Stones of Aran (42 page)

The place Kilbride recorded as “Cala-na-luinge” (i.e. Caladh na Loinge, harbour of the ship) is the shore nearest to the clocháns. The ship in question is said to be the one whose sailors’ bones were found here, but if so it found no harbour for its landfall, as
the correct name of the place, a trustworthy Iaráirne man tells me, is Cara na Loinge, and a
cara,
in Aran usage at least, can be just such a stretch of shallow stony shore as this.

The tombstone still lies on the top of the western clochán, but if, from that little eminence, I survey the wide spaces all around, I can hardly believe that the islanders chose this spot in which to dig a grave by chance. However, only a professional excavation could establish whether or not these mounds represent, perhaps, an early religious site with a burial place, some memory of which may have lingered on long after it had been deserted and drowned in sand.

Now that sand has refilled the clochán unroofed by Captain Rowan’s dig, both look much as they did to Kilbride, “large mounds of loose, dislocated stone, half buried in sand.” In search of a word to describe the setting of this final object-lesson in the Minister’s discourse on relics of the past, “dislocated” is the one that comes back to me, initiating a redirection, or a retranslation, of the antiquarian enquiry through which he has led me to this viewpoint. Sitting on the tombstone and looking around me, I see to the east the featureless
cara,
the usually troubled waters of the Sound, and the relentless stony profile of Inis Meáin. To the north, south and west is a flat wasteland rimmed by dunes, its smooth sheets of glaciated rock showing here and there through a sward worn thin by overgrazing. Nothing grazes here now except the countless rabbits that burrow in the dunes. I never meet anyone here, though an occasional patch of
carraigín
spread to dry on a bare area, looking like a forgotten picnic rug, tells me that at least one villager still derives something from this shore. I seem to have visited this remote corner of Aran only on days made
comfortless
by needling winds or overbearing sun, that made the half mile of heavy going over the dunes back to the end of the road, and then the long cycle home, a prospect scarcely preferable to staying where I was, on this tombstone, which, being blank, could as well be mine as any other dislocated voyager’s. “Vanity of
vanities
,
saith the Preacher, vanity, all is vanity,” and in his latter-day, antiquarianizing embodiment as the Reverend William Kilbride, expounds his text thus: sand comes with the wind and goes again, exhuming and reburying our scattered works and bones; the bay opens and closes like an eye troubled by flying grit; the Earth itself shudders from Ice Age to Ice Age; and so on. Some such sermon can be read into Kilbride’s “Notes of Some Antiquities on Aranmore” by a certain mood. Preachers induce such moods, the better to peddle their ideological pick-me-ups. If one declines these, the only cure is to walk on, out of the state in which
nothing
matters into its mirror image, more vivid like all such, in which everything matters.

I walk on now, to the last corner of Aran.

This last corner, the tip of the arrow-shaped peninsula beyond the great strand, has a superfluity of names attached to it. First, it is Ceann an Duine, the person’s head, and second, it is Ceann an Mhadra, the dog’s head. Colie Hernon, with seamanlike precision, once laid it down for me that the first name refers to the point from high water mark down to half water, and the second to its extension from half to low water mark. The “person’s head” is said to derive from some skull-like appearance of the tip of the
peninsula
as seen from out at sea, but I have never been able to catch the likeness. Nor do I know the reason for the “dog” name, which has been at Aran’s heels for centuries: Speed’s map of 1610 marks “Ye Dogge” as an islet (which does not exist in fact) in the sound between Árainn and Inis Meáin.

Five hundred yards off the tip of the peninsula, like the dot of an “i,” is Oileán na Tuí or Straw Island, a mere plateful of sandhills, carrying on its northern rim a small lighthouse by which vessels
steer into Cill Éinne bay. The “straw” is that of the marram grass which grows on the dunes, and it used to be important enough to have figured in a legal document; in 1717 when Edmund Fitzpatrick, then Aran’s landlord, demised Inis Oírr to an Andrew French, it was stipulated in the lease that French could cut enough straw from Straw Island and the headland to thatch all the houses of Inis Oírr.

Finally, the headland itself is Barr na Coise, the point of the foot, and An Chois, the foot, is the seaway between it and the islet. But this last name demands a deeper consideration from me (in fact it precipitates a crisis for this book), which I will defer for a while.

Straw Island has never been inhabited so far as is known,
except
by lighthousemen for the period between the establishment of the light in 1878 and its automation in 1926. Recently it was electrified, and a little windcharger has been set up beside it; from Cill Rónáin we can see its blades flickering away in any opportune wind. A man goes out by currach now and again to tend the light, and in 1976 I accompanied him together with some botanists who wanted to see what Straw Island could contribute to the
Flora
of
Connemara
and
the
Burren,
then in preparation.

We launched the currach from Trá na bhFrancach north of Cill Rónáin. While Bobbie Gill, the light-keeper, mounted the
outboard
engine and the currach was idling on the lucid water, the botanists were exclaiming over the dense beds of eel-grass lying in lank green festoons below us.
Maolscannach
was the local name Bobbie supplied for it, which seems to derive (at least to the
satisfaction
of my do-it-yourself etymology) from words implying its prostrate, filmy nature. (Later I was able to look at it more closely when a spring ebb exposed it on the muddy sand in the mouth of Cill Rónáin harbour—it is a pulpy, waterlogged, grass-like plant a few feet long—and an old shoreman there told me that sixty years ago he saw it gathered and hung over walls to dry for use in
stuffing
armchairs.)

Then the engine started and we headed a devious arrow of
wake across the calm bay, Bobbie in the bows signalling the course to his son at the tiller as we snaked between the buoys marking lobsterpots. The lighthouse, which from Cill Rónáin appears like a small, whitewashed gate-pillar out there by the wide exit of the bay, never quite ceased to look like a scale-model of a lighthouse even when our boat was nuzzling into the beach close by it, such is the diameter of the waters the bay opens into. There were lines of otters’ pawprints on the damp sand where we stepped ashore. I followed Bobbie through the narrow, high-walled yard of the lighthouse, past the chill stone vacancies of the old living-quarters and up the stairs to the glass octagonal room housing the lamp. The acetylene flame at its heart seemed insignificant. Bobbie
explained
the clockwork mechanism on which the two lenses
rotated
about it, sweeping its beams around the horizon, and pointed out the two slatted panels that had been added to the merry-go-round to eliminate a reflection of the lamp off the
windows
of the octagon (in which it seems they are not entirely
successful
, the light still being known up and down the coast as the one with the double flash). The botanists had fanned out to
quarter
the island’s eleven acres, and now and again as I attended to these matters, I caught sight of a bent head or rounded back among the marram crests of the dunes. Soon I went out to join the searchers.

The great prize would have been to re-find the sea stock,
Matthiola
sinuata
now extremely rare if not extinct in Ireland. It was discovered on Straw Island by J.T. Mackay before 1805 and seen once or twice in the next thirty years; it has also been recorded from dunes in Clare and Wexford a few times, but it is many years since the botanical establishment had word of it, nor did it make itself known on this occasion. Indeed to my eyes
the island offered little of floral interest; this was, after all, in
September
, after a summer-long drought, and apart from the
indestructible
marram grass and a few dull foreshore species, everything had been reduced to brownish withered scraps. However, as one of the party sternly remarked, one cannot restrict botanizing to the
flowering season, and they diligently searched out forty-five species, a total I found impressive. The find I chiefly remember from that day, with horror, is the carcass of a donkey that someone had left to foal here, which had dutifully done so, and then died of thirst together with its child. Another, I was told, had saved itself by swimming across An Chois.

Of course I returned to Cill Rónáin with the others, but for the purposes of this book I remain on Straw Island to contemplate the gap, the step necessary to complete this volume, which I have not taken, between the islet and the headland stretching out towards it.

The Ordnance Survey map of 1839 shows a sandbar, drying at low tide, linking the islet with the headland. It never dries
nowadays
, I believe, although one can wade across it with a spring ebb, that is, at low water of one of the extreme tides that occur for a few days after a full or new moon. Hence the name, An Chois, the foot, transferred by the act of walking or wading, from the body to the ground. An Iaráirne man once said to me, making nothing of it but leaving the notion to make its own way in my mind, that Easter Sunday is a good day for wading out to Straw Island. A
celestial
logic underlies the observation. The tides are the oceans’ swinging to and fro in their beds under the influence of the moon and the sun, and it is necessary to think through these influences in some detail to appreciate this logic of An Chois.

Consider first the moon. The gravitational attraction between any two objects is greater the closer they are together. Thus the force the moon exerts on a unit mass of the waters on the face of the earth near to it is greater than that it exerts on a unit mass of the solid globe as a whole, while the force per unit mass exerted on the waters of the farther face of the earth is smaller than that exerted on the globe itself. It is these differential forces that produce the
tides, and if the surface of the earth were all one ocean it would have a high tide at the point nearest to the moon and another at the point opposite to that, with low tides at the points of the globe halfway between them.

The sun also would produce a pair of tides, but since it is so much farther away its effect is only about two-fifths that of the moon. Because of the daily rotation of the earth each point of this idealized ocean would experience a small solar high tide every twelve hours, at midday and midnight (or a little later, making
allowance
for friction), and a large lunar tide every twelve and a half hours (the difference in period being due to the moon’s own
rotation
about the earth). These solar and lunar tides would coincide and reinforce one another whenever sun, moon and earth were in line. At full moon the earth is approximately between the sun and moon; that is why we, from earth, see the moon’s illuminated face full on. When the moon is new, it is between the earth and the sun, so that we see only a narrow margin at most of its illuminated face. Therefore it is at full and new moon that an idealized ocean would have its highest tides.

The sun’s contribution to the tides varies with the season of the year because the earth’s axis is tilted with respect to its orbit about the sun. In summer our days are long because the sun is north of the equatorial plane, in winter the nights are long because the sun has gone south, while day equals night when the sun is over the equator; and it is at these times of symmetry, the spring and
autumn
equinoxes, that the sun’s tidal influence is at its greatest.

The various oceans of our real world, however, are far from being of ideal simplicity in their behaviour. Their individual tidal responses to the periodic influences of sun and moon are
determined
, in an incalculably complex way, by their boundaries, depths and interconnections. Just as the water in a cup or a bath will slosh to and fro with a particular frequency when disturbed, so the body of water in an ocean bed has its natural periods of
oscillation
, and will respond most fully to stimuli of similar periods. Some oceans only manage one tide a day, but as it happens the
Atlantic at our latitudes is sensitive to the approximately twice daily pull of the moon, giving us a high tide every twelve and a half hours, with large variations due to the sun. Adding together the twice-daily, twice lunar-monthly and twice-yearly variations in the combined effect of sun and moon, therefore, Aran, like most west European coasts, should expect two roughly equal high tides a day, these being rather larger around the times of full and new moon, and especially large near the equinoxes. And with these
extremely
high tides come extremely low ebbs.

Now, Easter is in origin the festival of the risen year, celebrating the day’s winning out against the night, and when, fifteen
hundred
years ago, Christianity was undertaking the ordering of our relationship to the cosmos, the Council of Nicaea laid it down that Easter Sunday was to be the one after the full moon following upon the spring equinox. And although every link in the above chain of statements is weakened by qualifications—for winds and atmospheric pressures influence the tides as well as the sun and moon, there are perturbations and precessions and nutations to complicate the geometry of the solar system, and the modern way of calculating Easter does not always agree with the Nicaean
formula
—nevertheless there remains a correlation strong enough for Iaráirne to have noticed and blessed the fact that Easter Sunday usually provides the entertainment, when work is tabooed, of walking out to Straw Island. The fact is, I imagine, accepted with the same wondering but incurious good grace as that other fact pointed out to me by an Oatquarter man, that on every shore of Aran is a boulder marking the half tide level: such slight
perquisites
are only what is due to us, the constant servants of the shore.

As it happens, I have always been elsewhere on Easter Sunday, and have never crossed An Chois. But since this is a step at least approximately blessed by such an august configuration of Sun, Moon and Earth, I will adopt it into the structure of this book as a moment of questioning of what I am about, as I did the bad step, An Troigh Mhairbh, that invitation to death on Aran’s other
coast. What connotations has my ruling image, the step, picked up in this circuit of the island-world, now so nearly closed? Listening to this book as it has formed itself thus far in my mind, here and there I catch the hollow footfall of the museum
attendant
, for instance, and elsewhere the breathy creeping of the Peeping Tom. Among the echoes of all these steps—rash or wary, ritualistic or whimsical, processional or jiggish, trespassory or
proprietorial
—it is impossible to isolate the particular resonance I had hoped to amplify further, that of the good step, the one equal to the ground it covers. And while I have taken care to distance this book from that imaginary work of art preparatory to the
taking
of such a step—just as the architect of the tower of Babel no doubt preferred to watch its progress from a hillock not too close at hand—nevertheless I cannot quite evade the shockwaves of that project’s inevitable collapse. Having now acted out to the best of my capacity the impossibility of interweaving more than two or three at a time of the millions of modes of relating to a place, I can feel in the tiredness of my feet what any sensible thinker would have gathered from a moment’s exercise of the brain, that the good step is inconceivable. And this book in its oblique and
evasive
way had undertaken the conceiving of what I knew to be
inconceivable
.

Well, a book that is committed to failure may allow itself an
interlude
of rueful celebration of its success, so I will sit down by the waters of An Chois, bathe my bruised soles, and listen to the voices that say, “How foolish an enterprise! Surely everyone knows that you cannot estimate the height of the sky by climbing ever higher mountains, or get a sense of numerical infinity by wasting years in counting? The correct ways of contacting the depths of reality are just two: either to throw yourself over the cliff into your choice of mysticisms, or to do your time in one of the
cultural
armies, scientific or artistic. Otherwise your contribution is not even a dot of confetti at the wedding of humanity and the world!”

Perhaps so. These are mighty abstractions, humanity and the
world, and I repent my presumption before them. But here I am, as one always is, faced with the next step, and to bridge An Chois and so move on to a resting-point in my work, I need some
definition
of my purpose, even if it is only provisional, which will give my progress a touch of that unity the dolphin achieves so thoughtlessly. All that lies to hand (man of straw, marooned on Straw Island!) is the wreckage of an ideal. The notion of a
momentary
congruence between the culture one bears and the ground that bears one has shattered against reality into
uncountable
fragments, the endless variety of steps that are more or less good enough for one or two aspects of the here and now. These splinters might be put together into some more serviceable whole by paying more heed to their cumulative nature, to the step’s
repeatability
, variability, reversability and expendability. The step, so mobile, so labile, so nimbly coupling place and person, mood and matter, occasion and purpose, begins to emerge as a metaphor of a certain way of living on this earth. It is a momentary proposition put by the individual to the non-individual, an instant of trust which may not be well-founded, a not-quite-infallible catching of oneself in the act of falling. Stateless, the step claims a foot-long nationality every second. Having endlessly variable grounds, it needs no faith. The idea of freedom is associated in dozens of turns of speech with that of the step. To the footloose all
boundaries
, whether academic or national, are mere administrative
impertinences
. With this freebooter’s licence there goes every likelihood of superficiality, restlessness, fickleness and
transgression
—and so, by contraries, goes the possibility of recurrency, of frequentation, of a deep, an ever-deeper, dwelling in and on a place, a sum of whims and fancies totalling a constancy as of stone.

In all this the step is to be distinguished, maximally, from those metaphorical appendages of humanity, the need for which is much cried up by so many well-wishers of the species: roots—a concept which, though obviously deep, is to me unacceptably
vegetable
.

This will do for now: the adequate step will be one light and
sure enough to carry such explosive significances across tricky ground. This will do; this will get me across An Chois.