Stones of Aran (2 page)

Unquestionable answer to unanswerable question, this volume must close what the first opened, so that I can store them away safely, like two mirrors face to face. Therefore I must begin now at the place where my circuit of the coast of Árainn ended, and from which I am to broach the interior. That place, determined long ago by the structure of the whole book, is at the eastern tip of the island, where a hillside of rock and weather-beaten grass rises from the arc of sand and shingle about a little bay to a small ruined tower. At what era Túr Mháirtín watched over the safety or the subservience of Aran is unknown; but for some years now, in my mind, its function has been to keep my place in the book, marking a promise to return from long
wanderings
in Connemara and see my way through this island. Old maps call the tower St. Gregory’s Monument. The saint of the golden mouth, even after years of prayer and fasting, felt himself unworthy of a grave in Aran of the Saints, and on the
approach
of death commanded that his body be consigned to the sea in a barrel. Port Daibhche, the port of the barrel, is where the corpse was brought ashore by a miraculous current, in sign of his worthiness of the holy ground. I have now to write myself back onto that ground, and without benefit of miracle.

But finding the entrance to the labyrinth is not the simplest of steps, for I find myself separated from it by another
labyrinth.
I no longer live in Aran; I cannot jump on my bicycle
and go and have another look at that harsh grey hillside. My sight-lines and thought-lines to it are interrupted by the thick boggy hills and dazzling waters of Connemara. I am too far for touch, too near for Proustian telescopy. There is also a dense forest of signposts in the way, the huge amount of material I have assembled to help me. Here to my hand are a shelf of books,
thirteen
piled volumes of diary, boxes bursting with record cards, a filing-cabinet of notes, letters, offprints from specialist journals, maps and newspaper cuttings. Also, three ring-binders of writing accumulated over a dozen years towards this work, some of it outdated, misinformed, unintelligibly sketchy, some so highly polished it will have to be cracked open again in order to fuse with what is still to be written. What tense must I use to
comprehend
memories, memories of memories of what is forgotten, words that once held memories but are now just words? What period am I to set myself in, acknowledging the changes in the island noted in my brief revisitings over the years, the births and deaths I hear of in telephone calls? In what voice am I to embody the person who wrote that first volume with little thought of
publisher
or readership during a cryptic, enisled time, I who live nearer the main and have had public definitions attached to me, including some I would like to shake off—environmentalist,
cartographer
—and whose readers will open this volume looking for more of the same and will be disappointed if they get it? How am I to lose myself once again among the stones of Aran?

Looking around for inspiration in this quandary I remember that from the saint’s monument one can just make out a mark, a greyish dot, on the brink of the highest cliff of Inis Meáin, a mile away across the sound. This is Cathaoir Synge, Synge’s Seat, a low structure of massive stones like a roofless hut open to the west, of unknown date and purpose. Here the writer used to sit and brood upon the abyss:

I would like to use Synge’s vision of it to situate myself on that black edge, the beginning of my work, but at this crucial moment he is alienated from me. In an essay on his book
The
Aran
Islands
that grew out of his intense meditations on the cliff-top, I wrote that Synge was mistaken in thinking that the Irish name for the maidenhair fern is
dúchosach
(black-footed), and that as he knew so little about it he was wise not to treat of the Aran flora. Since then I have heard Aran people call that fern the
dúchosach,
my earlier source was wrong, and I am caught out in a petty
rival-rousness
. As if Synge, with his deep, intuitive eyes, cares whether or not I have more facts on Aran than he! The sage turns from me, listening to those clamorous gulls, whose language, he says, “is easier than Gaelic.” I shrink back to my filing-cabinet.

My efficient record cards remind me, however, that that hillside I would like to refind myself on is called An Teannaire, the pump, from a recess in the cliffs below it where waves rush in and compress themselves into waterspouts, and that it has already been appropriated, if not by literature, then by the oral tradition.

This is from
Amhrán
an
“Chéipir,”
the song of the “Caper,” composed in his head by Taimín Ó Briain, of the poetical O’Brians of Cill Éinne, near the beginning of this century. The “Caper” was a young fisherman from Cape Clear in Cork, who came with a boat called the
Lucky
Star
to work out of Cill Rónáin, and
married
a girl from Iaráirne, the easternmost village of the island. My translation is a rough piece of work—but so is Taimín’s original:

But although she was fine-looking girl (and I am told the
Caper
“wiped the eye of the local lads”), her family were desperately poor, and all her father could provide as dowry was this
salt-blasted
hillside and the dunes just north of it, plus the gear for scratching a living off the shore:

Can I imagine myself taking the island into my possession like this, in her penniless beauty? The welcome was generous enough:

But while the girl’s father sat with his back to a creel of turf politely ignoring the goings-on and her mother started keening, the whiskey somehow disappeared into the night, the guests,
ag
deanamh
“joy”
den
oíche,
making “joy” of the evening, broke up the bridal bed, and nobody got a wink of sleep. Fortunately the weather was too bad for the steamer to bring out the fifty policemen who were to search the place or the Justice and Crown
Attorney
to try the cases arising from that night.

Nothing suits me in this precedent. The island is no longer the village maiden of ninety years ago. The identification of a
territory
with a woman, a theme of great significance in Celtic
mythology
and one which tempted Synge too, is nowadays fraught with tensions. And, although I trust prayer no more than
whiskey
, I would rather drift ashore in a barrel than accede to a
holding
of this island through such ructions.

However, through all this frowning over my scrawled
difficulties
and disorderly data, I find that I have now arrived,
unbeholden
to saint or sage or father-in-law, and by my preferred
literary
transition, a slinking behind my own back. Nothing could be better adapted to this broken ground, riven by quantum jumps and contradictions. Now, all those problems of tense and person can be left to piecemeal solution. In the glow and hum of my word processor I am already mooching about below the
half-abolished
tower, as tenebrous as ever, trying to understand what it is I am to understand, peering into the crevices of the crag like the wise old women of Aran, in search of a simple for a complex.

In shadow, a recessive shade. Greyish-green flakes floating in an elaborate and slightly dishevelled pattern. The eye slowly sorts it out into perhaps five or six triangular fronds. On a closer look an individual frond breaks up into a small number of triangular sprays of five or six leaflets the size of a little fingernail. Each
leaflet
is fan-shaped, with straight sides and a scalloped outer margin, and is attached at the apex to a fine stalk, which in its turn branches off the slightly thicker axis of the spray, and so is
connected
back to the stem of the frond. Even these stems are so slender that the fronds bend outwards under their own weight, so that each leaflet offers its upper surface to the eye and the whole array canopies a curved darkness below. The articulations are so delicate that a breath is enough to start a flickering fan-language of display and concealment, chaste provocation, coquetry—or so one reads it, prompted by the fern’s English name. The Irish goes bluntly to the root:
dúchosach,
black-footed. Part the foliage and see how the wire-thin stalks emerge in a dense bundle like a jet of earth-force from a crack in the rock, glossy brownish-black,
grading
into green as they diverge into their parabolic trajectories. The peasant, sturdily rooted in the compost of its ancestors.

Adiantum
capillus-veneris
(to take up its Linnaean binomial as one would a magnifying glass for scientific objectification) is the Aran plant
par
excellence.
It is extremely rare in Britain and in Ireland except on the Burren and Aran limestone, and the earliest Irish record of it commemorates the first visit of a scientist to the island. Edward Lhuyd, writing from “Pensans in Cornwall, Aug. 25, 1700,” says:

The campion would merely have been the common sea campion;
Adianthum
verum
was the old name for the maidenhair fern; and without the rain there would be no such fern here. Lhuyd was Keeper of the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, and catalogued its collection of fossils; he was at the same time establishing himself as a Celticist, and his visit to Aran was in connection with the preparation of his great work
Archaeologia
Britannica,
described on its title-page as “giving some account Additional to what has been hitherto Publifh’d, of the
LANGUAGES, HISTORIES AND CUS
TOMS
OF THE ORIGINAL INHABITANS OF GREAT BRITAIN
: from Collections and Observations in Travels through
Wales,
Cornwal,
Bas-Bretagne,
Ireland
and
Scotland.”
In his second chapter, “A Comparative Vocabulary of the Original Languages of Britain and Ireland,” I notice:

which perhaps records the rusty voice of some Araner of nearly
three hundred years ago. Another name for the fern I have heard,
tae
scailpreach
 
(
scailpreach
meaning a place of rocky clefts), probably dates only from the last century when tea became such a comforter of the poor. Dinneen gives it in his Irish dictionary, with the remark that the fern was used as a substitute for tea; this seems unlikely, and I imagine it was the appearance of its sere and shrivelled fronds in winter that made people think of the
craved-for
drug.

But why does a plant of the warm south grow on these bleak islands, whose other botanical stars are the limestone bugle, from northern and mountainous areas of Europe, and the spring
gentian
, best known from the Alps? In an old encyclopedia I read that the maidenhair fern is “abundant in the south of Europe, where it covers the inside of wells and the basins of fountains (as at Vaucluse) with a tapestry of the most delicate green.” Fontaine de Vaucluse is where Petrarch retired to in a vain effort to forget his Laura. What brings the delicate Provençale to Penultima Thule? The answer begins to open up the labyrinth of Aran.

On a hillside like that leading up to St. Gregory’s tower (through which I am feeling my way into the matter of Aran) one sees the geometry of limestone exposed in black and white.
Because
this rock originated over a period of millions of years as the layered sediments of a sea that changed in depth, turbidity,
temperature
and living contents, its strata vary in their chemical and physical constition. Hence such a slope, carved out of a
succession
of almost horizontal strata of different resistances to erosion, consists of a number of more or less well-defined terraces
separated
by vertical “risers” of anything from a few inches to twenty or more feet. As one climbs, the rim of each step or cliff running across the hillside ahead shows up against the sky. Here, because of the particular direction one takes in coming up from the beach, these successive horizons have an extraordinary appearance that reveals another, vertical, set of divisions in the rock. Each rim, seen from below, has the profile of a row of blocks with gaps of a few inches between them; where the gaps are very close together
the blocks are reduced to mere blades an inch or two thick, and the hillside looks as if it were built out of arrays of knives set on edge. These fissures are the surface expression of a system of cracks or “joints” cutting vertically through the limestone, the result of tensions in these strata caused by movements in the earth’s crust at some period after the Carboniferous. Rainwater has eroded out these hairline cracks into fissures of various widths and depths on exposed surfaces of the limestone; once opened up, the fissures receive all the run-off from the level rock-sheets and channel it underground. In the curious international jargon of geology such a fissure is a “gryke” and the flat rock-sheet is a “clint”—Yorkshire dialect-words, adopted because such formations are best known from limestone areas like Malham in Airedale. A limestone
terrain
with subterranean drainage, as here and at Malham, is called a “karst,” a term equally expressive of stony barrenness, borrowed from the name of such a region in the former Yugoslavia. In this particular corner of Aran the grykes are generally only a few inches wide and a few feet deep, but in other parts they are sometimes over two feet wide and ten or more feet deep. The principal set of grykes runs with amazing parallelism across the islands from a few degrees east of north to a few degrees west of south. This happens to be the direction in which one climbs towards the tower, so here the hillside is sliced before one’s eyes
by the
brightness
of the sky.

This dissection of the rock not only underlies the detailed
accidentation
of the coastline, as I have shown in my first volume, but it orders many aspects of life, including that of humans, in the interior. Because of the general nakedness of the terrain, it immediately provides two contrasted environments for
lime-loving
plants. The differences between the “microclimates” of the flagstone-like ground-surface and the grykes are as sharp as those between two climatic zones hundreds of miles apart. In the shady water-gardens of the clefts the maidenhair fern can enjoy a mild, moisture-laden, Gulf-Stream ambience without the concomitant gales; a few inches above, the merest skim of soil provides for
plants adapted to extreme exposure, good drainage, heavy
grazing
and high light levels. Because of this rare conjuncture of
oceanic
climate and karst topography, the maidenhair can survive so far north as to consort with plants that are equally far from their headquarters on mountain and tundra, here at sea-level in the ultimate west.

Thus the block of stone allots its frugal abstractions of
horizontal
and vertical to separate plant-communities, neither of which would prosper in fatter conditions. And each contributes to the support of a scavenging fauna. When Synge first stayed in Cill Rónáin in 1898 he walked out to the east end of the island, and on his way back two little girls followed him for a while:

Similar accounts by other visitors make one wonder how the maidenhair survived the Victorian passion for fern-collecting. Fortunately Aran’s human children no longer need to exploit this particular ecological niche, and one can still find its delicate,
exotic
, charm enfolded in the rocks.