Stones of Aran (38 page)

If so much has been erased, do we know what sort of landscape this was, for instance when the first humans moved in, perhaps five thousand years ago? In Connemara, where bogs have been accumulating over much of the time since that period, researchers can reconstruct the history of the flora by identifying the types of pollen-grains preserved at various levels in the acidic peat. This is not so easy in areas without bogs and has not yet been attempted in Aran, but some similar studies have been carried out of pollen from the sediments of lakes in the south-east of the Burren, and most recently from a bog on an isolated patch of shale in the north-west of the Burren, which would include windblown pollen from limestone areas almost as exposed as the Aran Islands. In the south-east, Mullaghmore is a famously primeval-looking landscape, but its seemingly immemorial stoniness is a historical phenomenon and developed only after about
AD
400. In the Stone Age that area was covered in hazel-woods, with much pine, elm and oak. The elm declined drastically in Ireland at about 3100
BC
, just as it has done throughout Europe in our own time, and it may be that something like Dutch elm disease was spread by increased coming and going of humans. In any case the first settlers started thinning the forest about that time; the earliest activity at the great portal tomb of Poulnabrone in the central Burren has recently been dated to about 3000
BC
. The large number of wedge tombs in the Burren show how attractive it was to the graziers of from five to fifteen hundred years later, around the end of the Stone Age and the early Bronze Age. The pollen-record from the north-western site does not go back quite
so far, but it suggests that as early as 1250
BC
. the landscape was largely open grassland, and the sorts of weeds present indicate that it was heavily grazed and not much disturbed by tillage. There still were oaks and hazels (the oak is virtually unknown there now), and in the period from
AD
200 to 580 the hazel scrub won back a good deal of the land, owing to some unexplained remission of the pressure of humans and their animals on it, just as is happening now in many areas of the Burren drained by emigration over the last hundred years. Extrapolating all this to the Aran Islands, one can picture the Stone-Age voortreckers arriving here and finding forest, thinner and more dwarfed by exposure than that of the Burren, growing on a soil perfect for cattle-rearing; they probably knew as well as does the Aran man of today that “limestone puts bone on a beast.” They would have returned to the mainland with the good news, and brought their animals and chattels and gods and diseases across by currach. Since then the battle has mainly gone against the wood; fire and axe and hoof and tooth have stripped the land; rain and wind have carried off the unbound soil. The Iron Age, the feeding of the seven great cashels, if they were contemporaneous, must have depleted the environment, and perhaps by the time the saints arrived the islands were already as Roderic O’Flaherty described them, “almost paved over with stones, soe as, in some places, nothing is to be seen but large stones with wide openings between them, where cattle break their legs.” Only in this century, on some sheltered hillsides, does the Giant of the Wood increase his holding once more.

That story is at least an attempt to answer the first question posed by the perched boulder, but one is immediately led on to others. There is something of the classroom or examination-hall about the crag this boulder stands in; everything here is well lit, separated out, reduced to essentials, so that if we cannot understand, it is our fault. The boulder itself, pedagogical on its podium, demands clarity of thought: observe this, comment on that, deduce the other. A few long straight fissures draw elementary
geometrical figures on the the blackboard-smooth pavement; I stump around and look at them this way up, that way up. What sort of surface was revealed by the removal of the post-glacial
soil-cover
? Was this pattern of grykes and clints seen by pre-Euclidian eyes?

One fissure at least demonstrates the answer with gratifying rigour. It runs right across the crag for dozens of yards, passing exactly under the boulder and bisecting its pedestal. It is a few inches wide all along its length, but if one lies down and peers under the boulder one can see that just at the top of the pedestal, where not even the gales can blow rain into it, it narrows to a hair’s breadth. A textbook exemplar! The fissures have been opened up only since the ground was bared and rainwater began to work its way into the joints of the limestone. At least that is true of most of them; I can think of one, a very wide one on the next terrace below An Scairbh, that is stuffed with glacial till and so must have been open during or before the last Ice Age. Of course the warm spells between the Ice Ages—we may be living in one such—may also have seen erosion and fissuring of the limestone surface, but most traces of that would have been scoured away by the most recent glaciation. And to qualify the thesis further: not all the joints are open yet. Here by the boulder are some grykes that taper to a point and are continued by fine lines that look as if they had been drawn by a stonemason with scriber and steel rule. It is difficult to account for this: on a
stratum
that looks perfectly level and uniform, why is the joint closed here and open there? A freak of the irregular stripping away of the soil-cover? Or perhaps a joint can remain closed for some time after the baring of the surface, until some chance opens up a bit of its length, after which, because water-flow into the opening would be most concentrated at its advancing corner, the rest of the joint is comparatively rapidly unzipped. The fact that such effects are still legible on the present-day surface shows how
tender
and newborn it is, and how short will be its life. Once a fissure is open it will widen inexorably as the rainwater swills over its
rim; erosion acts fastest on edges and corners, picking off the more exposed molecules, or so I have read in some textbook. But is that what is happening here? Looking around this crag again, I see a joint that is closed along most if its length apart from two or three short stretches, which are full of standing water; when I splash in one of them, the water in another is disturbed. So there is an open level of the joint, running underground like a drainpipe; in fact I can peer some way along it and see that only the upper inch or less of the joint is still tight. Solution is taking place from below; the agency is stagnant, not flowing, water. What does this imply about the closed joint running through the
boulder
pedestal? Science shrugs its shoulders like an Aran man, and looks off into the distance.

However they do it, grykes eat clints. Other things being equal, an area of crag with big clints will also have wide grykes. (Simple, at least on the flowing-water theory: for clints of similar shapes, the rainfall on them is proportional to their areas,
i.e.
to the squares of their perimeters; therefore the run-off per unit length of a perimeter is proportional to its length; therefore longer perimeters are more rapidly eroded.) But “other things being equal” is not the normal state of affairs in this landscape of entropic dissolution, and in walking it one’s footsteps have to learn a vast variety of fissurings, carpet-patterns of the void woven into the rock. Just north of An Poll i’ bhFolach the two steps of the “Asbian-Brigantian contact” form platforms running along the hillside, four and eight feet above the terrace on which the
boulder
perches. The lower platform is so closely divided by parallel fissures that it consists of large slabs standing on edge, the outer ones leaning and about to fall over onto the terrace below, of a size and shape that the builders of the wedge tomb above would have found handy, while the upper platform is
dissected into even thinner blades of stone. It seems that certain strata are
predisposed
to fissuring in particular patterns. A geologist, David
Langridge
, explored this question for his M.Sc. dissertation in 1969. He roughly classified the types of pavement by the average width
of the clints (measured between the north-south grykes, which are nearly everywhere the best developed). Pavements for which this measure was less than 45 cm are nearly all on the uppermost stratum of the island, where they cover most of its exposure; this is the regularity that underlies the monotonous terrain of Na Craga. At the other extreme, pavements with clints over 105 cm wide occur principally on the terrace below An Scairbh. Broken rubbly surfaces in which clints and grykes are scarcely definable are found mainly on the lowest levels of the island. These patterns of jointing reflect the interplay of stresses in the earth’s crust with the strengths of particular strata, which in turn depend on their thicknesses and composition, and so the question is plunged back into the sea in which these strata were deposited, its depth,
temperature
, chemistry, fauna and flora—matters not beyond all conjecture, and which I quit with a certain sense of duty
unfulfiled
.

Making my way northwards from the crag of the perched boulder towards Oatquarter, I pass over several strikingly
different
ground-patterns developed on the same terrace; those answers from the Carboniferous sea-depths, even if I had them, would not explain this. The most tremendous of these terrains—probably the most tremendous in Aran—is a three-or four-acre crag called Leacrachaí an Fháin, the flagstones of the slope. Here the surface is riven by gullies six or ten feet deep, full of grass and heather, into a number of ridges only a few yards wide and several hundred yards long, aligned with the usual north-south major set of joints and interrupted here and there by smaller crosswise gullies following the minor joints. These ridges have bevelled edges and smoothly undulating tops; they rise and fall by two or three feet in waves thirty to forty yards long from crest to crest. The gullies are explicable: the ice-flow, coinciding in direction with master joints, has plucked out blocks of stone one after another. But the whale-back ridges? I thought I had the explanation when I
noticed
that here, in addition to the usual north-south set of joints, there is another set crossing them at an angle of only a few
degrees
;
if there is some regular variation in the lateral spacing of joints in each of these sets, their intersections would tend to be closer together in certain zones evenly spaced out along the ridges, and these zones would be more vulnerable to erosion than the intervals between them. However I think my simplistic geometry is inadequate to the elemental mix of rule and randomness in this topography. It must have been the Ice Age that moulded these ridges. Passing across this part of the island, the glacier danced a little. Why? Science answers, “You wouldn’t know!”

From the next crag to the north, a little path, Bóithrín na Scairbhe, the boreen of the rough place, leads down to the village, between greener, more humanized, patches of land reclaimed from the rock. But before I leave the geo-illogical uplands, the typical north-south bent of this boreen prompts me to ask one more question of the ground. What caused the characteristic pattern of the jointing, from which that of the grykes derives, and thence that of the fields and paths? What is the origin of this
direction
I have called “Aran North,” this prevailing wind in the stone? The major jointing in the Burren is parallel to that in Aran, and what attempts at explanation of it I have read are in terms of compressive forces emanating from the south during the phase of earth-history known as the Hercynian, when the Harz
mountains
, in ancient Hercynia, were born, and here the
Carboniferous
sea-bed was being lifted. But such a force would not give rise to north-south jointing; also, I am told, the limestones of north Mayo are jointed with the same orientation, and that is near the limit of Hercynian influences. Paul Mohr, the professor of
Geology
at Galway, whom I pester with these questions, has wondered if this regional effect is connected with a major tectonic event more recent than the Carboniferous: the parting of Europe and North America and the opening-up of the Atlantic in Jurassic times, two hundred to a hundred and fifty million years ago. Such a gigantic rifting would have exerted huge tensions on the lands to either side. A mere speculation, he insists, he never dared to publish it. Well, there it is now, for daws to peck at. It appeals
to me, for if it is true, then the Aran farmer in his boreen, and this book in its devious criss-crossing of the island, are walking
arm-in
-arm with the Atlantic and talking of the breakup of Pangaea.

Long ago, as I have been told by one of the elders of the village, a man from Fearann an Choirce travelled as far as Athenry looking for a calf with the makings of a good cow. When he had been walking about that neighbourhood all day, he met a woman
carrying
a wooden firkin of water and asked her if she would give him a drink of it. “Gladly,” she replied, “And I guarantee you never drank better, unless you ever tasted the water of Tobar Ghrióir in Árainn.” “Why!” said the islander, “That’s the water I’ve been making my tea on all my life!”

Tobar Ghrióir, Gregory’s well, the pride, the very source itself, of the village, is under the scarp of An Scairbh where the road twists north to climb down it. The villagers revert to its water when the piped supply fails for some mechanical reason or tastes salty after a gale; I have filled many a bucket there myself, when helping out at the nearby guest-house, Gilbert Cottage. After long droughts the flow is a mere seepage, but if you pluck one of the stiff fronds of hart’s-tongue fern that grow by it, fold it
lengthwise
and jam it into a crack of the wet rock-face, water will come rolling off its point like pearls off a broken thread. There are two stone-lined troughs built against the foot of the scarp, a long one to which beasts wandering the road have access, and a small one reserved for humans, defended by a little wall with a stile in it and tucked into the corner between the scarp and the ramp of the road. A fool washed out an oil-barrel in it once, and Bríd Gillan, an outspoken octogenarian living nearby, took a can of white paint and wrote on the rock-face above it, “God gave us this well—keep it clean.” Twelve years later, I notice, just enough of
this lettering shows through the mosaic of mosses, lichens and ferns to give the rock an air of cryptic significance.

Water, shelter, a little soil from the shale-band—the usual “givens” of the scarp faces, the usual narrow dispensation of
natural
treasures—have been repaid by generations of unstinted
labour
here, so that the village, starting at the foot of the slope by the well and accompanying the road westwards for a few hundred yards, is a green respite from the grey barrenness above and below it. The cottages and houses and bungalows are interspersed with hayfields, potato-plots and pastures, nearly all of them on what is called “reclaimed land.” (The term “reclamation” seems to imply the winning back of something lost, but if anyone ever
squandered
aboriginal soil here it must have been a thousand or two thousand years ago.)
Stócáil
(“to stoke” or “to prepare,” according to the dictionaries) is the local word for the process of making fertile land out of bare or nearly bare rock. The method is as follows. First the plot is cleared of loose blocks, which are piled into stacks or used to build walls. The grykes are filled in with small stones, and the smooth clint surfaces broken up with a
sledge-hammer
or by dropping a boulder on them. Then the ground is spread with basketsful of sand and seaweed carried up from the shore, supplemented sometimes by shale or clay scraped out from under the scarps and little winnings of soil and turf accumulated along walls or scooped up from fissures. A potato crop can be grown in the first year on such a mixture, and the depth of soil increases as more sand and seaweed is added year by year.

The earliest description of the process I have come across is in Samuel Ferguson’s account of his visit to Aran in 1852, shortly after the Great Famine:

This agreement of contemporary practice with ancient
origin-legend
appealed to the nationalist antiquarianism of Ferguson’s time. However, it seems likely that land reclamation became important only as food demand outgrew the capacity of the
indigenous
soils under the scarps and on Na Craga, during the generations of rapid population growth leading up to the Famine. Most of the new land would have been for that fateful crop, the potato, the only filling available for the cavernous hunger of the labouring man. (Even today the main meal of the day is still sometimes referred to as
na fataí,
the potatoes.) According to
information
gathered in the course of the British Association’s visit in 1857,

It is interesting to compare these statistics with those of a “base line” report drawn up in 1893 for the Congested Districts Board, according to which, on the 578 holdings of £4 valuation or less, potatoes took up on average an acre and a quarter, and barley, rye, and small amounts of oats and cabbages, only another quarter of an acre. Making some allowance for the 117 larger holdings, this indicates that about 1200 acres were under crops, nearly all of them potatoes. There were 562 families in the islands in 1893, and if these figures are anywhere near the truth, they imply that the average family had reclaimed about an acre of land for crops over the two preceding generations. No doubt some reclaimed land was under grass too. This rate of activity was evidently enough to attract the attention of visitors, and the fact that he made his own
land became part of the romantic image of the Aran islander, along with the currach and the pampooty. It was also an index of his exploitation, and as such first appears in the unlikely context of
The
Lives
of
the
Irish
Saints,
by Canon O’Hanlon. When visiting St. Brecán’s church in Eoghanacht some time before 1873, the Canon was shown a “
gort
or small garden” by a peasant, who told him that his grandfather had made it by laying sand and seaweed on the naked rock, and that the tenant had also built the house close by and the wall enclosing the holding:

By the 1890s, when Ireland itself was the object of symbolic reclamation, the Aran man forced to pay rent on land he had
created
himself became an icon of the oppressed nation. Mary Banim, writing for the
Weekly
Freeman,
placed this figure in a long perspective of wrong:

The CDB report of 1893 noted that potatoes were sown year after year in the same plots as there was no tillage land to spare for the rotation of crops. However, in the 1920s the spread of a parasite known as eelworm made it necessary to leave potato-fields fallow for four or more years after cropping them, and
despite
the declining population there was a further investment of effort in “making land.” Government grants for the work were introduced in the ’thirties. Pigs were also fed on potatoes, until the rising cost of fuel to cook the mash for them made pig-rearing uneconomical. An elderly man of Fearann an Choirce, looking back to the heroic days of his father, tells me that “Each man planted as many potatoes then as a whole village does now.” That was the era of the most famous representation of land-making, in the film
Man
of Aran.
Choosing a spectacularly primeval crag as the site of his new field, Tiger King shatters it with magnificent hammer-blows; the Siegfried rhythms of the sequence culminate in his lifting a mighty boulder above his head and dashing it down with giant strength. Meanwhile Maggy, his wife, delves a handful of soil out of a crevice and sprinkles it delicately on the ground, twiddling her fingers to get rid of the last grain (“You’ld think it was flour!” commented an Aran lady I watched the film with once). In the opinion of the anthropologist John Messenger, the use of the boulder is the film-maker’s invention, part of the “nativism” and “primitivism” that distorts most accounts of the Aran Islands. However, the natives are not averse to a little
nativism
and primitivism themselves, and Tiger King’s brother has shown me huge boulders that the Tiger and he shifted, or
incorporated
high up in walls, just to show that it could be done. Also, an Inis Meáin description of land-reclamation contemporary
with Flaherty’s film states that the ground-surface was broken up with a
ceann
mionnáin,
a roundish granite boulder weighing about a hundredweight, lifted onto the shoulder and flung down. Peadar Ua Concheannain’s is perhaps the first account by a practitioner; I quote part of it, in the rugged and vigorous Irish orthography of his day:

All the factors bearing on it—population, the potato-diet, pig-rearing, farming in general—having fallen away, the making of land is now at an end. I only once saw it being done, in 1973. In the course of a walk near Gort na gCapall, M and I stopped to pass the time of day with a man who was stirring a few sods of grass around with a spade, trying to make them cover a small area of crag, which showed through his incipient field as through a worn-out carpet. It was a grey cold day; he stood there as grey and cold as a monolith, and looked at us expressionlessly. “Are ye
enjoying
your holidays?” he asked; it was clearly his mechanical
response
to the sight of strangers. We had been on the island for
several months at that time, and hastened to tell him that we were not on our holidays, and for some reason M added, “We’re poor people!,” as if that were a guarantee of our groundedness. “Oh, ye’re poor people,” he echoed tonelessly. I wondered uneasily how my labour compared to his, mine at that stage being nothing more than vacant wandering about the island. Perhaps we were unnerved by an imagined implication of his task, that he had sculpted himself through timeless toil out of rock. Later on, though, a neighbour told me that the man had no need of another field and was making it with an eye to the grant rather than to any living crop.

Let none of these connections with irrealities that I have drawn be seen as making light of the work. The pleasant greenness of Fearann an Choirce was largely created, over a hundred years or more, by its inhabitants, through a process as sparing (in a
profound
sense) as that by which a snail secretes its shell. Helping Michael King in a field that, fifty years earlier, his father got the first crop off by laying out lines of seed-potatoes on a little crushed shale and seaweed, and covering them with upside-down sods of grass shaved off the crags here and there, I share his pride in the fact that its soil is now four inches deep, and as I carry a bucketful of stones off it to the great mossy cairn of them in the far corner, I feel I am lending a hand in a labour, not open-endedly timeless, but well found in history. A poem by Tomás Ó Direáin, brother of the more famous Máirtín, shows us an Aran man in prayer on the site of a field to be: