We named this place Scailp Álainn, the beautiful
scailp
,
thinking of a friend of ours, Allen, who had died shortly before we discovered it. Later I learned both that I was mistaken in thinking that “Allen” derives from
álainn
,
and that the place
already
had a name, though a rather pedestrian one: An Poll Mór, the big hole.

Individually, none of the names I have mentioned is of much intrinsic interest. But if we think of all the placenames that
humanity
has applied to the surface of this planet as constituting a single vast fingerprint, can we neglect even its most minute
particularities
in trying to identify ourselves?

The ungainly bulk of rock against which I, like so many before me, rested from my shore-labours, obviously did not originate in Aran. Its blackish complexion, its twisted veins of dull red and its unsplittable hardness would tell a locally knowledgeable geologist that it came from Leitir Mealláin or the south of Garomna, the nearest points of Connemara to Aran. It is in fact, an expert tells me, “a basaltic tuff of the South Connemara group, which has been hornfelsed to pyroxene hornfels facies, from very near the margin of the Connemara granite, probably from the far eastern end of the contact on Garomna Island.” Instead of providing a shaky translation for the layman, on the basis of my own very
recent
acquaintance with its terminology, I will allow the general purport of this dictum to emerge indirectly and by degrees.

An Aran man too would be able to guess the provenance of this boulder, for the difference between Aran’s hospitable lime stone and the bitter waterlogged land arising from Connemara’s granites
and metamorphic rocks has many consequences and is well known to those dwelling on either side of the Sound between them. Most of Connemara south of the Twelve Bens is of granite, which came welling up from the depths of the earth about four hundred
million
years ago. The rocks into which the granite was intruded were already fifty or more million years old, as they probably date from the Ordovician, a period of volcanic activity in this region, when large-scale earth-movements were beginning to build the
mountains
of northern Ireland and Scotland. These pre-existent strata consisted of lavas and sedimentary rocks laid down on the bed of an ocean which later vanished in the course of these
mountain-building
upheavals. The stresses to which these rocks were
subjected
had already thoroughly kneaded, hardened and “
metamorphosed
” them even before the intensely hot, viscid masses of granite were thrust up among them from below, whereupon they were reworked, baked and recrystallized to various degrees
depending
on their distance from the margins of the granite. Nowadays the resultant “metamorphic aureole” (the geologists’ term) can be clearly traced in the rocks surrounding the granite outcrops.

All this happened at some depth in the earth, but erosion since then has removed nearly all the original rock under which the granite was emplaced, except for a strip a few miles wide
comprising
the southern parts of Garomna and Leitir Mealláin islands, and the Skerd Rocks out in the Atlantic to the west. The strata
exposed
in this area represent a three-to five-mile thickness of rock that has been almost completely overturned in the course of its troubled existence, and probably formed part of a pendant
projection
, within the granite mass itself, from the “roof” of rock above it.

These twisted remains of long-destroyed landforms are known as the South Connemara group, and their component rocks have been studied in some detail, as their physical and chemical
make-up
contains clues to the making and unmaking of geographies long before Europe and America parted company and the Atlantic came into existence. The papers dealing with them exhibit one of the most lapidary prose styles I have come across. For example:

Even without looking up all these words (and then looking up all the equally alarming ones used in their definitions, and so on), one acquires a vague sense of the degree to which these rocks have been confounded and refounded in detail and in bulk by processes much fiercer than any that have affected the limestone areas to the south of them. This sample of South Connemara now lying on Aran’s foreshore is composed of ash ejected by a volcano, petrified under miles of overlying deposits, crumpled by forces that fold mountains, crystallized by the high-temperature chemistry of molten granite. This hectic period of its history was of course long before even the sea came into existence in which Aran’s limestone was to be deposited three hundred and twenty million years ago; on the other hand, it was brought across to Aran by ice-movement (perhaps embedded in an iceberg) in comparatively recent times, probably less than fifteen thousand years ago.

But to explain the full significance, which is double, of this alien stone, I must introduce another aspect of its native land. For the south of Connemara has been metamorphosed by fervours other than the geological—its rock has been irradiated with
legend
by the aureole of Aran’s mediaeval sanctity. I can just make out an example of this process on the opposite coast as I lean back against the black boulder and look out across the Sound to Golam Head, an appendage of Leitir Mealláin and the outermost of the
chain known simply as Na hOileáin, the islands. Its dark profile is easily identified from here by the ruins of an old signal tower on its highest point, and just to the right of that little upright marker is a tiny oblique whitish fleck pointing down towards its shore. A lad from Leitir Mealláin once rowed me out to Golam Head, which is uninhabited, and among the wonders he showed me there was this broad band of white rock running through the black and pursuing a straight course in the direction of Aran among all the convulsions of the terrain, like a glimmering wake across a stormy sea. A geologist tells me it is a dyke of quartz which was intruded into the older volcanic rock at about the time the neighbouring granite mass was solidifying. To my boatman it was Bóthar na Naomh, the road of the saints, and marked the way the saints took on their pilgrimage to Aran. “
Áit
dheas
í
,
Á
rainn;
áit
bheannaithe!
”
(“A nice place, Aran; a blessed place!”), he
remarked
as we stood looking out at it along the direction of this weird white way; and other people in Connemara have said the same thing to me, with a casual sincerity that brushed aside the centuries since the time of the saint. (Connemara! A just quittance for the years I have spent poring over the stones of Aran would be another decade in which to consider the stones of that as-yet hardly described land of marvels. But here it is fitting only for me to touch upon this single aspect of its southern shores, their
legendary
function as threshold to the Aran legend.)

Each of the promontories and archipelagos that reach out from Connemara has its tales of the holy traffic to and from Aran. Even the port of Kilkieran, which is Cill Chiaráin, the church of Ciarán, in Irish, is where it is because that saint went astray on his way to study under St. Enda in Aran. In Na hOileáin there is the saints’ road in Golam Head and another in Leitir Mealláin; Inis Bearcháin claims to derive its name from a saint who sailed there from Aran, and Garomna has two ancient churches the stones of which are said to have come from Aran (with an element of
probable
truth, the surrounds of the windows in one of them being carved from limestone). And in the next peninsula, that of An
Cheathrú Rua, I heard a legend linking four or five of its holy sites into the itinerary of another march of the saints to Aran, one
incident
of which illustrates the great number of these pilgrims with the diagrammatic realism of a mediaeval woodcut: their last
overnight
stop was at Loch na Naomh, the lake of the saints, on the hilltop near the present town of Carraroe, and the following day when the head of the procession reached the coast (at a point in An Rinn marked by a holy well on the shore, two miles to the south) their leader found that he had left his breviary behind. He told the monk behind him, the message was passed back, and the last of them was able to pick up the book before leaving the lake.

The people from whom I heard these marvels were unsure as to how these migrations went on to Aran, whether they marched over or under the waves. But certain well-known individuals among the anonymous hordes of saints sailed across, or sailed back, on boats of stone. Once they had fulfilled their miraculous function these boats were abandoned on the shore, where they are still to be seen, having reverted to their former status as ordinary boulders, immovably heavy, their reality if anything enhanced by the
accretion
of legend. As a poetic image of the paradox of faith (which ceases to be faith if it rests on any grounds of reason, and so is
essentially
committed to the seas of doubt), the concept of the stone boat seems to me even richer than that of walking on water. In its precarious solidity the stone boat is a foundation stone, itself founded on nothing but the possibility of foundering “like a stone.”

The most famous of these stone boats is on the Connemara coast south of Ros a’ Mhíl. Bád Cholm Cille, Saint Colm Cille’s boat, is a great prow of granite, on which the eye of faith can find the marks left by its anchor-chain, the grooves worn by the
working
of the oars, and the saint’s huge handprint in the middle of its slanting deck. Nearby are two “holy wells”—beautifully smooth pot-holes uncovered only at low water, and regarded as having been made by the saint as fonts for the baptism of the pagans; they are visited by hundreds of people on the Feast of St. Colm
Cille, the 9th of June, when Mass is celebrated on the shore. I am told that the boat used to be larger, but such is the demand for relics and souvenirs that it suffers a pious erosion, which I suppose could do away with it entirely if the cult persists for a few more centuries.

In Aran there are two stone boats, of which the best-known lies on the shore near Cill Éinne, the site of St. Enda’s monastery. It is called the Currach Stone (and it does look remarkably like a beached currach) or Bád na Naomh, the boat of the saints. Sometimes it is associated with St. Enda but more often with St. Colm Cille, to whom a nearby altar is dedicated. Both in legend and
history
Colm Cille is the most notable Irish saint after St. Patrick himself, and his cult is particularly strong on the South
Connemara
coast, where I have been shown thirty or more of those
mysterious
intertidal fonts attributed to him. In Aran too he is even more highly regarded than the founder of the island’s reputation for sanctity, and perhaps in the case of this boat his fame has eclipsed an earlier cult of St. Enda, for in the mediaeval
biographies
of the saints it is Enda, not Colm Cille, who sails to Aran on a stone. Similarly Aran’s other stone boat is called Mulán Cholm Cille, Colm Cille’s boulder. This is the stone that initiated my
digression
to Connemara and back, from the shores of Port
Chorrúch
. It is hardly known now except to a few of the more traditionally minded folk of the nearer villages.

My personal belief concerning the Port Chorrúch stone is a conditional one: if St. Enda sailed to Aran on a stone, it was on this one rather than the one at Cill Éinne. This is not an article of faith, for I can uphold it with reasons, if only shadowy ones from the age of faith itself. Firstly, in Magradin’s
Vita
S.
Endei
,
written in 1390, we read:

Actually Leamhchoill was in the south of Garomna, the point of Connemara nearest to the island; the name seems to be forgotten now but it is on Petty’s map of 1655. Roderic O’Flaherty,
commenting
on the above passage, puts the record straight:

Ochoill, or Eochaill as it is now spelled, is the townland of Aran that includes Port Chorrúch, which is O’Flaherty’s Port Caradoc. (I shall puzzle out the meaning of these placenames when I come to deal with the villages of Eochaill and Corrúch.) So the upshot of all this crabbed antiquarianism is that St. Enda landed in Port Chorrúch, therefore that the stone I am writing about is the
genuine
one rather than the Cill Éinne claimant; further, that St. Enda sailed from south Garomna, and so the hagiographical
origin
of his stone exactly corresponds to its geological origin.

The last shred of doubt as to the claims of our stone (I say “our,” being a patriotic resident of western rather than eastern Árainn) must be dispersed by the fact that St. Enda’s next
adventure
concerns the lake now called Loch Phort Chorrúch, which is behind the great shinglebank of Port Chorrúch. Magradin tells it finely: