Stones of Aran (10 page)

One last anecdote, of Micilín Sara's father from whom he
inherited
his calling, preserves all the comic, mediaeval eeriness of that life. One dark evening—for it was no good going down the cliff on a bright night—having lowered the cliffman onto his ledge, the lads decided not to go back to the village, because it was near St. John's Eve and the nights were short. So they lit
themselves
a little fire of cowdung in a field and settled down to wait for the dawn. When they got bored with talk they amused
themselves
by throwing bits of the flaming dung over the cliff. In the morning they pulled the cliffman up again. “Ah lads,” he said, “I had a hard night of it last night, fighting with the Devil! But I drove him off at last, though he was putting out sparks to Kerry!”

The western wall of Poll an Iomair is formed by An Bhinn Bhuí, the yellow cliff, a long sheer-sided peninsula of awesome gravity and bulk. The lowest level of the cliff is prolonged below its southern sea-façade into a series of great steps the currach-men call An Altóir, the altar; to me, though, the cormorants that stand there wrapping their black wings about them like shawls seem to be playing the role of beggarwomen around the cathedral’s portal rather than of priests before its altar. The field that roofs this
rectangular
peninsula is fenced on one side by a wall and on three sides by nothing, and it is a fine place from which to marvel at the sublime procession of headlands to the west. However, it is wise to keep clear of the brink, especially in gusty weather; an islander warned me—and I pass on the advice—to beware of “the
suckage
,” for “A sort of hurricane could pick you up and whirl you over, even if you weighed ten tons!” All the same, I remember that
on a day when gales made it impossible to see, speak or think near any of the other clifftops, we found a mysteriously becalmed spot on the very tip of this peninsula. It was a day of explosive
sunshine
, and the waterfalls that usually hang from the shale bands in the cliff faces after wet weather had been reversed by the
updraught
and were rearing back over the land in dazzling arcs. The gales had lasted for weeks; maddened hills of water were careering around the bays below, and in the distance we could see green surges bursting half-way up the three-hundred-foot cliff under Dún Aonghasa and sending their glittering spray high over the fort itself.

I have visited this place too on a calm summer night by a full moon that laced the sea with mercury all the way across to Clare, and in a wintery dusk when the screaming choughs were blown by like scraps torn out of the night, and a crescent moon and evening star followed the sun down into western cloudbanks. But
whatever
the play of light and darkness about it the headland itself is always unshakeably majestic; not even Atlantic fog can quite
dissolve
its materiality. The winter storms are nevertheless battering at its juncture with the land on the western side, where rock-falls have left upside-down staircases in its wall and a deep cove is
being
rounded out, a process which will someday leave the headland as an isolated stack. A Cill Éinne crew was lost in this cove eighty years ago, through carelessness in a playful sea; they were working too close inshore, and an unexpected swell picked up their currach and smashed it and them against the cliff, a casual sacrifice to the cult of this marine cathedral.

The bay on this western flank of An Bhinn Bhuí used to be very important to the men of Baile na Creige, whose territory this is, in the days when timber was carried as deck cargo and a
proportion
of it lost overboard in rough weather, and during the World Wars when wrack was plentiful. The semi-circular arc of cliff (called An Cró; the word covers many kinds of round holes and farm enclosures), deeply undercut and floored with shelving rock, is a natural trap for anything drifting in with the prevailing
south-westerlies
.
In the second field west from the headland two short lengths of wall about five feet apart are still to be seen, the
supports
on which baulks of timber were sawn up, and just beyond the next field-wall there are grooves worn by ropes in the rim of the cliff where men used to be lowered the two hundred feet to sea level. In the sort of weather that brings rich pickings the breakers come thundering up the rock terrace below and the descent had to be carefully timed to land the cliffman between two waves. One old man who used to go down here explained to me that there were two suitable points of descent into An Cró, one of which was more “advantageous” than the other—its advantage was that it landed one on a spot from which it was possible to run quickly up a slope and get out of range of the oncoming wave, whereas from the other landing-point it was a longer run and one was invariably caught and drenched. Going down was pleasanter than coming up, he told me. On the descent one could counteract any
tendency
to spin as soon as it started, by kicking out with the leg on the side towards which one was turning; however, when being lifted off the shore it was impossible to know which way the rope would twist to begin with, and all one could do was to “close your eyes and clench your teeth to stop the dizziness getting into your head.”

One field farther to the west the cliff makes a small outward turn, and in the angle is a recess of the clifftop called Uláinín Bhriain, Brian’s little ledge, after a man who, it is said, was sitting reading there one day when the breeze lifted a page out of his book and dangled it in mid-air before him, so that he leaned forward to grab it, and fell over the cliff. Perhaps this story has been confused with another concerning Gleann Bhriain, Brian’s Glen, close by. Here this doubly doomed fellow one day saw strange horses trespassing
on his land. He went up to them, put a halter on a mare and jumped on her back. But these were sea-horses; the halter slipped off and the mare galloped straight to the cliff with Brian clinging to her mane, and plunged beneath the waves. If two conflicting versions of the one fall have been passed down, perhaps it scarcely matters; we all go over the cliff in the end, whether we would ride on horseback or lean towards the literary, and Brian’s one death is at least twice remembered.

Binn na nIasc, the cliff of the fish, is the name of the next
headland
, and on its eastern face is a little recess in the clifftop called An Chathaoir, because it is exactly like an armchair. It is a fine spot in which to sit and watch the wind circulating the fulmars in the bay below, like a juggler with a dozen boomerangs. An
accumulation
of winkle shells shows that this is also the customary perch of some fisherman, and in fact a number of empty cigarette packets tucked into crevices around tells me that one of the most reclusive of the village lads, whose identity I can guess, regards the seat as his own.

The ground falls sharply from the east to the west flank of this headland, for this is where one of the inland scarps, corresponding to one major division of the limestone, comes to the coast. As usual there are springs associated with the shale band at its foot, and the fresh water that falls over the cliff just west of the
headland
is said to be responsible for the unusual size of the limpets on the shore below, from which it is called Aill na mBairneach, the cliff of the limpets. To gather them the islanders used to climb down a jumble of blocks, now in a dangerous state of suspended collapse, in the inner angle of the headland, to a ledge called Ulán na Téide, the ledge of the rope, where there were iron pegs fixed on which to tie the seven fathoms of rope needed to reach the
bottom
. Shore-food such as limpets and the seaweed called
sleabhcán
made the difference between death and survival for the Aran folk and the Connemara refugees who came here during the Famine, and even in the earlier decades of this century some poor families depended on it. Limpets are still occasionally gathered as a delicacy,
tough but tasty, though from more accessible shores than this. Even the shells had their uses, for children, as I have been told, used to cook up spoonfuls of sugar in them over the turf fire “when we had no pennies for sweets.”

From Binn na nIasc one has a view inland for the first time, as the coast descends from here onwards to the low-lying neck of the island; Dún Aonghasa, on the cliff’s edge at the shoulder of the next upland, is seen in profile against the sky, a mile and a half ahead. Three little villages appear, lying apart in this intervening lowland: Gort na gCapall near the southern coast and not far away, Cill Mhuirbhigh far to the north-west near the other coast, and on the horizon directly inland a few of the rooftops of Fearann an Choirce (Oatquarter)—among them that of our own house, which signals to us across grey-green latitudes of crag with the little flag of its darkly vivid cypress, the instant we reach this spot in returning from a walk along the cliffs. We often rest here, on sunny afternoons. At Aill na mBairneach one is about a
hundred
feet above the sea and on a level with the gannets sailing by just offshore, which seem also to be idling along in enjoyment of the summer skies—bright-skinned beauties in long black gloves, out of a Sargent portrait—until one of them suddenly checks in mid-air, half-folds its elegant slim wings, and plunges vertically, avidly, disappears in a plume of spray, and surfaces a few moments later to lumber into the air with a mackerel in its beak.

Not far along the cliff from Binn na nIasc is an extraordinary detached pillar of rock that appears to be frozen in the act of
staggering
into the sea bearing a little green field on its head. I have the impression that it has leaned farther out from the cliff during the years we have known it, and the Gort na gCapall people whose bit of land is being alienated in this way tell me that goats used to jump out onto it, and that the village lads used to put a plank across the gap to fetch birds’ eggs off it. It is called simply An Aill Bhriste, the broken cliff, and its top is a little square
garden
of sea-pinks, scurvy grass, samphire and sea beet, beyond the reach now of any goat. It feels odd to see one’s own home together
with such an impending earth-change in the one landscape. The stack will probably fall in one of those equinoctial storms that shake our house in autumn, but I hope it goes, with a gorgeous wallowing splash, on a day of crazy spring breezes when we
happen
to be sitting on Binn na nIasc watching the sea attack the
keyboard
of the cliffs with the rolled chords and flashing cuffs of a Romantic virtuoso.

We visit this shore in other seasons and other moods too. One bitter winter afternoon, the nadir of a Christmas holiday, I was walking along this cliff with my closest friend and our two loves, when something made me stop. I found myself standing in a
circle
of ragged, blackish mushrooms. The others stopped too and stood looking at me. Not one of them would join me in the
sinister
circle—perhaps only because at that stage of the walk no two of the four of us were on speaking-terms. I respect ancient forms, even if I do not believe in fairies, so I took care to come out where an outcrop of rock interrupted the circle. That evening I
mentioned
the incident to an old man from the west of the island. He was impressed: that means that you are an angel, that your prayers will be answered, he told me. This was flattering, but I pricked up my objective folkloristic ear: what was the exact connection
between
being an angel and having your prayers answered? The old man explained that this was something he had learned in America where he had spent some decades during the Depression. He had been lucky enough to get a job as a boilerman in a convent, and one day a young nun had told him that she was in some trouble and asked him to pray for her. He said that he was not much good at praying but he would have a go—and a few days later the nun came up and thanked him for his prayers, saying that he was an angel, and that her troubles were over. The story did not quite make sense to me, until I pictured this young girl running up to him and crying out “Gee Patrick, you’re an angel! Your prayers were answered!” The light-hearted Americanism, deeply pondered for years by a simple soul, brought back across the ocean, was the spore from which the whole magic circle of misinterpretation had grown.

Half a mile beyond Binn na nIasc one has to climb down another scarp that runs inland at right-angles to the coast, and the decrease in height evidently brings the clifftops in occasional reach of the waves, as the storm beach starts again at this point. The scarp is a little cliff in itself where it parts from the coast. In its face is
exposed
a bed of fossil shells, and the material of the storm beach has evidently come from the same stratum as it is full of the same shells. Most of them belonged to sea-creatures called brachiopods, which occurred in such numbers in the Carboniferous era that certain limestones are almost wholly made up of their remains. Brachiopods are superficially rather like such two-shelled molluscs as the mussel and cockle, but in fact they represent an earlier branch of the evolutionary tree and have a more primitive
body-structure
; for instance molluscs do have heads, although they may not be very apparent in such examples as the mussels, whereas in brachiopods the mouth and principal sense-organs are not so grouped together at one end of the body. Another difference
between
them and the bivalve molluscs is that the latter have one valve of their shells on either side of the body while brachiopods have one valve below and another above the body. Most of the space inside the shell is taken up by the organ with which they both breath and feed, a pair of feathery spirals covered in minute vibrating hairs, which keeps water flowing in and out of the shell, absorbs oxygen from it, filters out food-particles and passes them to the mouth. Their archaic structure has by no means meant their entire extinction, for although they no longer dominate the seas as they did three hundred million years ago, there are still over two hundred living species, mainly in Pacific coastal regions, and one or two in Irish waters too. However, the type most prevalent in the seas when Aran’s rocks were being laid down is long extinct; it was the largest of them all,
Gigantoproductus
, and elsewhere it grew up to fifteen inches across. It looked rather like a scallop
except
that both its valves were arched, the convexity of the lower
one fitting into the concavity of the upper. Its shell was of calcite, and so wherever a cliff face cuts through a bed of them, exposing every conceivable cross-section of shell, its contribution to Aran’s substance is an abstract frieze of gleaming white arcs and ovals. In other types of brachiopod the coiled internal organ was supported by a forked ingrowth of shell. One of these,
Davidsonina
sep
tosa
, occurred here, and has identified itself for us by a letter Y, the trace of this supporting structure, within the oval outline of its fossils.

Where the sea has smashed down a section of rock face
enclosing
a shell bed, one can find specimens of all its contents lying among the rubble, as on the storm beach that starts at this point of the coast’s decline towards the harbour of Gort na gCapall. Once I picked up what looked like a brooch or pendant of stone, in the form of a flat spiral coil just over an inch across—the fossil shell of a sea snail,
Euomphalos
,
identifiable by the cross-section of its tube, which is nearer to a pentagon than to a circle. It was such a covetable object in its compactness and density that I carried it home with a twinge of guilt, as if there were some means of
restoring
it to its previous owner which I had neglected.

Whenever I pass this place I keep my eyes open for another kind of memento too, for the Gort na gCapall people tell me that they used to pick up spent bullets here. The basic reason why the ground brings forth this ominous crop is clear if one looks at the nature of it. The land below the scarp is barer than any seen so far, and of a hard, smooth limestone that gives rise to wide, unbroken pavements. Gort na gCapall, the rooftops of which are visible a quarter of a mile inland, has nearly all its land on this terrace of the island or on the one below it which is of similarly sterile rock. Thus it has more than its share of the worst land, and what it has of the good was coveted in the last century by a powerful
neighbour
, O’Flaherty of nearby Cill Mhuirbhigh, the local J.P. and the largest landholder in the islands. So it was that the men of Gort na gCapall were the most militant of Fenians and Land-Leaguers during the “Land War” of the 1880s, and this is where they came
to practise firing the guns they had stolen from the barracks in Cill Rónáin. The place was well chosen; the road comes no nearer than the village, and should the police or coastguards have shown themselves on the open crags closer than that, the rebels knew of a way down the cliffs just two fields to the west to a sea-cave called Poll Uí Néadáin, in which they could hide their arms.

The history of this conflict will find its place at the site of its terrible culmination on the great cliffs west of Dún Aonghasa, but at the present point I will turn aside to note a happier reason for the villagers’ assembling here. Just inland of the storm beach is a short length of wall against which they used to play handball, on a stretch of ground where absolutely nothing grows, which lacks even the fissures in which at least a goat could find a few
mouthfuls
of herbage, but is therefore all the more suitable to be the floor of a ball-alley. Passing homeward from the storm beach,
absorbed
in wondering how to unify my finds more securely than by a belletristic chapter heading, it can happen that I fail to hear the ringing steps and urgent cries of the long-dead players here.