Stones of Aran (6 page)

The grey terrain west of the puffing-holes, cut off from the sea by the jagged ramparts of the storm beach, and with the island's low
bare ridge-line as its inland horizon, looks like the birthplace of rock itself. The ground here sloughs off scales of stone, which men have set on edge, close-stacked, to make walls for countless fields, and like giant eggs in these comfortless nests are dozens of huge limestone boulders, some of which have split apart and lie in pieces as if already hatched. These rugged boulders are quite
different
from the smooth slabs of limestone lying everywhere; they were carried here by ice, which ground them into rough ovoids before dropping them as the glaciers melted back at the end of the last Ice Age thousands of years ago. These glaciers had radiated out from an ice-cap on the mountains of the Joyce Country thirty miles to the north, and most of the “erratics” they brought with them are of Galway's granite, but the chunks of limestone that are so profusely scattered across the eastern end of the island must have been torn out of the ground somewhere not so far to the north, either on Aran itself or from the floor of what is now the Sound between it and the granite country. They are all individual and characterful objects, which lead one on into strolling from field to field as through the rooms of some weirdly
metamorphosed
sculpture gallery. Rain has worked into the tilted flanks of the boulders, carving terraces for miniature rock-gardens of
wall-rue
ferns and little herbs with starry blossoms in white or purple: scurvy grass, herb Robert, etcetera. Some boulders have been so deeply eaten by rainwater that they have come apart along their parallel fracture-planes and now lie in three or four thick slices stacked aslant. One or two have small lean-to pens for goat-kids built against them out of the curious shards of stone the ground crops in this part of the island. The biggest of them all, ten feet tall, is called Mulán Sheáin Bhig, Little Seán's boulder, after some long-dead toiler in the unpromising plot it overshadows.

The boulder-streak (as the geologists term such an assemblage of glacial erratics, because when plotted on a map it appears as a streak marking the course of the ice that brought the boulders) leads one away from the coast towards the ridge-line, and beyond that down again to near the starting-point of this book. Once
engaged
in hunting out a way through these tiny, bare, deserted fields, with the curious paths and gaps and stiles that link them into sequences, it is difficult to turn back. Field follows field with the unending incalculable oddity of the prime numbers in their sequence, that ultimate mystery of arithmetic. But the quest for Aran's interior mysteries is reserved for the sequel to this book, and I must return from this incursion, to the cliffs of the south.

The grey terrain west of the puffing-holes, cut off from the sea by the jagged ramparts of the storm beach, and with the island's low
bare ridge-line as its inland horizon, looks like the birthplace of rock itself. The ground here sloughs off scales of stone, which men have set on edge, close-stacked, to make walls for countless fields, and like giant eggs in these comfortless nests are dozens of huge limestone boulders, some of which have split apart and lie in pieces as if already hatched. These rugged boulders are quite
different
from the smooth slabs of limestone lying everywhere; they were carried here by ice, which ground them into rough ovoids before dropping them as the glaciers melted back at the end of the last Ice Age thousands of years ago. These glaciers had radiated out from an ice-cap on the mountains of the Joyce Country thirty miles to the north, and most of the “erratics” they brought with them are of Galway's granite, but the chunks of limestone that are so profusely scattered across the eastern end of the island must have been torn out of the ground somewhere not so far to the north, either on Aran itself or from the floor of what is now the Sound between it and the granite country. They are all individual and characterful objects, which lead one on into strolling from field to field as through the rooms of some weirdly
metamorphosed
sculpture gallery. Rain has worked into the tilted flanks of the boulders, carving terraces for miniature rock-gardens of
wall-rue
ferns and little herbs with starry blossoms in white or purple: scurvy grass, herb Robert, etcetera. Some boulders have been so deeply eaten by rainwater that they have come apart along their parallel fracture-planes and now lie in three or four thick slices stacked aslant. One or two have small lean-to pens for goat-kids built against them out of the curious shards of stone the ground crops in this part of the island. The biggest of them all, ten feet tall, is called Mulán Sheáin Bhig, Little Seán's boulder, after some long-dead toiler in the unpromising plot it overshadows.

The boulder-streak (as the geologists term such an assemblage of glacial erratics, because when plotted on a map it appears as a streak marking the course of the ice that brought the boulders) leads one away from the coast towards the ridge-line, and beyond that down again to near the starting-point of this book. Once
engaged
in hunting out a way through these tiny, bare, deserted fields, with the curious paths and gaps and stiles that link them into sequences, it is difficult to turn back. Field follows field with the unending incalculable oddity of the prime numbers in their sequence, that ultimate mystery of arithmetic. But the quest for Aran's interior mysteries is reserved for the sequel to this book, and I must return from this incursion, to the cliffs of the south.

About half a mile west of the Glasson Rock at a little point called simply An Coirnéal, the corner, the coast adopts the general west-north-westerly direction it holds to all the way to the farther end of the island. Headlands appear one beyond another, chapters still to be read of an unfolding tale; the inlets are hidden, but the recesses of the deepest of them lie less than half a mile north of the direct line of sight from here to the most westerly point visible, eight miles away, so the tortuosities of the coastline are constrained within surprisingly narrow limits. The succession of bays and capes, which reaches superb climaxes to the west, begins quietly with a meandering row of little alcoves, each only thirty or fifty yards wide, cut into low cliffs, the massive storm beach set well back from them so that one can walk the clifftops easily, and broad, stepped terraces of rock-pools exposed at their feet when the tide is out. This stretch of coast is so finely detailed, and the Iaráirne man I walked it with when I was collecting its placenames—one of the best of the older generation of Aran folk, keen and hardy in mind and body, a small man bird-like on the roof when mending a thatch, a fisherman who builds his own currachs, a villager who can enter into my sense of the wider significance of his local lore—was in such good form that sunny day that my wind-torn old six-inch map of the area was almost obliterated by my notes and markings. I will only mention a representative few
of these placenames here, which introduce themes—what the sea gives, and man’s keeping of the land—to be expounded in detail by other shores of Aran.

The third of these little alcoves, going west from An Coirnéal, is Poll an tSail; the basic meaning of the first word, which rhymes with the English “owl,” is “hole,” but it has to be translated as inlet, bay, cave, valley, hollow, pool or pond, according to circumstances. This, then, is “the bay of the baulk of timber,” and around it stand Ailltreacha na Giúise, the cliffs of the pine timber. Many of the older houses of the islands have rafters cut from beams washed ashore and carried off and hidden before the coastguards or the landlords’ agent got wind of them, and even today islanders keep an eye out for such prizes, as I do myself. Recently an elderly and, as I had thought, frail couple, neighbours of ours in the west of the island, managed to drag a thick tree trunk eighteen feet long up a steep shinglebank to where they could bring a cart for it. When I made some remark about this feat the old lady replied,
“Ní
raibh
ann
ach
pléisiúr!”
—“It was nothing but a pleasure!”

The next bay is named Poillín na gCleití, the little bay of the feathers, but only from some chance observation of scattered seagull feathers, as the seabirds the old cliffmen used to catch and pluck to fill pillows and mattresses nest on the higher cliffs to the west, not here. Next door (for these bays are on a household scale) is a deeper inlet called Poll Neide, after one Ned. Surnames, being few, are little used in Aran and most families have a nickname which is either the Christian name of some forbear or derives from some joke or anecdote about a forbear (and as most of the latter type are offensive to the people concerned and not to be used to their faces it is impossible for me to give any of the dozens of current examples, interesting though they are). However, Muintir Neide (the Ned folk, one might say in English) are a well-known Iaráirne family; their holding is a long strip of land coming down to the coast here, and it would have been in this inlet that they gathered seaweed to put on their land. Seaweed rights used to be grimly defended, and were closely defined in terms of types of
seaweed and the times of year at which they could be gathered, and even where they could be dried; for instance the Iaráirne people had the right to spread seaweed to dry on the piece of the Neides’ land by the shore here. The next bay to the west, a rather large one, was well known specifically as a place where large amounts of the red
Laminaria
weed drifts ashore and could be easily fetched up the low cliffs to be burnt for kelp; it is called Poll na Feamainne, the bay of the seaweed. Beside it is An Darna Poll, the second bay, so called because coming from the west it is the second one after the boundary wall of the territory of Iaráirne village. And so the final bay of this Iaráirne shore is the next, An Poll Sleamhain, the slippery bay; it is the green
Enteromorpha
seaweed that makes the shore slippery wherever fresh water flows over it from springs, as here.

The boundary wall of Iaráirne’s territory is immediately
recognizable
if one climbs the storm beach just west of the last-named bay and looks inland. The horizon is given by a low ridge half a mile away, from which walls come down towards the shore, dividing up a grim and grey landscape into a number of strips of crag and pockets of rough pasture. But, to the west of the wall opposite this point the divisions are large, and to the east of it they are small. The difference used to be even more marked, as the land in the west was redivided or “striped” in the Thirties and distributed among the people of Cill Éinne and Iaráirne. And on the northern slopes of the island where what is being divided is comparatively productive land rather than so much grimness and greyness, the contrast between tiny patches on the one hand and broad acres on the other speaks for itself: the huddled portions of the exploited seem to mutter against the complacent spread of the wealthy. Specifically, what one sees here is the border between two of
Árainn’s twenty-four
ceathrúna
or “quarters” which have had quite different histories: to the east lies Ceathrú an tSunda, the quarter of the Sound (being adjacent to Gregory’s Sound), consisting of the smallholdings of Iaráirne farmers; to the west is Ceathrú an Chnoic, the quarter of the hill, formerly a single holding known as the Hill Farm, which went with a fine lodge on the hillside near Cill Éinne village, the villagers themselves being landless
fishermen
or having small plots in the next quarter to the west, an area rather dismissively called An Screigín, the small stony place. The Hill Farm’s history, which with the lapse of time has fallen apart into picturesque anecdotes, and the miserable consequences of its monopoly of the best land of Cill Éinne, belong to
Labyrinth
, the account of Árainn’s interior. Here we turn back to the coast and note that the shore ahead, that of Ceathrú an Chnoic, is or was serviced by a road, while that of Iaráirne’s land is not. The road, a wide, untarred and unwalled track, comes over the ridge of the hill that hides the Lodge to the north-west, crosses broad crags, the more recent “striping” of which has interrupted its course with a couple of walls, then turns eastwards along the coast in the lee of the storm beach, and ends abruptly against the boundary wall. It was famine-relief work of the late nineteenth century, and like most such projects what little utility it had (for the transport of seaweed and wrack from these low-cliffed and accessible shores) was to the benefit of the larger landholders and not to that of the hungry wretches who laboured on it for their daily dish of boiled maize.

One can take this road from the boundary wall as far as the next large bay half a mile to the west, or follow the same arc of the coast on the clifftops, which is preferable since the road is a dreary track of depressing associations and is deprived of a sight of the
sea by the storm beach; or if the tide is out one can climb down onto the terraces below the cliffs and meander along among the rock-pools on the sea’s own level. This
leac
(as such a sheet of rock is termed here) is over a hundred yards wide in places, and is one of the most spacious wave-cut terraces of Aran. It is called Leac na gCarrachán, and the bay it leads round into is Poll na gCarrachán, both names deriving from that of certain shoals half a mile or so off shore here, called Na Carracháin, which merely means the rocky patches or stone-piles.

Being a landsman I have not visited Na Carracháin, but the old boatmen have told me the spell or Open-Sesame that would get me there:
“Mant Beag ar Ghob an Chinn; Teampall Bheannáin ar na Clocha Móra”
(“The Little Gap on the Point of the Head: St. Benan’s church on the Big Stones”). The Mant Beag is a dip in the Cliffs of Moher on the eastern skyline, and it has to be lined up with the southern tip of Inis Meáin, a spot nearly always
conspicuously
flashing white with breakers. For the other bearing, the
little
ruin of St. Benan’s church, the only building visible from here, high on the hilltop over Cill Éinne village, must be aligned with certain huge boulders precariously balanced on the edge of the cliff on the west side of Poll na gCarrachán. The currach-fishermen had dozens of these runes to guide them to good fishing grounds and keep them clear of danger. They often involve places the
fishermen
had never visited and to which they gave names their
inhabitants
would not recognize. Thus Na Simléir, the chimneys, is the Cill Éinne fishermen’s name for a place near Gort na gCapall that the farmers of the village cannot quite equate with any of their land; a tiny patch of green grass clinging to the brink of the cliff below Túr Mháirtín is well known to Inis Meáin boatmen as An Réallóg, whereas few Árainn men would know it had a name at all. (The word
réallóg
itself has died out of Árainn’s speech although it occurs in a number of placenames there, whereas it is still in use in the smaller islands, for an unfenced plot of good land in a waste of crag.) And men from all three islands, on
hearing
that I have mapped the area, have asked me about what they
call An Garraí Gabhann, the pound, up on the hilltop just east of Ballyvaughan in County Clare; it is a natural formation, not
particularly
striking on a close approach, that looks like a great
enclosure
from a distance, and when it appears around Black Head it throws a signal farther and clearer than any lighthouse to men on the sea out to the west of Aran. Thus offshore usage recreates the surrounding landscapes; like a poet I know who finds his lines by glancing along titles on library shelves, so the fisherman low among the waves raises his eyes and picks words off the land with which to write sentences on the sea.