Stones of Aran (31 page)

O’Donovan (writing in 1839) says that neither this name (Loch na Ceannainne, the lake of the white-headed cow) nor its origin are remembered on the island. However, I have heard both, from a man who certainly did not get them from O’Donovan or his sources. This current version of the legend is less ornate but somehow more appealing to the mind’s eye than the emblematic
mediaeval
one. It seems that in those days Corrúch belonged to a pagan who lived in a castle up on the hillside (its remains, an ivy-covered stone-rick, will be pointed out in due course). The saint and his monks were living on his land on the shore of the lake, and they asked him for a cow, which he kindly gave them. The cow swam across the lake to its new owners, and its white face appearing above the waters gave the lake its name. (I also hear that the
pagan
’s
two daughters were converted to “Catholicism” by the saint.)

So much for the material and spiritual nature of the boulder evidently miscalled Mulán Cholm Cille. The rest of St. Enda’s
legend
will crop up here and there, miracle by miracle (his division of the island with St. Breacán, the harbour an angel cut out for him at Cill Éinne, his wrestling match with Colm Cille, etcetera), as we pass the visible traces each of these incidents has left on the
impressionable
stones of Aran. A more connected account of what passes for his history and of the significance of his foundation will be given when I discuss the monastic remains at Cill Éinne in
Labyrinth.
But perhaps a defence of my haphazard treatment of the legendary material is in place here, in the form of a remark on the nature of miracles as I would have it. The idea of the miracle is
required as the blazingly distinct emblem of all the possibilities
lying
muffled in any given place and time. As such, the miracle must stand apart from all rational orderings; the moment of its happening must be free from the threads of causality linking all moments; and its retelling should reflect this if it is to accomplish the refocusing of our blurred perceptions of the here and now.

Ultimately the only true believer in miracles is one who
believes
they do not happen, and all this talk of voyages on stones is here only as part of something that might appear more feasible, the taking of a step or two around a certain stone, a blackish lump of “hornfelsed basaltic tuff,” on a deserted seaweed-shore of Aran. It is not very like a boat, but it has often carried me faithfully to Connemara. The heat of the earth cooked it, ice delivered it,
centuries
of aching backs have been sustained by it. What is required to float it into the miraculous is not an act of faith, but an act of recollection.

The next bay to the west of Port Chorrúch is Port Eochla, so called as pertaining to the village of Eochaill. But between
Corrúch
and Eochaill is Baile na Creige, the village of the crag. (All three are in fact rather arbitrary segments of a scattering of houses along the mainroad, half a mile inland, and no stranger could tell where each begins or ends.) Baile na Creige is the smallest village of the island, and its territory is an irregular strip just three or four hundred yards wide, running right across the island from the north coast to the south. Its northern shore is an unemphatic stretch of the low headland between the two bays named above, a few minutes of rough walking and enervating nullity that has never revealed itself to me in any memorable way, about which I have collected no lore, upon which I have met neither native nor stranger—and which by the logic of Aran’s land-divisions
corresponds 
to one of the most dramatic parts of the southern coast, the cathedral-like peninsula called An Bhinn Bhuí, and the vast cauldron of An Cró on its west. So the man who owns that
amazing
field on the peninsula, with one wall of stone and three of wind and vertigo and the cry of gulls, also owns a couple of fields, hardly better than damp bramble-patches, down by this shore, while the rest of his holding is in a dozen or so little parcels strung out like beads along the two miles between these extremes.

This northern coastline of Baile na Creige represents a failure in the terms of this book, as I can report scarcely a word from my several walkings of it (except—now it comes back to me—that of a heron I disturbed here one dreary day; a deathly, hoarse
khaa
a
,
exhaled as it lumbered on grey wings into a grey sky). Therefore I prefer now to retrace my steps from the stone boat, and linger around the “lake of the white-headed cow” for a while before
cuttin
g
across the headland by the coast road to Port Eochla—all the more so as Loch Phort Chorrúch and its surrounds compose one of Aran’s frankest and most engaging landscapes.

On the west of the lake is the great rampart of shingle
separating
it from Port Chorrúch itself (allowing some seepage of the tide through fissures below, it seems, for the lake has a taste of salt and is not now, if it ever was, a “pool of sweet water” as in the legend, and yellow-green
Enteromorpha
weed grows in it and is gathered to keep the rain off stacks of more useful seaweeds drying on the back of the shinglebank). There are reedbeds along the foot of this shingle shoreline of the lake and around its northern perimeter. The eastern shore is of little fields, that make green capes and promontories, kept trim by grazing cattle; sometimes after rainy weeks the lake reaches across a boreen that runs back to the shore through these fields, and borrows a few more of them for a while. The road goes by close to the southern bank, and there are
secretive
little steps down from it to a freshwater spring that feeds the lake, opposite an islet upon which the waterfowl pursue their
private
lives oblivious to the woman filling a pail for her cow there.

One March morning I noticed that this islet appeared to have
been paved with large pebbles, and it was only when one of them showed twinges of restless life that I identified them as knots, a species of wader, moderately sized, moderately long-beaked and long-legged, of a nondescript grey, and to my amateur eye at least, chiefly distinguished from the dozens of other waders by its lack of distinguishing features. This whole area, bay and lake, is
especially
vivified by birds in the winter. All the dark members of the crow family including the raven and the chough, and a few rooks that fly in from the mainland at that season, come to forage on the great bank of rotting weed amassed by the gales on the outer face of the shingle. Countless waders work the rock-pools, following the tide down the shore; one needs binoculars to resolve all these fidgety brown-grey scraps into so many highly distinctive species, and I have never learned to discriminate the half of their
individual
parts in the web of vibrant calls stretched like taut nerves over the shore. The dunlins, ringed plovers and turnstones all run
mingled
together, a few redshanks and the occasional greenshank hold aloof, half-a-dozen bar-tailed godwits keep to themselves. The sanderlings, diminutive clowns of this winter circus, amuse us by forming a wavering line across any patch of sand and running down it after each receding wave, picking morsels out of its rim, and then all turning together and running up again before the next wave catches them, matchstick legs whirring under their fat little bellies, keeping just ahead of the spreading foam as if afraid to get their feet wet.

In winter too there are often thirty or forty whooper swans on the lake, together with half-a-dozen mute swans. Occasionally the whoopers all take off with long splashing runs over the water, huge wings labouring, and come sailing low over the shinglebank, necks outstretched, emitting that strange breathy hoot in time to the hiss of their wingstrokes, and land on the waters of the bay, where they rest for an hour or two with heads under their wings before returning to the lake. Sometimes in the depths of winter there comes an isolated day of summer (a pet day,
peata
lae
,
as they say here) that holds a lens of stillness and clarity over all this
life of the shore; each feather, each rustle of a feather, is as incisive as diamond in the memory—at least one feels it so at the
moment
, but then the day passes and one’s impressions of it merge into a dazzled nostalgia.

With spring the gatherings disperse. The whooper swans fly north to their nesting grounds in Iceland and beyond, while the mute swans fight balletic wars until just one pair holds the lake for its territory. I know where some of the shore-birds go, for we find the ringed plovers nesting in the dunes at Cill Éinne, and I
remember
from my childhood on the Yorkshire moors how the curlews would arrive there in time for my birthday (as I put it, with a child’s egotism) in late March (and having so long ago learned their horizon-circling, sky-probing call as the annunciation of spring, to hear it now on their return to the shore in August as the thin premonitory trumpet of autumn gives me a sense in the marrow of my bones of the Earth’s curvature and my ageing).

After the curlews have gone in the early spring, the very similar but smaller whimbrel breaks its northward migration here, so picking up (and leaving behind) its local name of
crotach
Bhealtaine
,
May curlew. And then throughout the summer there are more birds on the lake than on the seashore. Dabchicks and waterhens nest in the reeds, so does a pair of herons, and
invariably
the mute swans convoy a flotilla of six or eight grey cygnets in and out of their harbour in the recesses of the reedbeds farthest from the road.

The lake is curiously open and indifferent to observation; a few islanders come wildfowling here but not so often as to dispel its trust. The human routes around it—the high walkway of shingle used only by a few men preoccupied with seaweed, the open road that carries sometimes a couple of tourists on bicycles and
sometimes
a man driving cattle into Cill Rónáin, the boreen sidling through the fields that give covert views of the water through gaps in the reedbeds—at once present the lake to the eye and half avert themselves from it; and the lake-dwellers know and care as little of them as do the figures in a painting of the title on its frame.

I remember that for some reason one spring (it was in 1978) a single whooper swan stayed behind when all the rest had flown, and spent the entire summer pottering about the banks, because whenever it tried to put a foot into the water one of the resident pair of mute swans would come sailing towards it with wings
half-raised
and head poised on its elegant stalk above a chaos of white plumes—a ruffled rococo beau with a duellist’s eye—and the whooper, gauche and gooselike with its stiff straight neck and bland face, would turn away resignedly. Witnessing a little defeat like this almost every time I passed the lake used to make me
uncomfortable
. Un-swanlike in practical life, having to assume a finely feathered style before trusting myself even to the eyes of the future, I would prefer for my own ego the unflappable self-possession of a heron I watched here once. It had caught a large eel and had just swallowed its head when I saw it, with the rest hanging from its beak. A passing crow had seen it too and alighted nearby hoping to profit in some way. The heron ignored the crow and
concentrated
on gulping down a little more of the eel. The crow rose into the air and called up its mate, and the pair of them set up an
intimidating
racket, one on either side of the heron, which merely threw back another few inches of eel. The crows tried making
little
hopping, flopping flights from one side of the heron to the other, only just clearing its head; but the heron calmly raised both broad wings into a canopy for itself, and after a pause for breath downed the rest of the eel in one violent convulsion. Then it cleaned its beak, eyed the ground narrowly as if to ensure that not a single scale was left for the crows, and took itself off with leisurely flaps.

Enviable bird, gorging on the moment, contemptuous of dark forethought and afterthought! Whereas even as I stand here
noting
every detail of the scene I can imagine some islander pausing from spadework on the hillside above and shaking his head over my wandering and staring about his island; and as I write up the incident I wonder if those haunting eyes,
the reader’s, which the writer must exorcize if he is to inhabit his work, will read me as I
intend myself, or unimaginably otherwise. Perhaps what will last will be nothing of my writing, my thought self, but some chance observation of me, marginal to an anecdote about a bird, or a
fiction
prompted by my alien name in an old census return,
resurrecting
me in a body and mind I would not recognize. At this very spot I have done the same to a fellow alien, as I will tell:

The little field to the south-east of the lake, where the boreen around it meets the road, is called Garraí Wilson; a
garraí
is a “garden,” which in Aran means a potato-or a vegetable-plot (I remember being puzzled when we were new here by an islander telling me he had a little garden down by the shore; the idea seemed charming, impractical, and absolutely un-Aranish). As for Wilson, nobody remembers who he was, but in the census of 1821 I found:

In those days the only lighthouse was above Eochaill on the
highest
point of the island, whence its ruins still look down towards the lake. Wilson must have leased this garden to grow vegetables for himself and that young family living up there on the windy skyline in the disused signal tower by the lighthouse. Why was he retired on halfpay? Perhaps he had a stiff knee which he allowed it to be understood had a Napoleonic bullet lodged in it, but which in fact he broke by tripping over a bollard in Plymouth docks while turning round to look after a passing shop-girl, Ann. I
picture
him in this field, paunchy, grunting, puzzling ineffectually with his spade of unfamiliar design at the shallow stony soil of Aran. He straightens up, putting his knuckles to his spine, and sees
through the reeds a heron swallowing an eel. He stands there
open-mouthed, long-dead Lieutenant Wilson, keeper of the
long-extinguished
light, never suspecting that we are watching him through words, those chinks in Time.