Stones of Aran (12 page)

But of course Gregory has no imposing
Vita
Sancti
Gregorii
to back his claim to existence, and everything we read or hear of him is fabulous. What of St. Enda himself, then?

Julius Caesar claimed to have put to death all the “senate” of the Veneti and sold the rest for slaves after defeating their fleet of two hundred ships at Bordeaux, but as Hubert Butler points out it is possible that many of them escaped to Britain and Ireland, and some Irish place-names such as Fanad in Donegal and Fenit in Kerry have been said to reflect their presence here. However, Enda as an ancestor figure of the Veneti seems a shadowy hypothesis to me, much as I would like an excuse to welcome Aeneas to Aran.

Perhaps a vaguely syncretic agnosticism is the only rational attitude to the truth-value of the Lives of the Saints; they may contain reminiscences of the adventures and rivalries of the monks and hermits who founded Ireland’s thousands of churches, but they have been so hopelessly entangled with stories of many other sorts, including the origin-myths of hundreds of early tribal groups, and then exaggerated to magnify the prestige of much later civil and religious potentates, moralized to edify the credulous and fantasticated to entertain the simple, that all their assertions must be taken as unfounded.

However, I am reluctant to reduce the miraculous history of St. Enda to such tepidity. As cosmologists now sense through their radio-telescopes a faint radiancy that has been batting about an expanding universe for so long that it has cooled almost, but not quite, to absolute zero, so, when I pore over these strange pages—photocopied from the 1947 facsimile of Colgan’s 1645 printing of a transcript of a manuscript copied from another compiled in a fourteenth-century scriptorium from writings already then venerated as ancient records of extinct oral traditions—I feel some warmth of truth still emanating from them. The crackling
of the unimaginable fire out of which our galaxies, suns and planet were born is itself only a rumour of the single point from which all things sprang; from his tower the inexistent saint’s bell recalls that dawn of terrible perfection. I need this chapter of Aran’s foundation-myth as reassurance that something more can always be founded on these stones. But absolute beginnings are too aflame with potentiality to contemplate with the naked eye, and only lapse of time and corruption of report makes them bearable. The abyssal upward perspective to the point of origin has to be clouded with fables and tales of false miracles, to celebrate and obscure the fact that there is only one true miracle, which itself is all-inclusive.

Against the dazzle of its foundation myth and the pale ardour of monastic days, the Cill Éinne of the last century, huddled around the abandoned fort, has in my mind a broken and blackish silhouette. The relative nearness, the existence of documentation, of that darkening time lets us hear the sounds of those smoke-filled hovels, the hawking, coughing and sighing, enchained with laughter and the cries of new-born life. The angel Sarial who (according to Colm Cille) came to pour out God’s benificence on the bare flagstones of Aran each Thursday had long abandoned the task, Thursday as dole-day was yet to come, and the islanders were left to their own resources. The fateful cross-multiplication between potato and human being was mounting up towards the Great Famine. Large families could live off the bounty of a few small plots, and save all other income for the rent; the potato thrived on the plenteous labour of those families, the carting of sand and seaweed that created the plots out of rock, the spade-work that doubled up the shallow soil into ridges, the weeding and watering that could be done by children. Fecundity led to
overcrowding: the ridges full of low-quality potatoes vulnerable to drought, pests, diseases and prolonged salty winds that scorched their stems; the cottages crammed with young and old forcibly habituated to this monotonous diet, and with no money to invest in any alternatives.

The first season of “distress”—this was the term used for the state of near-famine that recurred throughout the next hundred years—was in 1822, when the ending of the Napoleonic wars had already led to a widespread agricultural depression, and kelp prices had fallen away as European sources of alkali were opened up. In the years of distress small charitable donations from British voluntary organizations were distributed through the clergy and resident gentry, or the Government organized public works on which men and women laboured for a portion of oatmeal. In 1822 many were employed quarrying the huge ashlar blocks used to edge various piers which the engineer Alexander Nimmo was building in Connemara, and a beginning was made on a pier, to Nimmo’s design, to replace Cill Éinne’s aboriginal quay. In 1831 another pier was built, on the south of the harbour at Cill Rónáin. Despite these interventions, life in Aran became impossible for many islanders, caught between the fixity of rents imposed in more prosperous times at the beginning of the century, and the decline in all sources of income. A large group left for America in 1822, and in the three years before 1836 five hundred more went, while others would have gone had they not been disappointed in their arrangements with the ship that was to carry them from Galway. Many exiled Cill Éinne men were employed in fishing between New York and Boston.

By the middle of the nineteenth century whatever prestige Cill Éinne had acquired from the garrison in the fort or the barracks that succeeded to it, or from the residence of the Fitzpatricks and the O’Malleys, was lost, and the Cill Éinne villagers found themselves in a worse situation than the other islanders. Even in the early decades of that century Cill Éinne’s economics were precarious. Its land was on a barren arc of terraces called An Screigín
(which means merely the small stony place), west of the Hill Farm’s ample tracts, but many villagers had no land and were totally dependent on fishing, apart from periodic employment in cutting blackweed and shipping it to Kinvara as manure, or carrying the islanders’ cattle to Casla Bay in Connemara, whence they would be driven fifteen miles along the coast road to the September fair in Galway.

In the 1820s the Aran fleet consisted of about forty sail-boats—small hookers of five to ten tons burthen, only five of them half-decked and the rest open, and two hundred currachs. The majority of the sail-boats worked out of Cill Éinne. In January, February and March they pursued the herring shoals; the village must have been festooned with the 120-fathom nets made (from locally grown flax), barked, dried and mended by their families. Through the summer until September cod, ling, pollock, bream, mackerel were caught with spillards (long lines with about three hundred hooks) or hand lines, and the roofs of Cill Éinne were
golden-tiled
with split-open fish curing in the sun. But bad weather would keep the Aran fleet at home, and the herring could desert Galway Bay for years at a time. When the fishery was good, it was dominated by boats from the Claddagh, the fishing village on the outskirts of Galway; sometimes there were two thousand boats in the bay, and the Aran men complained of the Claddagh men taking away their nets and fish, and beating them if they protested. Salt was in short supply, and often herring could not be got to market in good condition. Buyers were rapacious, insisting on buying the herring in thousands, each of eleven “long hundreds” of 123 fish. Long-line fishing was inefficient, but the Claddagh men forbade trawling, which they feared would disturb the fish and destroy the spawn—sheer prejudice, in the opinion of Alexander Nimmo. In the spring the sunfish or basking sharks were to be harpooned on the banks forty or fifty miles to the north-west beyond Slyne Head, but the little Aran boats were unfit for such expeditions.

When famine and the cholera came to the islands in 1822, and
the winter fishing failed, the Cill Éinne people were unable to buy potatoes, and went hungry the following year too. Similarly in 1825 there were reports of Cill Éinne people stealing potatoes. In 1832 a severe outbreak of cholera spread from Cill Rónáin to Cill Éinne; the O’Malleys fled to Cill Mhuirbhigh, the villagers deserted their cottages to live in little caves and huts among the crags, and it was reported that their womenfolk were making coffins out of bed-heads. The Great Famine of the 1840s, strangely enough, was not so severe in Aran as elsewhere; it seems that the fishing was so good during those years that islanders still speak of it as miraculous; nevertheless there was hunger and fever, and a desperate shortage of fuel, for Connemara was too weak to provide turf and Aran had no money or goods to exchange for it. Throughout the rest of the century bad years recurred in every decade, and the Aran fleet dwindled almost out of existence; foreign steam-trawlers appeared on the fishing grounds, guano imports to Galway meant the end of the seaweed-carrying trade, the Cill Éinne boatmen shipping cattle to the fairs found that they could not compete with the new paddle-steamer. Cill Éinne declined into a slum, until the Congested Districts Board brought some tentative relief to the fishing industry, striped the Hill Farm, and built a row of cottages to replace the knot of hovels sheltering in the ruined fort.

Newspaper accounts of these specific years of “distress” are voluminous and pitiful, and the condition of the Aran poor gave rise to many denunciations of the landlords, their agent, and the Government. Even during the unreported in-between years, it is clear that either stormy or rainy or dry or still weather meant less than usual to eat. Malnutrition and overcrowding made the community helplessly vulnerable to disease. There was no doctor until 1845, after which there was intermittently a medical officer serving the three islands from Cill Rónáin, and until the turn of the century the two smaller islands had not even a resident nurse. The ill-lit, smoke-filled, earth-floored cottages were ideal homes for the tuberculosis bacillus, and there was no possibility of isolating
the infected, who just had to carry on working as long as they could and then sit in the sun or by the fire until they died. The islanders were fatalistic about
an
cailín,
the girl, as they evasively called it; they thought it was “in the blood” of certain families, with the consequence that people often tried to hide away its occurrence in their own family. As Ruairí Ó hEithir writes, in his study of Aran folk medicine:

Folk medicine was largely a cruel delusion; it was not a matter of the herbal remedies we buy in charming bottles for our modern insomnias and hypochondrias. An infusion of mullein leaves was supposed to cure “the girl,” but as an islander remarked bitterly to me—for TB is still not just a memory—“There was a lot of them it didn’t cure.” Other treatments were based on misunderstandings of the nature of the disease, and must have caused unnecessary suffering. Pains in the chest, which might have been the result of anything from heartburn to cancer, were ascribed to a mysterious ailment called
cleithín
or
cleithín
do
thitim
(literally, “fallen chest or breastbone”) in which one of the floating ribs was supposed to have become bent in. The cure was to turn it out again with the fingers. Alternatively a lighted candle-end was placed on the breastbone with a tumbler inverted over it; as the air in the tumbler was consumed the flesh would be dragged into the resulting vacuum, and (in theory) the rib pulled into its right position again.

Midwives and bone-setters were probably the only genuinely effective practitioners in this murk of ignorance. Every village had its wise woman ready with capable if not clean hands at the
doors of life, though an especially renowned midwife might be sent for from village to village or even from island to island, bringing comfort and sometimes deadly infection; it is recorded that the famous Róisí Mhór, from Fearann an Choirce, was drowned going to Inis Meáin by currach some time in the 1840s. Bone-setting also demanded deft manipulation, but, being concerned with the dry mechanics of the human frame, it was a male vocation. Several islanders could deal with dislocations, a very few could fix up fractures. Synge met an old bone-setter in Inis Meáin in 1898 who was well known throughout the islands and on the mainland; and long after the coming of conventional medicine to the islands people would visit certain famous bone-setters in Connemara. Local accounts of these men show them besting the official experts, in a way that is delightful to those who have suffered the condescension of learned doctors. Thus the blacksmith of Fearann an Choirce tells me of a Dublin surgeon who decided to test the skills of a Connemara bone-setter (probably the well-known Micil Pheaitsín Mhocháin of Leitir Mealláin). The surgeon called at his cottage with a sack containing all the bones of a human skeleton plus one small extra bone, emptied them onto the floor, and challenged him to put them together. This was soon done, and when the surgeon picked up the extra bone and asked, “What about this?” the countryman replied, “You may throw that away.”

Most island medicine was magic, of some shade from white to black. Certain people claimed knowledge of
arthaí
or charms for stopping bleeding or choking, for curing erysipelas, toothache or the stitch. Migraine (“the little fever”) was thought to be due to a condition that was diagnosed by measuring the head with a tape in various directions; if the measurements did not tally, the skull was open at the top. The cure then was the recitation of an
artha
in the form of a little sacred narrative:

There were also one or two women who had the power to transfer a disease from one person to another. The botanist Nathaniel Colgan accidentally learned about this practice during his visit to Aran in 1892: