Stones of Aran (5 page)
Authors: Tim Robinson
Iaráirne—the name is rather puzzling since at first hearing it
seems to mean the western or back part (
iar
)
of Aran, or of a ridge (
ára
).
There is a similar puzzle about the name of the easternmost of the Aran Islands, Inis Oírr, pronounced very much as if the last element were
iar.
In the latter case the solution is clear. In some early sources the island is called Ára Airthir, the Aran of the east, or Inis Airthir, the island of the east. (For instance the
Annals
of
the
Four
Masters
record that in 856 the High King of Tara burned and plundered Munster and carried off hostages from every corner of it. One of these corners is specified as Ára Airthir; presumably the other two Aran Islands were considered to be in Connacht.) The more modern spelling, Inis Oirthir, first appears in the
seventeenth
century in Roderic O’Flaherty’s
West
or
H-Iar
Connaught.
Since the word
oirthear
(
oirthir
is the genitive case) is not in use in Aran speech, it has been corrupted and simplified until hardly distinguishable from a word meaning the exact opposite. The same has happened in the name Iaráirne, which presumably started out as Oirthear Áirne, meaning the eastern portion of Aran. It is curiously easy to slip from east to west in the
phonology
of several European languages, in which north and south are kept poles apart. Perhaps the distinction between north and south, between shade and sun, winter and summer, demands so much commonsense from us, that the practical outweighs the symbolic; the other, the east-west journey travelled so quickly by each of our days, resonates with concerns we prefer not to
articulate
too clearly. From Aran, evening after evening, we see how the glorious career of the sun only serves to paint it into a corner, so that it has to escape down a mouse-hole into some cellar of the world in which, whatever its state, it is no longer the sun. Perhaps east and west are the names of buried hopes and fears that betray themselves in this slip of the Indo-European tongue.
All but one of the houses of Iaráirne have their longer axes east-west, and this orientation is dominant throughout the island. In my early years in Aran I took it that this pattern represented the alignment of the houses with the main road, which on the whole runs east-west, and was probably due to some bureaucratic
ideal of neatness imposed by the planning authorities, so when a family in Cill Mhuirbhigh consulted my aesthetic sense in the siting of their bungalow I had them put it at an angle to the road; the result is disconcerting now that I understand that the pattern long predates the road. The island itself provides the level terraces running along its northern flank on which the villages have
developed
, and these have origins vastly senior to all human
custom
, as I have shown. However the alignment of individual houses answers not only to the topography and to meteorology, but to a complex mystique of westernness. Occidentation, rather than orientation, would be the best word for this simultaneously domestic and otherworldly compass bearing.
The houses of Iaráirne nearly all derive either by multiple
extensions
or by replacement from thatched cottages of the
nineteenth
century or earlier, and inherit their orientation from a tradition common to most of the west of Ireland. Several of these cottages were joined together end to end in twos or even threes, to save the building of a gable, and in such cases one could be sure that the westernmost cottage was the oldest. Dara Ó Conaola, a writer born in Inis Meáin and now living in Inis Oírr, explains this in his account of the richly meaningful simplicities of Aran’s domestic architecture:
Nothing was built onto the west of a house because
“Fear
níos fearr
ná
Dia
a
chuireadh
fad
as
an
teach
siar”
(“Only
a man better than God would lengthen his house to the west”). It was thought that anyone who did that was
showing
he had no respect for God, and that no luck would come to him out of it. I never heard what the reason for this belief was. I suppose that it was because in the old days people thought God was in the west. In the pagan times they worshipped the setting sun, and the idea stuck in their minds long afterwards. That’s only what I think myself, but it stands to reason.
Front and back of these cottages were the same; the two doors were opposite one another, and which was in use depended on the way the wind was blowing.
These houses were no wonderful palaces but they were comfortable enough. They were thought-out and suited to the times and the surroundings. Their design was simple enough—an oblong, with two walls and two gables. There was a door in either wall. There weren’t many windows because at that time even sunlight was taxed! One of the doors would be left open to do the work of a window as well as that of a door. It was called the sheltered door (
doras
an
fhascaidh)
,
or the open door, and the other was called the wind door (
doras
na
gaoithe
)
or the closed door.
In Aran, keeping the driven rain out of the house during a gale is not easy, and the wind door often has old sacks stuffed under it, with a length of plank or something similar to hold them in place, and opening it is not just a matter of turning a key. Again before I knew about these things, when calling on an islander I would knock at what I took to be the front door because it was the one facing the road, and sometimes there would be an
obscure
shout from within, which I gradually came to understand as
“Doras
eile!”
(“Other door!”). But the next time, if I went round to the back, I was just as likely to get the same response, the wind having changed.
If in the layout of the cottage the distinction between north side and south depends on the wind, east and west are sharply differentiated:
Our house had two rooms when it was built, but later on it was altered, and it had three rooms in my own time. When you came in at the door you would be in the kitchen. The kitchen was in the middle of the house, with the “big room” (
seomra
mór
) on its west, behind the chimney, and the “little room” on the east. There were two beds in the little room, and not much room for anything else. The kitchen was about twelve feet square once the little room had been cut off it. That left it cramped enough, I suppose, but as the old man who lived with us used to say to anyone who came to the door, “Come in, if we’re cramped we’re not unwelcoming.”
There was a door by the chimney, the door of the big room. Above this door, next to the chimney and under the scraws of the thatch, was a way
into the “small loft,” which was over the big room. It was a dark hole with no light but what leaked in from the kitchen past the chimney. It was a place for storing things, or of course for hiding them.
On the east of the kitchen above the small room was the loft, which compared to the small loft was spacious and well-lit. It was open to the rafters. It stuck out a couple of feet over the wall of the little room to make it deeper. There was a beam running across the house under this edge of the loft. Many a pig or beef carcass was hung from “the beam of the loft” in its day. Fishing gear, baskets of salted fish and so on were kept in the loft. People would put turf up there. Often when something couldn’t be found, they would say “I don’t know where it is, if it isn’t at the back of the loft.”
The kitchen was the main room, and the hearth was the heart of the kitchen, but the big room had its own importance. In our house two
generations
came into the world in it. Two generations died in it. Many a
person
breathed his last in it. There was a fireplace in it; we called it the little chimney, and it was at the back of the main fireplace in the kitchen wall. It had a wooden mantelpiece, plain but well finished. There was a press or cupboard set into the wall near the fireplace;
muifid
we called it. Any
ornaments
in the house would be kept there, and medicines, and perhaps a drop of the hard stuff. There was a big feather bed, and a coffer or chest which was their bank.
Dóite
brúite
suas
amach
Bhfuil
aon
duine
ag
dul
an
bóthar
A
chuirfeadh
an
chóra
mhór
amach?
[Broken up burnt out, is anyone going the road who would put the coffer out?] That’s what the old man said when he thought the house was on fire.
Thus the hearth is central, what is to the east is merely
functional
, and the west is heavy-laden with consequential matters. The uncanny sometimes taps on the western gable. When I
happened
to learn that a fairy path runs just west of a certain house, I was asked not to tell the young wife who was moving into it, lest she become anxious and start imagining things. (I only mention
it now because I know she has long since bravely faced down what seemed indeed to be an initial spitefulness of the place.)
The bygone Iaráirne one can sense beneath the present layout dates, it seems, from the early nineteenth century, for the census of 1812 names all the fourteen villages of the island except this one, implying that there was not enough of it to be worth
discriminating
from Cill Éinne, whereas the census of 1821 lists eight households and sixty-one inhabitants here. (The
population-figures
for the island as a whole were 1785 in 1812 and 2285 in 1821; the first census may have been inadequate, but in any case this was a period of very rapid growth, for by 1841, shortly before the Famine, the figure was 2592.) Seven of the heads of Iaráirne households in 1821 were farmers with holdings of a quarter to one and a half cartrons (a cartron being a nominal sixty-four acres), and one was a labourer; two of the farmers and a few others of the menfolk also made kelp or were “boatmen,” probably employed in carrying kelp and seaweed to the mainland. Among the
womenfolk
three were wool-spinners, two flax-spinners, and one a stocking-knitter. Nobody is listed as “fisherman” (in contrast to Cill Éinne, a village of fishermen, net-makers and so on with no land), but no doubt most of the men fished for breams and rockfish from the shore. This was a self-sufficient community—
self-insufficient
, perhaps, for the famine known as the Famine was not the first—and not even a track linked the settlement to Cill Éinne until some time after the turn of the century; the wide open spaces of Na Muirbhigh Móra and Máirtin’s rambling
róidín
took it wherever it wanted to go: to the well, the crags, the shore.
In that census of 1821 a seven-year-old schoolboy, Edmund, is listed among the sons of a John Flaherty of Cill Rónáin. Ned Sheáin, as the child was called, later settled in Iaráirne, and from him are descended Muintir Neide, the Neds. Some generations later, probably in the 1930s when land-holdings were being
rationalized
, a Land Commission official came out to arrange for Muintir Neide to exchange their bit of land in Barr an Phointe
near Cill Rónáin for a share of Iaráirne territory. He and Beartla, the Ned of that era, ascended to Carn Buí, the rocky knoll on the ridge-line behind the village, and surveyed the dreary plateau foundering seawards beyond it. “What’s out there?” he asked, waving his arm to the south-east. “Rock,” replied Beartla Neide. “Then you might as well have the lot!” said the official. So it comes about that today my friend Pádraicín Neide farms over eighty acres, much of it indeed rock, but with enough grassy little glens hidden among the crags for him to be able to sell off four two-year-old cattle each year. His farming is done before and
after
his day’s work as a builder, and so when I arranged to meet him, to hear how it is with the Iaráirne of 1993, it had to be late in the evening.
It was the end of June; the days were at their longest. At half past nine when I knocked at his door he was not yet home; his young daughter Cathy led me across the village, hopping over low walls and cutting through enclosures I don’t know whether to call fields or back-gardens, and pointed out his bent back showing like a boulder above the dense green foliage in the further corner of a big potato-plot. Pádraicín is a blocky, vigorous man in his early forties; he climbed out over the field-wall, slightly glistening in the last of the sunshine, all ready to fill me up with facts and opinions. As we strolled back to the house he told me what the other Iaráirneans do for a living nowadays. There are four fishermen, one working out of Cill Éinne harbour and the others out of Ros a’ Mhíl and Cill Rónáin. (The more recent, eighty-foot, trawlers of the developing Aran fleet cannot berth at Cill Rónáin, and in any case Ros a’ Mhíl, the designated fishery port of the area, has the ice-plants, auction halls and processing factories the industry depends on, which unfortunately leads to fishermen’s families leaving the island either temporarily or permanently for houses on the mainland.) The huge growth in tourism of the last few years is transforming even Iaráirne. A sparklingly white
bungalow
with its coign stones painted blue and scalloped beige blinds showing in its big windows belongs to the owner of some
of the eleven minibuses that carry visitors up and down the
island
. Another villager hires out bicycles in Cill Rónáin; there are a thousand bicycles on the island now. However, apart from Ard Éinne, which is technically over the border in Cill Éinne
territory,
Pádraicín’s is the only Iaráirne house to keep guests in the summer. There are also one or two old-age pensioners, a teacher, a “retired Yank” (that is, an islander returned from the States), and a Dubliner whose wife stands in for the island doctor now and again.