Stones of Aran (16 page)

“I’ll do it if I can, as the billygoat of Binn an Ghlais said!”—
“Deanfad mar fhéadaim, mar a deir pocaide Bhinn an Ghlais!”
—is an old Aran saying used in tricky undertakings. What the
billygoat
was up to on this, Aran’s highest cliff, has unfortunately been forgotten, but the saying still captures something of the essence of this place, the contrast between the gloom of the abyss and the airy ardour of life on its brink. Even rabbits seem to live
dangerously
up here, burrowing in gullies of crumbling shale that give onto the direst drops; in fact it is the dog that chases them that is likely to go over the edge, as in one of the short stories in which Liam O’Flaherty celebrates life’s dance towards death.

Spring exhibits its delectable blend of spontaneity and ritual on the clifftops as elsewhere; each time it comes round the same
wayward
impulses inhabit new bodies exactly like those of last year, or perhaps the same bodies rejuvenated, at exactly the same times and places. There is always a pair of wheatears flitting about and calling to one another in a little glen just outside the Dún’s
western
defences. The Aran belief is that they winter in caves on the cliff face, but in fact they fly to equatorial Africa each autumn and arrive back in March; as an islander rather oddly put it to me, “If you don’t see them on St. Patrick’s Day, you’ll see them a day or two before that.” At that season, too, a pair of inky-black choughs are often to be seen hopping heavily from stone to stone of the Dún’s western
chevaux-de-frise
, stropping their curved red beaks. Choughs are rare nowadays; as jackdaws, their rougher, rowdier cousins in the crow family, have spread, so the similar-sized (but slimmer, more fastidiously black and elegantly beaked) choughs have become restricted to a few such western outposts as this, where nesting pairs are not uncommon on the great cliffs. Often there is a bachelor party of a dozen or so unpaired, yearling birds, high and buoyant above the Dún, flinging themselves about in aerial riot, soaring with wing-feathers spread like long fingers against the brightness, then folding themselves up into black fists and abandoning themselves to a few seconds of free fall, scattering their fierce shrill, down-curving cries like ragged scrapings of zinc. Couples of ravens perform a similar dance, but on a spectacular scale befitting their much greater size. The ravens’ courtship flights take them up into skies so spacious they become black dots
to us and to each other, but each pair of these circuits springs like vast invisible wings from a fixed origin on the clifftop, one of which is above An Sraoilleán; I have the impression that just four couples spaced out as far as possible each year hold and divide the entire range of cliffs between them. Aran people delight in telling one that the raven can fly upside-down, and indeed it does so for certain instants of the spring. The raven, flying high in the sight of its mate, half-folds its wings, lets itself plunge and turns over on its back for a moment as it swings through the sky like the clapper of a bell, and its call at that supreme moment is a single deep chime as evocative of marriage as is its normal croak of funeral.

The irrepressible every-day, every-field plants that flower on the clifftops have already been mentioned, but this particular range, the mile or so west of the Dún, is the last refuge of a little rarity that, having lingered on almost since the end of the last Ice Age, is now reduced to this marginal existence, if it is not, in Ireland, on the verge of extinction. This is
Astragalus
danicus
, the purple milk-vetch; its loose clover-like heads of violet flowers catch the eye here in May, and throughout the summer its small neat leaves, pinnate like those of the common vetch but ending with a leaflet rather than a tendril, are easily recognized in the short turf. It is common only on these particular clifftops, occurs sporadically in one or two places on the north coast and in Inis Meáin (notably in the new graveyard), and nowhere else in Ireland. In Europe it is a plant of the tundra and high mountain pastures, and presumably it was widespread in Ireland when this country was recovering its vegetation after the retreat of the
glaciers
. Now, on this uttermost edge of its former range, it finds conditions similar enough to those of its old habitats to blossom and seed, because of rather than despite the adjacent gulf.

The western wall of An Sraoilleán is noticeably different from the other cliff faces; it is smooth and vertically streaked, as if it has been half-melted. In fact it has been subjected to extreme stresses, for this is the effect of a fault, where the rock has fractured and the land on one side of the fracture has moved relatively to that on the other. The plane of this fracture is almost vertical and at right
angles
to the general line of the coast. As the cliffs have been eaten back by the sea, rock on the east of the fracture has fallen away and exposed some of the opposing rock face; the fault, then, is older than the cliffs. Although the fault extends through the entire thickness of limestone from clifftop to sea level or below, the
relative
movement of the two sides has been very small, as one can see at the point where the fault plane reaches the cliff. A thread of
water
finds its way over the brink just here and in fact has cut a little cleft into this weakened zone, in which the various thicknesses of rock on the west of the streamlet visibly match up with those about six inches higher on its east. The little valley resulting from erosion along the line of the fault runs inland for about a third of a mile in a direction a few degrees more easterly than that of the major set of joints, and even on an Ordnance Survey map
showing
only the field boundaries it can be recognized as a slight
distortion
of the field pattern, which otherwise is largely controlled by the jointings. Faults are infrequent in Aran, as they are in the western parts of the Burren, but both faults and folding of strata become more noticeable towards the western tip of the island, and, as will become apparent, a fault may have initiated the
development
of the whole line of cliffs.

The name of this headland that closes off An Sraoilleán on the west, Barr an Leath-chartúir, means “the head of the half-cartron”—which lands one on the middle of the multiplication table of a system of land-divisions that dates from mediaeval times. It is based on factors of four. The four townlands of Árainn are each divided into carrows or quarters, each of which is divided into
four cartrons, each of which contains four croggeries or fourths. These terms are anglicizations of Irish words:
ceathrú
(quarter),
cartúr
(cartron) and
cnagaire
(croggery). A
cnagaire
is sixteen acres, the nominal size of a holding that “could feed a cow with her calf, a horse, some sheep for their wool and give sufficient potatoes to support one family.” This nineteenth-century formula gives the whole scheme a basis in rustic idyll, it would seem, but there are complications in adjusting it to reality. First, each of the four townlands of Árainn has
six
quarters. (Inis Meáin’s two townlands and Inis Oírr’s single townland, though, have just four quarters each.) The three western townlands, Eoghanacht, Cill
Mhuirbhigh
and Eochaill, each measure very close to 1800 acres; Cill Éinne townland has 2296 acres but if its unproductive sandy tracts are disregarded it is not far off the same size as the rest. However, if a
cnagaire
is sixteen acres, a townland (even if it has six quarters) should only be 1536 acres. Thus there is a certain latitude of
allowance
for bare rock, even if not as much as one would think
reasonable
. Perhaps, though, this calculation should start from the old “Irish acre,” which was about one and two-thirds the size of a statute acre. In that case a townland of six quarters would contain no less than 2594 statute acres. This seems to indicate that those basic croggeries (the very word speaks of stony ground!) on which the tenants subsisted were of niggardly measure.

It follows from the above, as the mathematicians say, that a
leath-chartúr
is thirty-two acres, give or take a few acres hardly worth giving or taking.

I have not been able to identify the particular tract of land
referred
to in the name of Barr an Leath-chartúir, and in several other cases I have only just been in time to catch the dying
whispers
of the island’s oral record of such minor subdivisions. Only the townland boundaries are shown on the Ordnance Survey maps. In 1980 it was only with difficulty that I found one or two people in each village of the island who could show me at least parts of the boundary walls of the nearby
ceathrúna
or quarters, but I was able to complete a record, with only a few doubts and
gaps, of this incredibly complex apportioning of land between the villages, which having long lost its function is now being
obliterated
by the swapping of parcels of land to rationalize scattered holdings. The names of most of the individual
ceathrúna
survive though the sense of some has become obscure, and here and there I was shown a wall that formed part of the otherwise forgotten boundary of a
leath-cheathrú
or half-quarter, for many of the
quarters
, themselves narrow strips running across the island, were
divided
longitudinally into still narrower pieces, each with its name, of which a few are dimly remembered.

However, with one quarter I had no difficulty as it is a single holding and its borders are therefore marked in red on its owner’s Land Commission map, which he kindly lent me. The way in which it came to be a single holding, over a century ago, is also scored in red, on the island’s communal memory. As I gathered its history piece-meal from various people, I heard more bitterness expressed over this particular case of “land-grabbing” than over any other in the catalogue of Aran’s wrongs—not against its
present
owner, who is everyone’s obliging neighbour, but against his distant predecessors the O’Flahertys of Cill Mhuirbhigh.

The quarter in question is called Ceathrú an Turlaigh, and its eastern boundary wall comes zigzagging across from the north coast to the western side of the bay of An Sraoilleán. Over most of its course this wall like all the others obeys the promptings of the joint-system, so that each length of it either runs south-south-west or at right angles to that direction; near its southern end it is slightly deflected by the distortions caused in the field-pattern by the fault described above, as if it were briefly tempted by an
analogy
between the geological and social stresses that have riven Aran, and it finally reaches the cliff on the east side of Barr an Leath-chartúir. A little gully running out onto the cliff face
immediately
west of that same headland, was the site of the most horrific incident of Aran’s “Land War,” the “cliffing” of the O’Flahertys’ cattle just over a century ago. But to explain this event and relate it to the tensions such boundaries as those of Ceathrú an Turlaigh
have inscribed on the face of the island, I need first to set a wider scene.

The name Ceathrú an Turlaigh refers to a
turlach
, a hollow in which a lake appears from time to time as the level of rainwater held in the fissures of the surrounding rock fluctuates with the weather and the season of the year. There is such a hollow called An Turlach Mór about three hundred yards inland from the cliffs just west of Barr an Leath-chartúir; it is a closed valley comprising a few large pastures often waterlogged in winter and almost always damp and lush through the rest of the year, in startling contrast to the dry stoniness of the land in neighbouring quarters. Ceathrú an Turlaigh also includes fine sandy grazing on the north coast, and on the whole it is more productive than any other quarter west of Cill Mhuirbhigh.

However, during the Famine and the decades of chronic want that followed, the small tenants of this quarter were no more able to make ends meet than the rest, and when rents could not be paid evictions followed; those who were not evicted or forced by hunger to leave a home that could not provide for them were
disposed
of by the offer of tickets for the emigrant boats. As an
islander
explained to me: “The big-shots didn't care where they went, to Cill Rónáin or Inis Oírr or America, just so long as they got the hell out of Ceathrú an Turlaigh!” And as the long-settled population evaporated in this way, the landlord's agent was able to lease the entire quarter to the O'Flahertys, already the island's largest landholders. No doubt the agent considered this a
progressive
step, a reform of a hopelessly archaic fragmentation of
productive
capacity. Perhaps he even believed that the surviving population of Aran would someday join him in regarding their distress, bereavement and loneliness as necessary to and justified
by the inauguration of a more rational order. The economic
theology
of the time would have strengthened this man, Thomas Thompson, at whose name I have seen old Aran men shake their sticks, in the repression of his humanity, as the latest versions of such doctrines armour the hearts of his like today. The only
beneficiaries
in fact, apart from the agent himself and the landlords (who were far away and cared nothing so long as they received a couple of thousand pounds out of Thompson's takings each year), were the O'Flahertys. By the end of the 1870s James O'Flaherty was master not only of the fertile lowlands around Port
Mhuirbhigh
but of the Hill Farm in the east and Ceathrú an Turlaigh in the west. He was, simply, The O'Flaherty. His house had expanded from a thatched cottage into a plain two-storey, slate-roofed,
mansion
which by Aran standards was palatial. The constabulary
barracks
stood before it, and like his father before him he was the island's Justice of the Peace.

But for his version of justice the islanders did not return him peace. They too were strengthened by voices from the outside world, for Aran's case was that of much of Ireland, and opposition to rack-renting and evictions was being organized both overtly and covertly throughout the country and articulated in Westminster itself. Although the Fenian uprising of 1867 had been a dismal
failure
, Ireland was still threaded through with the remains of a
secret
, nationalist, revolutionary organization. Gladstone on taking office in the following year had announced his mission to pacify Ireland, but while his Land Act of 1870 had given the tenant who could pay his rent a degree of protection against eviction, towards the end of the decade bad seasons and competition of cheap grain from America had made paying the rent impossible for the men of few acres, and the Act was no longer a hindrance to the landlord who wished to clear surplus tenantry off his estates.

The number of evictions soared after the long wet summer of 1877 had brought the country to the verge of famine again, and the local and immediate resentments of the peasantry which had always found their outlet in sporadic acts of violence against landlords,
agents, bailiffs and “land-grabbers,” as those who occupied land from which others had been evicted were called, became forces which both the Fenians in hiding and Parnell in parliament wanted to control and direct in pursuance of their various hopes for Ireland's future. At a mass meeting organized by Michael Davitt at Westport in June 1879, Parnell lent the voice of his
urbanity
and reason to the oppressed, and in return pocketed their spontaneous rebelliousness as a card to be played or held in reserve in his own unfathomable parliamentary game:

The National Land League was founded by Michael Davitt a few months later with Parnell as its president, and the “Land War” was declared. Throughout Ireland there were mass-demonstrations that obliged many landlords to reduce rents on the spot. The Land League concerted action physically to prevent many
evictions
, and could dispose of the funds necessary to house and feed at least some of the dispossessed. It won the support of the local clergy and the Hierarchy, instituted an alternative system of courts, and by 1880 could be described by
The
Times
as “a very distinct and potent government which is rapidly succeeding the Imperial government.” Gladstone responded in the following year with, on the one hand, a Coercion Act which allowed him to arrest various
Land League leaders, and on the other with a second Land Act which guaranteed “the three F's”—fixity of tenure, free sale of the tenants interest and improvement on vacation of the holding, and fair rents, to be set by a Land Court. By 1882 the crisis was over at least for the time being; Parnell had been arrested and released on an understanding that he would call off the agitation and
co-operate
with the Land Act, under which tenants were already
winning
rent decreases, and that the Coercion Act would be repealed. The attention of both Parnell and the country as a whole soon turned to more directly nationalistic matters.

The climactic event of Aran's Land War exactly coincided with the peak of Ireland's fever. I am told that at this time James O'Flaherty had his eyes on an area of good fields called An Caiseal (no doubt from the cashel of Dún Aonghasa on the hill above it), which bordered his own holding in Cill Mhuirbhigh and was leased in small lots to the people of Gort na gCapall. Opposition to his depredations was led by the Fenians, now Land Leaguers, of that village, among whom Mícheál Ó Flaithearta (Michael
O'Flaherty
) who later fathered the novelist Liam O'Flaherty, was
prominent
.

The plans for the destruction of James O'Flaherty's stock, which took place on the 7th of January 1881, must have been
carefully
coordinated. James O'Flaherty had twenty-one cattle
including
a bull grazing near An Turlach Mór at the time, according to oral history, which has preserved many curious details of the event. (Newspaper accounts though mention thirty heifers of O'Flaherty's and three belonging to his retainers.) The Land Leaguers rounded them up, blindfolded them and herded them down the gully nearby to the edge of the cliff, from which they fell more than two hundred and fifty feet into the sea. By pre-arrangement, children were banging empty buckets and playing jew's harps on the roads at that hour, to prevent the distant lowing of the terrified beasts reaching the ears of authority, and the conspirators came home unhindered.

Arrests were made after the discovery of the crime, but evidence
against particular persons was lacking. In May of that year Michael O'Flaherty and his brother-in-law Thomas Ganly, the
local
secretary of the Land League, were added to the other suspects in Galway Gaol; after three months in prison they were offered
release
on condition of signing an undertaking about their future behaviour, which they refused to do, and by the end of September they had been released unconditionally. A “cess” covering
compensation
to James O'Flaherty was to be levied on the household rates, and opposition to this communal fine, including the violent repulse of the police, bailiffs and hired roughs from Galway who came out to enforce it, rumbled on for decades. In the end it was paid off by degrees, but James O'Flaherty hardly saw the three hundred pounds he was awarded, as he died in November of the same year, aged sixty-four. According to the newspapers he “
received
the Last Rites,” but Aran lore has it that his last living
dealings
with the clergy were rather of the opposite nature. It is said that as he was stepping into the boat at Cill Rónáin to go to the court hearings in Galway a curate on the quayside said to him “May you never come back!,” to which a bystander added “Amen!” The curate turned on the other man and said, “That's a terrible thing you've done, saying Amen to a curse!” And indeed
O'Flaherty
did not come back, but was found dead one morning in his hotel bedroom.

That dramatic year of 1881 does seem to represent the
beginning
of a process of redress, a slow and painful progress towards amelioration in which national and parochial history oddly
conspired
. Nationally the “agrarian outrages” of those years around '81, the cattle-maimings, house-burnings, attacks upon landlords and bailiffs, boycotts of land-grabbers, and above all their political orchestration by the Land League, won significant concessions, and these were felt in Aran when the Land Court sitting in Cill Rónáin in 1885 reduced the rents on the average by a third. The Gort na gCapall men had followed Parnell's urgings and had “kept a firm grip” on their holdings in An Caiseal. The expansionism of the Cill Mhuirbhigh O'Flahertys had been halted, and their estate
was soon to decline, for it happened that James had left no male heir and his eldest daughter married into gentry, the Johnstons of Doolin in County Clare, who had no Aran roots, and were
expensively
addicted to drink and fox-hunting. As financial ruin
approached
, the outlying portions of the estate had to be sold off The Hill Farm in Cill Éinne (after tragi-comedies to be detailed in a sequel to this book) was eventually “striped” and distributed among smallholders, while Ceathrú an Turlaigh went to an Aran man returned from America rich enough to buy it as a single lot. Even the Cill Mhuirbhigh farm itself, with the passing of the last of the Johnstons, has become in some respects an Aran holding like the rest.

And so it appears that this little kink in the edge of Ceathrú an Turlaigh, the brief cattle track that led the puzzled beasts from peaceful grazing to those four seconds of black panic before their deaths, is a site (one of hundreds) of a certain historical crisis, as well as of a shameful deed, which is how most Aran people see it. When I peer down here, sickly, to the breakers crawling on the rocks below, I know why this story is one that sticks in the throat of oral history. I fear that some islanders will be displeased that I have told it, though it has been at least mentioned in print before. One or two have said to me that it would have been fair enough to throw the landlords over the cliff, but that it was a shame to treat the innocent beasts so. In the long exchange of insults that has
always
accompanied the Connemara men's dealings with Aran, for instance, the “cuffing” of the O'Flahertys' cattle has been the
substance
of a jibe and a reproach, as I have been told. Our eldest, best and most prolix story-teller could not bring himself to say much to me about the event but this:
“Ba mhór an náire é. Ba mhór an peaca é!”
—“A great shame it was. A great sin it was!”