Stones of Aran (21 page)
Authors: Tim Robinson
Prof. Melville assembled the group at the centre of the fort, and it being the anniversary of Her Majesty’s birthday, called for a cheer for the Queen, which was responded to with such a good will that the very puffins forsook their native cliffs in sheer fright.
Botanists had visited the islands long before this, the pioneers being Edward Lhwyd in about 1699, and in 1806 J.T. Mackay of TCD’s newly founded botanic garden. In the middle decades of the century a number of botanists, mainly Scottish and English, published accounts of their “rambles” in Aran: J. Ball in 1839, W. Andrews and L. Ogilby both in 1845, D. Oliver in 1851 and 1852, J. H. Balfour in 1853 and D. Moore in 1854. Between them they recorded fifty-four species, but did not aim to be exhaustive. Then in 1867 Professor E.P. Wright of Dublin University published a list of 159 species from Aran, being, he claimed, “all, or nearly all,
the species to be met with in the month of August,” and the
discoveries
made by H.C. Hart in 1869 soon doubled that number. This was hard-won knowledge; Hart complains about the
interminable
and disheartening obstacle-course of the field-walls, while Wright suggests that the botanist would do well to bring with him
… a few creature comforts to supplement the meagre fare of the place; and above all … a store of good candles. The sufferings that the writer endured while trying to investigate with a half-inch objective some gatherings made near the Holy Well at Kilronan, were indeed great, the only choice of light being between a farthing dip-candle of the worst description—
i.e.
with the thickest possible wick and the smallest amount of tallow—and a slender cotton thread lying in a saucer of fish oil.
Meanwhile the islanders themselves suffered scientific
identification
for the first time. A Dr. Beddoe came to Aran in 1861, and later wrote in his book
The
Races
of
Britain
:
The people of the Aran Islands have their own strongly marked type, in some respects an exaggeration of the ordinary Gaelic one, the face being remarkably long, the chin long and narrow but not angular, the nose long and straight and pointed, the brows rising obliquely outwards, the eyes light with very few exceptions, the hair of various colours but usually dark brown. We might be disposed, trusting to Irish traditions respecting the islands, to accept these people as representatives of the Firbolgs, had not Cromwell, that upsetter of all things, left in Arranmore a small English garrison who subsequently apostasised to Catholicism, intermarried with the natives and so vitiated the Firbolgian pedigree.
This question of the racial purity of the islanders was to trouble many minds, as the ideological significance of the Aran Islands ramified over the next half-century, and still excites undue
curiosity
today. In the 1950s the conclusions of a blood-group survey of the islanders were much more widely commented on than
would have been the case for a similar investigation on the
mainland
; there is a fear that facts might “vitiate” the dreams that
enchain
us with the primeval. (This study in fact showed that the blood-group frequencies of Aran differed sharply from those of adjacent mainland areas and were more like those of the east of Ireland or even the north of England where Gaelic and English stock have mixed. Such findings prompted a Dublin magazine to tease nationalists and “nativists” with a cartoon of Aran islanders playing cricket.)
There was a lull in the scientific investigation of Aran, perhaps due to the depressing and disturbed state of the country, during the Land War, but two legal gentlemen connected with the
sittings
of the Land Court in Cill Rónáin in the mid-1880s
published
accounts of the islands. James G. Barry’s “Aran of the Saints” was a brief paper largely devoted to the monuments
recently
restored by the Board of Works, but with a few interesting details of land-divisions not available elsewhere. Oliver J. Burke’s
The
South
Isles
of
Aran,
published in 1887, was the first book devoted to the islands. Much of it rehashes J.T. O’Flaherty, O’Donovan’s Ordnance Survey letters and Hardiman’s appendices to
West
or
H-Iar
Connaught,
but it also contains the first critical
assessment
of the economic state of the islanders and suggestions for its improvement. This book must have helped to disabuse many subsequent visitors of romantic notions about the noble peasants and their even nobler masters.
Thereafter the islands continued to attract an extraordinary number of enquirers. In 1895 there were mass assaults by
archaeologists
and by natural historians. The Royal Society of
Antiquaries
of Ireland arrived on the 4th of July, most of it by the
SS
Caloric
having sailed north-about from Belfast and visited Tory Island, Inishmurray and High Island
en
route,
while a hundred or so more came out on the
SS
Duras
from Galway. Among the
excursionists
were the Provincial Secretary for Connaught of the Society, Edward Martyn of Tullyra Castle in south Galway, and the leader of the party was Thomas Westropp, who had been
visiting the islands since 1878 and was later to publish detailed studies of its forts and stone huts. The
Caloric
moored off Cill Mhuirbhigh, and getting ashore was not so easy:
A few corraghs at once put out from shore, and in an hour there must have been more than twenty at the ship’s side. Many of the natives came on board, and some of them sang Irish songs, and danced jigs remarkably well…. The corragh … is very buoyant, and can be rowed with great
rapidity
. They contain no seats except those for the rowers. This makes them
inconvenient
boats for passengers, who are obliged to accomodate themselves on the bottom of the boat sometimes in not very comfortable attitudes; while many carry away on their clothes reminders that tar takes some time to dry. They are excellent seaboats, however, riding over waves which would swamp a heavier boat, and with any reasonable care are perfectly safe. One accident only occurred during our stay—an accident which might have led to very serious consequences but for the gallant conduct of the first officer of the ship. This accident was caused by an act of great carelessness on the part of a young boatman.
In fact two of the party were nearly drowned by this drunken currachman; the Society’s later official reprint of the original
account
in the
Belfast
Newsletter
glosses over some of the upsets of the expedition.
Next day the party landed in the bay of An Gleannachán, on the advice of the Rev. Mr. Kilbride, who was a member of the Society, and visited most of the island’s great monuments. The following day was spent in the two smaller islands, and they were outraged by the womenfolk of Inis Meáin who stretched a rope across the entrance to Dún Chonchúir and tried to levy a toll; some paid, some refused, the police were called, but came too late to be of help. However they were well satisfied with their finds, which included bronze pins and two “methars” or large cups. The archaeological account of the three islands that Westropp had prepared for this occasion remains a most useful summary guide.
This influx almost coincided with the visit of a hundred or so
naturalists, the members and friends of members of the Belfast, Dublin, Cork and Limerick Field Clubs, brought together by a joint conference in Galway. They had already toured Connemara and the Burren, discussing and studying their numerous
discoveries
over dinners at the Railway Hotel, and had taken afternoon tea with the President of Queen’s College, Galway. The trip to the Aran Islands on July the 16th was another day of vigorous
tramping
and close observation, and was “in every way successful.” Their leader was the Secretary of the Irish Field Club Union, the indefatigable Robert Lloyd Praeger:
Punctually at 5.30
A.M
. the Secretary’s shrill whistle called members down for an early cup of tea. A prompt response was made, and at 6 o’clock sharp the SS “Duras” cast off her moorings…. A heaving tide-run off the shore of Aranmore proved disastrous to some of the naturalists, but they speedily recovered as the steamer dropped anchor at Portmurvey…. The members who visited Dun Aengus—the larger proportion of the party—were amply repaid for their exertion…. Floating on the Atlantic swell far below, a
keen-eyed
member descried a fine specimen of the Great Sun-fish, which
considerately
remained in full view for a length of time. On the vegetation here and elsewhere many observers noted the great abundance of the handsome rose-beetle (
Cetonia
aurata
)
.
The presence of this species—so rare on the Irish mainland—was a great surprise to the entomologists. A small
flower-beetle
(
Meligethes
rufipes
)
new to Ireland, was found, as well as a minute spider (
Micariosomia festivum
),
also apparently new to the Irish list….
On the beach at Kilronan, Miss Gardiner had a sumptuous tea
prepared
, to which the members did ample justice; after which, undeterred by frequent showers which now began to fall, a numerous party started
southward
to visit the primitive church of St. Eany, &c., and to attempt further discoveries among the fauna and flora. The botanists were well pleased to find, at the last moment, that very rare Irish grass, the Wood Rush, in one of the two Aran stations given by Mr. H.C. Hart in his paper on the botany of the islands, and in the fading light a hasty return was made to the steamer, which left at 8 o’clock punctually, and the hotel in Galway was once more reached at 11.0.
Praeger returned to the island a few days later with a few
colleagues
, and went over it with his usual thoroughness. The
floristic
result of this excursion was an additional twenty-three new records. (A few other botanical visits brought the total of reliably recorded species up to 408 by the end of the century, and the present known flora numbers about 450 species.)
By the 1890s hundreds of day-trippers were disembarking at Cill Rónáin in the summer months. A pleasure-boat service to the islands from Galway had been initiated as early as 1863, and the paddle-steamer
Citie
of
the
Tribes,
so called from an old
appellation
of Galway, had begun its long career in 1873. Mary Banim’s
Here
and
There
through
Ireland
has
the first account of Aran from this new age of holiday-making, of people coming as she did, to enjoy “a mitigated Robinson Crusoe life.” She had read much about Aran’s saints, prehistoric monuments and wild-flowers, and above all about the charming innocence of the islanders. To avoid corrupting this last, she had left behind her an appendage of her travelling suit, the “dress improver,” four iron bars that gave a skirt a fashionable outline; and when she found, hanging behind the door of her room in the Atlantic Hotel, a feminine costume with the same unmistakable bulge in its skirt, she felt the shock Crusoe suffered on seeing the footprint in the sand. More
seriously
, she was also shocked to find that the natives of this
delightful
holiday-resort were hungry:
I was in Arran at a time when great distress yet prevailed after the famine of 1885—a small, a scandalously small sum had been given by Government for relief works, and a little harbour was to be made. The sum allowed of the employment of but one out of each family proved to be in dire necessity, that one to receive one shilling a day—six shillings a week for perhaps ten in family. I saw the poor men besieging the priest, the gentleman in charge of the works—even begging us to intercede for them for work…. It was no fit labour for women, yet one fine young girl came weeping and praying so earnestly that it was impossible to refuse her, and she joyfully toiled as hard as anyone, carrying huge stones and doing all required of a strong man, that
she might get that pittance with which to support her little orphan brothers and sisters—for father and mother were dead.
What must have appeared to the islanders as the tourists’
curious
fetishism about certain minor aspects of Aran life was already proving a marginal economic resource:
Sitting on the edge of the pier and darting here and there amongst the men were a number of boys carrying for sale pampootys and large bunches of the beautiful maiden-hair fern which grows in the chinks of the rocks … and they patiently waited that I might examine the relative merits of brown or white pampootys, before finally deciding on one all brown and one sweetly mottled.
The “pampooty,” a moccasin-like shoe made of a single strip of untanned cowhide, hairy side out, with a few stitches at heel and toe and shaped to the foot by draw-strings above, was simply the
bróg
úrleathair,
raw leather shoe, to the islanders; the more exotic word, which has been speculatively derived from words for “
slipper
” in a wide variety of languages and is seemingly a
seventeenth-century
introduction, has always appealed more to the tourist. Mary Banim repeats what was to become a standard trope of Aran literature, that the light and graceful carriage of the
islanders
is due to this footwear. Synge was later to make the pampooty, as contrasted with “the heavy boot of Europe,” the very emblem of the Araners’ closeness to nature.
In that same period certain young men who would become internationally renowned Celticists and linguists visited Aran. The first of them, Heinrich Zimmer, saw the island during the Land War in 1880, and was moved to address the islanders at a Land League meeting in Cill Rónáin, urging them to stand
together
and protect their land. I have mentioned his unravelling of the genealogy of St. Enda, which forms an aside to an
extraordinarily
dense study of
The
Voyage
of
St.
Brendan.
He later became professor of Celtic philology at Berlin (and the father of another
Heinrich Zimmer, the great Indianologist). Kuno Meyer, who was to found the School of Irish Studies in Dublin in 1903 and later to succeed Zimmer at Berlin, first visited the islands in 1889 during his lectureship in Celtic and German at Liverpool
University
. Both the Copenhagen linguist Holger Pedersen and his
disciple
Franz Nikolaus Finck came; the latter’s two-volume work
Die
araner
Mundart
of 1899 being the first detailed study of an Irish dialect. The American Jeremiah Curtin collected material in Aran for his
Myths
and
Folklore
of
Ireland,
published in 1890.
Irish-language
enthusiasts of the Gaelic League, founded in 1893, who came to the islands as to a shrine of the reviving spirit of the nation, include Eoin MacNeill, Eugene O’Growney, Dr. O’Hickey, Una Ní Fhaircheallaigh, Thomas MacDonagh and Patrick Pearse. Glancing ahead to the roles these people were to play, it seems the nation itself went to school in Aran. MacNeill was the first professor of Early and Medieval Irish History at UCD, Chief of Staff of the Irish Volunteers from 1913, and the first Minister of Education under the Free State; McDonough (whom an old man told me used to lead the Volunteers in
rifle-practice
out on the crags of Inis Meáin) taught at St. Enda’s, Pearse’s school in Dublin, and both of them were among the
leaders
of the Easter Rising elevated to martyrdom by the British in 1916. O’Hickey was Professor of Irish at Maynooth from 1896, and Una Ní Fhearcheallaigh became Lecturer in Modern Irish in University College Dublin on its foundation in 1909, and
Professor
there in 1932. Fr. O’Growney was Professor of Irish at
Maynooth
from 1891, and his
Simple
Lessons
in
Irish
began to appear from 1893; his successor at Maynooth, Fr. Donncha Ó Floinn, much later wrote of them: