Stones of Aran (27 page)

Having considered this case and several others in which
witnesses
did not confirm the written complaints against the
committee
to which, Kilbride alleged, they had previously put their marks, Curran found as follows:

Curran finally concluded that some islanders who had quite properly been refused relief, took advantage of the ill-will
between
the Catholic and Protestant clergy to impose upon Mr. Kilbride; that their written statements had been exaggerated by anger and disappointment, and that Kilbride should not have
been surprised that in calmer moments they had reverted to the truth, which was harmless; finally, that the Aran Committee had thoroughly cleared themselves of all charges.

A new barracks was opened in Cill Mhuirbhigh in that year of 1880, and six extra policemen were brought in, but the Land War continued to skulk up and down the twisty boreens. The Chardes, or their animals, were the principal sufferers of the Land
Leaguers
’ twilight deeds; their mare was backed over a cliff at Mainistir in April, and in June their sheep and lambs went the same way. In September, when Thompson had imposed fines on certain
villages
for taking stones from the disused lighthouse buildings in Eochaill, the Catholic clergy called a public meeting outside his office; it was, according to the new curate, the Rev. McLoughlin, the first time in seven hundred years that the people had come together in their hundreds to call their agent “a public, infamous and scandalous liar.” As Thompson had rejected their demand for reductions in rent in consideration of recent bad fishing seasons and the failure of the kelp and pig markets, they would appeal over his head to Miss Digby and the Government. A young
German
visitor addressed the crowd too, and told them they were honest, hardworking and over-rented people; he was the
philologist
Heinrich Zimmer. An islander reminded the crowd of how they had been forced to make roads and buy Charde’s bread, and had had their parcels searched for Galway bread, and exhorted them to stand shoulder to shoulder against tyranny and
proselytism
, for now they were awakening from their slumber at last.

About this time it was found that the rent-books had been stolen out of the Cill Rónáin courthouse, making it difficult to prosecute for arrears of rent. Dr. Bodkin suggested that perhaps they had not been stolen by the tenants but by Thompson
himself
, to cover up his crooked dealings over kelp; however the
doctor
may have been trying to divert suspicion from himself, for oral history says that Pat Ganly got him drunk, borrowed the dispensary keys from him, and broke into the rent office next
door through the common roof-space to steal the documents. Soon afterwards a house used as a courthouse in Cill Éinne was burned down, and Kilbride’s boat was damaged. Then, just after the New Year of 1881, the famous cliffing of James O’Flaherty’s cattle took place, and in April more sheep and lambs of Charde’s were driven off the Mainistir farm and drowned. Pat Ganly’s brother Thomas, secretary of the local Land League branch, was arrested with another man on suspicion of their part in the killing of O’Flaherty’s cattle, and taken off to Galway Gaol. The bailiff Ó hIarnáin was shot at, and a Gort na gCapall man was arrested and imprisoned for it; the alleged motive was that his father was in arrears, and that since the rent-books had been stolen the
bailiff
was the only person who could swear to this. Minor acts of vengeance against the “land-grabbers” continued, and a calf of Charde’s was found stabbed in the belly. The last deed of the Land War in Aran was at harvest time in 1882, when a field of rye on Charde’s half of the Mainistir farm was cut and the rye removed to Ganly’s half. After that, as economic stress was
moderated
by the Land Courts’ reduction of rents and then the
development
of the fisheries, sectarianism lost its fire. Personal antagonisms were outlived, or were carried off to the respective graveyards of their faiths.

Curiously enough, the most lasting memorial of Protestant evangelism in Aran is a stirring profession of Catholicism,
written
by an Aran poet and still occasionally to be heard as a song. The story goes that one day Kilbride met the poet, Séamas Ó Chonchúir, going to collect his pension, and promised him both land and money if he would write a poem against Catholicism. According to another version of this incident, it was Thompson who demanded the poem, and when he received this spirited
answer
, evicted the poet, who had to go to America with his nine small children! Here is the first verse of Ó Conchúir’s lengthy reply, with a translation:

Kilbride seems to have played little part in the belated end of the islands’ dark ages; he probably concerned himself with his farm. His wife died in 1891, and it is ironic that her tombstone, the nearest thing we have to a memorial to Kilbride, names him in a rather strange Irish, as “
Uilliam
Mac
Giolla
Bhrighde,
bhiocar
Aránna
.”
The perception of the one or two old-timers who
remember
him is that he had learned Irish only to accomplish his evil purposes of perverting the people’s faith. (His Irish versions of the Psalms had been published by the Society for Irish Church Missions back in 1863, at the height of his proselytising activities.) Kilbride himself died in the winter of 1898–99; J. M. Synge
received
a letter from one of his Inis Meáin friends telling him that the minister’s boat had been on anchor in the harbour and that the wind blew her to Black Head and broke her up after his death. In 1907 Peter Gill, Dr. Stoney’s driver of long ago, returned from years in America, and discovered to his distress that the doctor’s grave was unmarked. He carved a tombstone himself, and set it up in its obscure position. His nephew, then a boy, remembers
sitting on the churchyard wall that day; it was snowing—a rarity in Aran—and when his uncle removed his black felt hat in
reverence
to his long dead master, the youngster shied a snowball and hit him on his bald head.

Little is remembered of later Protestant pastors; as their
congregation
dwindled they evidently had less and less of an
influence
on island affairs. By the time the last minister left in 1921 the only Protestants in Aran were two of the Charde family, for an elderly islander tells me that most of the later coastguards were English Catholics, and he remembers going to school with their sons. Later on, the roof of the disused church was removed so that rates would not have to be paid on it, an act which is still resented by those old natives who remember its last days, for they fear that visitors suppose the Aran people had wrecked the church out of bigotry, whereas “we never touched a window of it.” The empty shell of St. Thomas’s stands to this day, a stark reminder of
seventy
years of barren ministry.

Heading out of Cill Rónáin with our shopping, we have to make up our minds whether to take the coast road, which is level but rough, or to face the steep hills of the main road. The point of choice comes just beyond the rectory grounds, opposite a pub called Joe Watty’s, where a turning to the right dips into the shade of the Protestant sycamores, and within a few dozen yards swings left again into a sheltery backwater of the town, separated from the main road by a scarp, with a row of cottages and a few little barns and stores and roofless walls representing an earlier, more stunted generation of cottages. This is, or was, the hamlet of Baile an Dúin; so called either from a
dún
or cashel, or, according to other equally unverifiable sources, from a chapel or
domhnach,
perhaps Cill Rónáin or Rónán’s church itself. Both cashel and
chapel are untraceable today (the OS map of 1898 marks the site of a church about 150 yards north of the turning, which was
probably
a mass house or some relatively recent precursor of the present Catholic chapel), but Baile an Dúin (nicknamed Sleepy Hollow) seems to harbour a number of abolished histories, so I will look around it before heading for the west.

The turning down to Baile an Dúin is Carcair an Atharla, the slope of the burial ground, because St. Rónán is said to be buried at its foot. Leaba Rónáin, Rónán’s “bed” or grave, is a plot about four yards square, delimited by a low wall, where the road turns right. There is a small altar in it, on which stands a stone inscribed with a cross and the name “St. Ronane,” very like another in Teampall Macduach in Cill Mhuirbhigh which is the work of a local stonecutter of the last century, John Burke. Up to perhaps fifty years ago it was the custom for people to sleep in the
leaba
on the eve of the saint’s day, the 15th of August, and one or two old folk remember seeing crutches left there after the lame had been cured by such vigils. They tell me too that an Englishman once uprooted an elderberry bush there, saying it was a limb of St. Rónán, and was smitten with a stroke.

In 1947 the parish priest, Fr. Killeen, decided to have the
leaba
cleared out so that one of the outdoor benedictions of the Whit Sunday procession of the Blessed Sacrament could be held there. Fr. Killeen was devoted to processions; in fact Dara the postman tells me that he was always making the route longer, “going up and down narrow boreens with the people banging themselves on the walls, so that everyone was jaded by the time we reached the church; if he had stayed on the island any longer we would have ended up walking to Bun Gabhla!” At that time there was a small forest growing in the enclosure in place of the one alder tree O’Donovan had noted there during his 1839 researches. Fr. Killeen describes the felling:

This passage is from the history of Aran Fr. Killeen put
together
at the behest of his archbishop, a work of a hundred folio pages in typescript, particularly copious on all the saints ever mentioned in connection with Aran in the most obscure of
ancient
sources, a topic he poured his scholarly heart into. But even Fr. Killeen cannot tell us anything about St. Rónán. I need not quote the lengthy reasons he gives as to why our St. Rónán is not to be identified with Rónán of Locronan in France, Rónán of Kilronan in Roscommon, Rónán Finn of Laind, Rónán Finn of Uí Eachach or Rónán mac Beraigh of Dromiskin. Perhaps his name was really Crónán, perhaps he is not buried here at all (O’Donovan thought he was not), perhaps he never existed—but one thing is certain, he was a mighty saint.

Just west of the
leaba,
according to early nineteenth-century maps, stood another monument to a most obscure facet of the island’s history: Digby House, of which I believe not a trace
remains
. The Digbys are the great absence in Aran’s history, not only as being for the most part absentee landlords of the classic sort, syphoning off the islands’ tiny capital resources to be spent as the small change of a metropolitan, high-society lifestyle, but
as blanks in the island record. What history of them I can put together here has been pieced together out of widely scattered references, and as to the islanders’ own knowledge of them, that is and was virtually nil. When Synge in the late 1890s asked who owned the islands, the answer he got was “Bedad, we’ve always heard it belonged to Miss Digby, and she is dead.”

The Digbys, as I have mentioned, acquired Aran in the first half of the eighteenth century. In 1713 the Cromwellian Sir
Stephen
Fox sold the islands for £8200, in two “moeities”; one to Edmund Fitzpatrick of Aran, and the other to the Rev. Simon Digby, Lord Bishop of Elphin, in Roscommon. The bishop leased his moeity to the Fitzpatricks for £280 per annum, but in 1744 the next generation of Fitzpatricks sold their own moeity for £2050 to the Digbys, then represented by a Robert Digby of Landenstown in Kildare. Perhaps this name Robert is an error in the source, for the bishop’s son was called John, and it is recorded that John Digby was the proprietor in 1745, and that in 1754 he demised Inis Oírr to a William McNamara of Doolin (on the Clare coast
opposite
the island), for thirty-one years at £90 per annum.

The 1745 reference to John Digby is in connection with a
curious
legal dispute between himself and the Mayor of Galway, concerning a whale stranded on the island of Muínis in south Connemara. Digby had harpooned this whale and extracted from it blubber and whalebone to the value of £160. The oil from this blubber was seized by the Galway authorities, and then
somehow
repossessed by Mr. Digby. Galway took him to court,
claiming
that these products were a royal franchise, and that the Crown at some distant period had made a gift of that franchise away from the O’Briens of Aran to the Mayor, he being Admiral of Galway Bay. Digby’s lawyer on the other hand argued,
successfully
, that a whale is not the King’s property to grant, as the tail half belongs to the Queen, to keep her boudoir in whalebone.

The incident shows that at least part of the Digby family was in the west at the time, and they may even have lived in Aran for a while. Local tradition is that a Digby removed from An Spidéal
to Cill Rónáin, bringing with him his tenants, the Gills and the Folans, whose surnames are still frequent in the island, and built the three-storey dwelling known as Digby House. However, by the time of the earliest documentary reference to Digby House I have come across, in the census for 1821, it was leased to a John Brown Moyne, and was occupied by a caretaker, James Connor, and his family (the future poet Séamas Ó Chonchúir was his son, aged one at the time), and twenty-five years or so later it was in ruins. I am told that its stones were used in the building of the Rev. Synge’s rectory, and that when the rectory in its turn was
abandoned
it was quarried for stone for the Catholic curate’s house.

To continue with the history of the absentees. In 1822 there was some “distress” in the islands due to potato blight, and the then landlord, Mr. John William Digby of Landenstown,
contributed
to a relief fund. He was, according to J.T. O’Flaherty’s paper of 1824,

However, the popular character of the Digbys did not survive for long in the miserable years that followed. The potato harvest failed in 1825, and the consequent distress was said to be worse than in 1822. By March of the next year the
Connaught
Journal
was attacking the landlord, now the Rev. John Digby, for
neglecting
his tenants. The land-agent George Thompson (father of the Thomas Thompson who succeeded him in this post) wrote to the newspaper in his master’s defence:

The newspaper refused to apologize to either Digby or Thompson, saying that the parish priest, the Rev. Gibbons, had asked them before Christmas to publish the plight of the people and that the resident gentleman (
i.e.
Patrick O’Flaherty of Cill Mhuirbhigh) had asked them to press on the Government and the landlord the need for aid:

By April however the paper could report that the Rev. Digby had purchased meal and potatoes for his tenantry, and added “If we spoke harshly the reader will appreciate the circumstances.” In 1831, though, conditions in Aran were again “as bad as in 1822,” and Digby distributed a free cargo of potatoes. Cholera spread from Galway to Cill Rónáin in the next spring and claimed two lives; there was neither doctor nor dispensary in the islands, and the
Connaught
Journal
urged the landlord to do something for his tenants. In August the coastguards in Aran reported that there had been twenty-five deaths, people had deserted Cill Rónáin and Cill Éinne to live among the rocks, and the O’Malleys had fled from the Lodge to Cill Mhuirbhigh. A messenger had come to Galway for medicine, but it was felt that in the absence of a doctor medicines could do more harm than good. By September there had been fifty-seven deaths. Mr. O’Malley and Mr. O’Flaherty contributed £5 each to a relief fund, but according to the
Journal
nothing had come from the landlord or the agent. The epidemic was over by the spring of 1833. The parish priest was
then building the chapel at Eochaill, and the
Journal
“joyfully” announced that the Rev. Digby had contributed £21.

At the time of the Great Famine that started with the
blighting
of the potato crop in 1845, the owner of the islands was Miss Elizabeth Francis Digby of Landenstown. By the next spring a local relief committee had been instituted and there was a
dispensary
in Cill Rónain; unfortunately the doctor, Surgeon Richardson, was dangerously ill himself, and a Dr. Stephens was enquiring into the extent of an outbreak of fever. The
Connaught
Journal
in November had a rather indefinite report of deaths from
starvation
, but since none such are mentioned in a letter they published from the Parish Priest, the Rev. Harley, in the January of 1846 it seems likely that the strong Aran belief about the Famine, that the islands were spared the worst of the blight and that only one person died, is soundly based. However there was immense distress, as the priest’s appeal makes clear—poor crops of potatoes, a shortage of turf due to the stormy weather interrupting supplies from Connemara, a failure of the herring fishery for some years previously, no Government relief or public works, no resident gentry or local institution to look after the peoples’ interests.
According
to his figures, about two thirds of the population was without food and dependent on the others, who he claimed would soon be reduced to the same state. Only two tons of meal had been received from Miss Digby. The Rev. Harley’s appeals for Government aid were finally answered, and in the next February he received a second contribution of £100 from the Central Relief Committee. That spring the potatoes were sound, though not many had been planted.

The divergence of fortunes between the Digbys and their
tenants
thereafter became more and more glaring. Miss Digby’s niece, Henrietta Barfoot of Landenstown, married Sir Thomas St. Lawrence, the third Earl and twenty-ninth Baron of Howth, KP, Vice Admiral of Leinster. It was his second marriage, the first having been to a daughter of the thirteenth Earl of Clanricarde. He died in 1874 and Henrietta in 1884; thereafter the owners of
Aran were old Miss Digby of Landenstown and her niece’s
offspring
: the Hon. Thomas Kenelm Digby St. Lawrence, Henrietta Eliza of Sloane St., London, who married Captain Lee Guinness and became Lady Guinness, and the unmarried Lady Geraldine Digby St. Lawrence; down to the end of the century different combinations of these resounding names and titles appear on the ejectment notices served on those Aran tenants who for one
reason
or another failed to contribute their mite to the upkeep of the noble family. By 1911 the surviving proprietors, the two last-named ladies, had agreed to sell out the estate, but it was not until 1922 that the Land Commission finally took possession of the islands, for the sum of £13,721 paid in land stock, and began to distribute the land among those who had worked it and in many cases created it out of rock. It seems entirely appropriate to the Digbys’ role in the island story that not a stone remains
identifiable
of Digby House.