Stones of Aran (15 page)

No, such flippancy will not do at all! I shall have to return to Dún Aonghasa.

From the western walls of Dún Aonghasa one can survey the tableland beyond, a grey-green puzzle of fields and walls that slants evenly and almost imperceptibly across to the south and stops in mid-air three hundred feet above the sea. All the features of the central plateau recur here, for this surface is carved out of the same strata: the thin layers of chert exposed here and there that break up into fragments like children's building-blocks; the monotonous network of fields (about fifteen hundred of them, I estimate) of various sizes but nearly all of a rectangular shape that seems to usher one towards the cliff; and underlying this pattern the regular jointing dissecting the surface by shallow fissures into strips a foot or two wide that also direct one towards the edge, where some of them jut out beyond the cliff top like fingerposts to the horizon. Because of the height of these cliffs the strange
landscape
continues almost unchanged right up to its abrupt cessation, which, approached from inland, can scarcely be called a coast, the region of interplay between land and sea being hidden and
apparently
reduced to a line of mathematical intangibility and finality.

Only the most exceptional seas can fling spray over these cliffs and so the flora of the stony pastures persists right up to the edge, but crouching ever lower against the blast. The lank-stemmed harebell of the inland fields is reduced to a height of four inches at thirty paces from the cliffs, and at a yard from the brink its stem is only an inch and a half long and its bell lolls on the ground. Similarly in the hayfields of the sheltered northern slopes centaury grows eighteen inches tall, on the open crags it is half that height, and here on the clifftop it is a compact knob of pink blossom an inch high. The yellow cat's-ear is prominent here in late summer, its stem prostrate and its flowerheads hardly lifted off the ground, among hunched sprigs of Lady's bedstraw and elegantly
abbreviated
fairy flax. These dwarfs stand up out of a sward that clings to the rock like a skin, mainly composed of thyme and the little Gothic rosettes of buckthorn plantain, but comprising dozens of other plants reduced by exposure to a botanical shorthand only the expert can read. Thus the scale of what is underfoot shrinks as the edge is approached, where all commentary on this world of fascinating minutiae is brought up short by the overwhelming generalization of the void.

A line of portrait busts of Roman senators could not display a nobler sequence of profiles than do the headlands west of the Dún. Here the cliffs have three and in places four massive storeys of limestone separated by deeply scored ledges where the sea has licked out the crumbly layers of shale. Often the upper storey projects beyond the one below, and in places the lowest level forms a wide terrace onto which the waves break at high tide. The cliffs of Achill are seven times higher than these and yet are not so imposing because they slant into the sea, whereas these cliffs are sheer or overhanging. A fall from the Achill cliffs would be an
ignominious
slithering panic, but here it would be an unimpeded parabolic plunge. However, the idea of falling is not so insistent here as it is on the lower ranges to the east, where the movement of the waves below is not so dwarfed and hushed by distance and one feels oneself in a more immediate comparison with the forces
of the sea. Here, though, the space outside the brink is so far
beyond
the human scale that it fills one with the breath of oceanic well-being and a lofty self-confidence.

Nevertheless people have vanished over this edge. Carraig an Smáil, which Tom O'Flaherty renders as the Rock of Perdition in his stones of the old cliffmen, is an ill-famed angle a hundred yards west of the Dún, from which a Gort na gCapall fisherman went down. Nobody knows how he came to fall, but although this was nearly a century ago what ensued is still remembered with some bitterness in the village, for boatmen of another family found his body in their nets many days later, and let it go with the tide rather than bring it ashore as it was so loathsome, and this caused a rift between the two families that lasted for decades.

Only once or twice in the course of many walks have I met anyone fishing from these western cliffs, and the unnerving
spectacle
, made world-famous by Robert Flaherty's film
Man
of Aran,
is now almost extinct. Having baited his hook with periwinkles brought from the low northern shores, and searched around for a suitable weight—a stone a few inches long, preferably with a waist to tie the line round—the fisherman stands on the brink and
either
swings the stone to and fro underhand or whirls it around his head in a few great slow circles before letting it fly far out into the air. However energetic the cast the height of the cliff is such that the stone always seems to fall close to its base. The fisherman sits down with his heels stuck out into space and leans forward with the line delicately held over one finger; in the barefoot days he would have run it between two toes. By experience and
inheritance
he knows exactly where the wrasse are waiting, just off the edge of the terrace below. The tug of a bite brings him
convulsively
to his feet. It is easier to haul the catch up if the cliff actually leans out over the water, and to the onlooker standing a little aside out of range of the whirling stone and who can see the extent of the overhang, this spasm of activity on the cracked lip of rock looks suicidal. Sometimes a fisherman will leave his line in a cleft
of the clifftop when he goes home, knowing that no one will touch it. Recently an Oatquarter lad went back to his habitual perch, to find that not only his line but the place itself had
disappeared
overnight.

The cliff face itself is unvisited territory nowadays. The main routes of this portion of it were two ledges, continuous for a
couple
of miles westwards from the Dún and linked in certain angles of the cliff by vertical, stair-like climbs. The
ailleadóir
or cliffman would enter his chosen ledge at dusk east of the Dún where the rising ground brings the clifftop up past the level of each ledge in turn, or he would be lowered onto it from above by a team. Both the
aragaint
or ledges and the
strapaí
or stairs are much altered since the days of the cliffmen of the last century, being blocked by rock-falls in places that were clear, and cleared by erosion in places that were blocked. One man who had discovered his own route down to sea level when he was a boy and offered to show me it, was unable to recognize the entrance to his
strapa
when we reached the spot, and I was glad that I had prudently declined his invitation and that we had not carried the necessary so many
fathoms
of rope all the way along the cliffs.

The names of these old ways are being washed away too, and the memory of those who traversed this dark obverse of the
path-system
above is similarly lapsing into the fabulous. The anecdotes I have picked up of their exploits are as evocative as scraps of a lost cycle of legends. Hearing about the man on whom the ravens dropped pebbles while he was raiding their nest, or of the man who was battered by the wings of a cormorant in the darkness of a narrow crumbling shelf, or of the brothers who saved themselves by climbing the cliff-face at night when the weather changed and the waves started to reach up into the ledge they were crouched in, I envisage the cliff as the field of a strange hands-and-knees chivalry, across which an order of knights pledged to the
vertiginous
crawled forth to do battle with black-winged monsters. Simultaneously I see these heroes as bent, wheezy little old men
with a comic turn of phrase, for this is how the islanders I talk to recall them; it seems that those vigils on the windy ledges were conducive to wit as well as to catarrh.

For the
ailleadóir
the cliff was primarily a geography of
variously
productive places and the handiest routes to them. The
terrace
below the cliff a couple of hundred yards west of the Dún, on which the tides leave little pools of water, for instance, was Leac an tSalainn, the flag of the salt, and it was worth going there in hot weather to collect the salt from around the rims of the evaporated pools. Aragaint an tSraoilleáin, the ledge one third of the way up the cliff in the first big bay west of the Dún, was a famous place for cormorants and guillemots, and many a feather pillow came from that ledge. If the cliff was haunted in places it was no more so than the villages; if there was a Scailp an Phúca, the goblin's cleft, in the east of that same bay, it was still as useful a shortcut as Róidín an Phúca, a lane in Cill Rónáin. Nevertheless, and
whatever
the importance of its product in the way of bird-flesh, eggs, feathers and oil, fish, limpets and driftwood, this was an alien
territory
, a world turned on its edge and subjected to a draconian law of gravity, and those who ventured into it must have brought back something of its savagery to their wives and hearths, as a Gort na gCapall man I have heard of brought back peregrine falcon and raven chicks, to rear them up and to pit them against each other in cock-fights. And when the cliffmen led their sons out along these ledges for the first time and were agreeably surprised by the lads' steadiness of nerve, they probably suspected from their own experience that the children had been secretly testing themselves on the cliffs for years, as both boys and girls still occasionally do.

Half a mile west of the Dún the façade of the cliffs is recessed as if around the forecourt of a sombre and majestic public building. A
falling tide leaves the smooth pavement of this great rectangular courtyard bare and black, and the bay is named An Sraoilleán from this sprawling, slippery rock, which is what the word means. The cliff that looks down into the bay from the east is Binn an Ghlais; the sense of this name is not quite clear, but it seems to
refer
to an appearance of greenness, perhaps of the turf along its rim. Half-way along this cliff one can step down onto a little ledge, a balcony trimmed with thrift and sea-campion in spring, or scentless mayweed and sea-aster later in the year. Long ago this was the favourite fishing perch of the three sons of a woman called Nora, and it is known from them as Ulán Chlainn Nora, the ledge of Nora’s family. These young men were pilots, and they lived in a cottage by the “Seven Churches” on the north coast, from which they could keep a look out for sailing vessels coming into Galway Bay from the west. One day, when there was “a stir on the sea” as the Aran men say, they saw a ship sailing up the North Sound, and hurried down to the shore to launch their currach, intending to intercept the ship and offer to guide it through the rocks and shoals of the bay. But the ship vanished as they rowed out, and the great breaker of An Gleannachán overturned their currach and drowned them.

The history of Nora’s sons is not the only tale of Aran men lured to their deaths by fairy ships. The seas of Aran are or were as haunted as its hillsides, lanes and precipices, and drifting scraps of sheer malice—flotsam from that great shipwreck of evil, the Fall of the Angels (for that is one supposed origin of the fairies)—could entangle themselves in the fishermen’s lives at any moment. Some tracts of sea are more ghost-run than others; the shadowed tides of An Sraoilleán in particular bring in the supernatural as other bays collect wrack of the human world. With the flood the breakers roll farther and farther up its slanting floor until they
enter
caverns that look like dark slits along the base of the cliff; seen from so far above their movement is slow and deliberate, and on a day when Aran is windless and the breakers have their origins in a storm long past or far out to sea, their silent disappearance one after
the other under the low arches has the solemnity of a great funeral procession entering a cathedral. Such a place is a natural
breeding-ground
of stories. Here is a translation of what an islander wrote for me about this bay:

And on reaching home they would have heard of the overturning of a currach in calm waters close to the shore near Mainistir, and the drowning of three men—a tragedy which is ascribed by the
island’s
oral history to drink, whatever unearthly conflicts it may have occasioned in the catacombs of the sea.