Stones of Aran (14 page)

Most of Nell’s contemporaries are buried in the old cemetery by the sea with St. Enda and his hundred and twenty companions, where the rain is washing the names off the limestone slabs lying on their graves. Some of them, however, are also commemorated by vertical inscriptions, and therefore more lastingly, on monuments standing in rows along the road north-west of the village. The lettering on these is still legible, especially when a westering sun cuts its shadows deeper, and I have screwed my eyes up into an antiquarian mode and puzzled out all the inscriptions, and published them in a book, so that the names of Patrick Flaherty, Peter Wiggins, and three dozen others, together with their meagre life-data, will last as long as such books do.

These cenotaphs are stout squarish pillars rather higher than a man (islanders like to cod visitors that people are entombed upright inside them), about four feet broad across the sides parallel to the road and a little less the other way, flat-topped, and surmounted by a stubby cross carved out of a single piece of stone. They are built of natural limestone blocks carefully fitted together with a little mortaring, and nearly all have two plaques with incised inscriptions, set one above the other in the side facing the road and framed by dressed stones; one inscription names the person commemorated and the other the person who raised the monument. The first such monument one meets as one walks out of Cill Éinne stands in a field on the left-hand side; one can lean over the roadside wall in front of it, and let the tall stony presence address one directly:

The little letters above the lines are hard to decipher among the blotches of lichen. The cross on top is no longer standing but lies propped against a small stone. As one moves on from monument to monument—there are eight in a row here, a few yards apart—one becomes aware of more regularities in their structure and repetitive oddities in their orthography, and of the haphazard effects on them of time. The top half of the next has collapsed, and its upper plaque lies in the grass at its foot:

Then comes one crowned with a rather fine cross leaning
askew, with rounded arms and head, and a shallow square recess in its shaft—a feature an archaeologist tells me derives from the form of glass-fronted shrines for the display of relics. A coping on the top of the monument projects a few inches all round immediately above the upper plaque, and the base is a little wider and thicker than the rest of the pier, giving a narrow ledge around the sides and back just below the lower plaque. Ivy obscures one side of the monument but on the other one can see how the stones framing the plaques are dressed, with inch-wide chisel strokes all round their margins and the central areas lightly pocked with a punch. The plaques themselves have neoclassical sunburst motifs in each corner and margins of a lozenge pattern. The inscriptions are more elaborate than the norm too:

And so the mournful litany goes on. After these eight, and a gap of a few hundred yards, comes a group of five, one of them reduced to a mere stub a foot high, close together by a cottage on the right of the road; then an isolated one on the right, and another on the left which serves a house as a gatepost. This last has
an extra plaque lettered in block capitals in memory of a Peter Gill, died 1892; this is the latest inscription in the series, and is clearly an insertion into a monument which the main plaques show to date from 1840. Not far beyond this point the road descends a steep scarp to shore-level by An Charcair Mhór, the big slope, and so leaves Cill Éinne territory. There are no such monuments in Cill Rónáin, but ten more are scattered along the road through the western villages from Eochaill to Eoghanacht; there are none in the other Aran islands.

These rather forbidding structures address one with questions both historical and mortal, and even the former, easier, sort, cannot be answered with much conviction. Counting one which has totally vanished but is mentioned in a late nineteenth-century source, and two of which only the plaques survive, set in a wall, there are twenty-eight in all, with dates ranging from 1811 to 1876. Individually they are not very different from sundry eighteenth-century memorials, mainly to individuals of the landlord class, to be seen, for instance, near Cong and in other places north and east of Galway city, but as a series the Aran roadside monuments are unique, in their number, in their late date, and in the fact that they concern ordinary members of the tenantry. There is nothing like them in Connemara or the parts of County Clare the islanders might have visited. What suggested the building of such elaborate memorials, in a time of such want? Their only local forerunners are the Fitzpatrick cenotaphs of 1754, looking down on Cill Éinne from the Lodge; but why should the tenants start to “trot after the gentry” two generations later?

There was in Aran a humbler funerary custom that both predated and outlasted the era of these monuments. At certain traditional points along the route of a funeral procession, the coffin would be set down while a few of the relatives put together a little cairn from the loose stones of a crag by the road. Dozens of these survive in the west of the island, and I believe there used to be some at the top of An Charcair Mhór. Some consist merely of three or four long stones leaned together, while others are neat
conical piles several feet high. Also, in the fields below An Charcair Mhór there is a cairn rather nearer the inscribed monuments in bulk and form; it even has a stone set vertically on it which with a little imagination can be seen as almost cross-shaped. It stands by an overgrown boreen running below the scarp, northeast of the road, that I am told was a long time ago the main way to Cill Éinne. If the anonymous stone-heaps evolved into the highly formalized inscribed monuments, with promptings from the Fitzpatrick cenotaphs, the process included a sudden leap of invention. This characteristic assertion of human creativity (characteristic also in that it was then followed slavishly) was perhaps taken by a relative of one of the two people whose plaques bear the earliest date, 1811. Unfortunately this cannot be ascertained, for neither of these plaques (one in Eochaill and the other in Eoghanacht) is in its original position and we do not know what shape their setting took.

That English should be used in these inscriptions is less surprising than would at first appear. The very possibility of writing in Irish was little known outside of scholarly circles until the spread of the language revival movement in the 1890s. Also, limestone Aran, being largely composed of potential tombstones, used to export them to granite Connemara, and these slabs were inscribed and decorated by island craftsmen; so the island had the set phrases of funerary English off by heart—or, as some of the plaques on the roadside memorials seem to show, copied them, mistakes and all, from example to example. Mortality and error being two related universals of the human predicament, the latter acquires prestige from the former; the curious abbreviations and corrections by means of superscripts became part of the rite of inscription, arcane but reassuring, to be reproduced as carefully as the architecture of the whole. In fact the dignified parade of these monuments along that outer reach of communal survival represented by Aran in the mid-nineteenth century, asserts a companionship between the living and the dead. But who is escorting whom, in this petrified funeral procession?

“These monuments of the dead have by moonlight a ghastly appearance,” wrote one of the first visitors to describe them, Oliver J. Burke, in 1887. This is still true despite the increasing suburbanization of their setting; not night alone but fog and rain and wind, in making it impossible to connect them with imaginable individuals, turn them into looming frights. On a fine day, however, one lingers and notices their individual quirks and stances; they have the air of men breaking off from work in the field for a chat with the passer-by. In the west when you pass someone at work you say
“Bail
ó
Dhia
ar
an
obair!”
—“God bless the work!” What work is being done by these monuments, that concerns us? I gave my little monograph on them a seductively lugubrious epigraph from Sir Thomas Browne, who in his
Urn
Burial
explains that it was the Roman practice “to bury by highways, whereby their monuments were under eye;—memorials of themselves, and mementos of mortality unto living passengers; whom the epitaphs of great ones were fain to beg to stay and look upon them.” The commerce between those of us still on the road and those who have gone before is two-way; the departed remind us of death, the inexorable general condemnation to oblivion, and at the same time demand from us an attention to the particulars of their epitaphs, as if hopeful of their own case for exemption.

Synge saw the roadside monuments on his first day in Aran, and in his book merely mentioned them as part of the grey waste of stone and rain he depicts, to throw into relief the vitality of the girls who hurried past him “with eager laughter and great talking in Gaelic, leaving the wet masses of rock more desolate than before.” But in his pocket-book he scribbled a thought about them:

But there he breaks off, and leaves us in the lurch. This idea of assistance between souls: was it merely some theosophical fancy brought with him from Paris, or was it consonant with the realistic humour he learned from Aran? In fact the roadside monuments, unlike those of the Fitzpatricks, do not ask for our prayer, but offer up their own. Nevertheless they call upon us for witness, for a response, even in this unbelieving or indifferently agnostic age, in which true Catholic Aran is letting them fall into ruin. Or is the call we hear from them merely an echo of our own thoughts?

One wearisome damp day when I was studying the monuments of Cill Éinne, I broke off to explore a side-road running up to the crags west of the village. I will try and relive that excursion as a train of thought, to advance me through the labyrinth, and because I think better with my feet than my head. The side-road is called Róidín Docherty after the Limerick family whose
holiday-home
is the former teacher’s residence at its foot, next to the disused Killeany National School. It is also called Róidín Donnellan after a teacher who lived there about fifty years ago, and Róidín Seoirse after someone who flourished no one knows when. It is a narrow, grassy, walled track that angles its way between the fields and up the hillside for half a mile, then pauses by a wet hollow before scrambling around it and up the scarp behind it. The hollow is Turlach na mBráthar, the turlough of the friars; nobody knows why, but it might have belonged to the Franciscans of Cill Éinne. It is fed by the run-off from a long narrow ravine crossing the plateau south of it called Gleann Ruairí Óg, the glen of young Ruairí (and again nobody knows who he was), the significance of which is that it divides Ceathrú an Chnoic, on the east, from Ceathrú na gCat, the quarter of the cats, on the west. The former was the land of the Hill Farm, the latter the quarter in which the villagers had their land; the cats were probably pine martens, which are no longer seen in the islands. The path then follows the brink of the scarp for a few hundred yards to the west, and on its left is an antique-looking hut of large stone slabs. One of the stony little fields opposite this hut, just below the scarp, is
called something that sounds like Creig hÍobairt, which an islander translated for me as “sacrifice crag.” There is said to be a bullaun stone set in one of its walls, which is why I had come. The owner of the field had told me its story. Long ago, a man went up to the field one Sunday to fetch his horse, intending to collect some seaweed from the shore. On entering the field he saw a priest saying the Mass, with two candles burning, and he knelt down. Afterwards the priest vanished. That made him think that there must have been a church there whose priest had been killed, and he looked around the field and found the bullaun stone, a granite boulder with a hollow in it. The owner of the field also told me that once when he was troubled by a painful stye, he dipped his finger into the water in the stone and put a drop on the stye, and the pain stopped immediately.

The bullaun stone does suggest an ecclesiastical connection, and I suspect that some half-forgotten scrap of oral history suggested the ghost story. But although I searched along every wall, and trampled to and fro in the long grass, I could not find the stone. In fact there was nothing at all in the field. Nothingness was palpable and oppressive, as it often is in these tiny enclosures, where a thousand or two thousand blocks in the walls present blank faces, and a few harebells stand up out of millions of grass-blades. Why might the ghost of a priest be seen here? Perhaps some lonely friar lurked for a while here after the Cromwellians had plundered the monastery and imprisoned its abbot; his legend might have attached itself to the common folktale of a priest whose soul has to wait in a ruined church for a living witness to hear him perform some rite neglected or interrupted. Once when I was helping two Aran men to pull down the loose stones of a double wall that needed rebuilding, around the garden of the old teacher’s residence in Fearann an Choirce, I noticed them flicking at something, as if they had disturbed a moth in the core of the stonework and were sending it flitting off across the crags. Their mime was half joking, and they laughed as they told me about old Moloney, the schoolmaster who had had the wall built, and of
how people used to believe that the dead lingered around the scenes of their life for a while before their final release. In fact Aran’s walls with their endlessly varied grey facets and dark crevices look as if they had absorbed all the faces and gestures of the generations of shadows cast upon them. But I saw nothing in that field; or perhaps I should say, as an Araner would in such circumstances, I saw nothing worse than myself. Perhaps I was in the wrong field, for the directions I had been given to it were not perfectly clear, or perhaps it was my resolute scepticism that held at bay the faded figure of the priest appearing like a lichen stain on the wall. It is our own shadows we are frightened of, I reason, the fears of our own extinction shadowing us, and we lend our shadows to the departed who have none of their own, colluding with them in a delusion of survival, for ghosts frighten us less than our own future inexistence.