Stones of Aran (18 page)

Seán and Beartla, fishermen of Bun Gabhla, like to catch the BBC coastal weather reports at 8:05 a.m. before deciding whether or not to launch their currach for the day. They had promised to give me a lift out to the Brannock Islands on the first suitable morning, so I had set my alarm clock to wake me in time to cycle the four miles westwards to Bun Gabhla for the moment of decision. From my bedroom window the North Sound looked smooth enough to me, so I dressed and ate, and leapt onto my bike. It was a grey morning, in the April of a belated spring. The ease with which I sailed up to Seán’s bungalow high on Aran’s westernmost hill should have told me there was more wind at my back than I thought. Seán, opening his door, looked surprised to see me. “You’re not going anywhere today!” he said, and led me through to the kitchen. The four children were waiting around the table with silent sleepy smiles while Bríd buttered scones for them. Behind them the picture window held a dark panorama of the Connemara coast eight miles away, and Seán pointed out the sparks of white flickering all along its base, tiny images of the breakers one could expect on Aran’s southern shores that day. The radio was impassively reciting a familiar litany of winds veering south and south-west, increasing gale force 8 and severe gale force 9, etcetera, in a string of sea areas including Shannon. But Shannon is a vast tract of ocean and many a gale out there never troubles Aran; and Beartla’s coming in for the conference at that moment (silently materializing in what was evidently his habitual way, without knocking) also gave me hope that the day was not quite out of the question. But then again my few previous encounters
with Beartla had led me to associate him with weather unsuitable for whatever is in hand. Once I had found him pulling rye for thatch on a sweaty July afternoon, savagely yanking the handfuls out of the ground and beating the soil off the roots with vicious blows against his boot; once gloomily looming up on his bike out of a wet white mist, going to milk a distant cow; once slamming nails into splintery boards to make a shed for his donkey at the bitterly windy gable of his cottage. Bríd handed round mugs of tea, and while I chatted with the children I kept an eye on the two tall Aran men standing in the window against the sky they were weighing up. Seán’s wide-shouldered stance and gingery aureole of whisker and hair spelt robust commonsense, Beartla’s lank
darkness
a pessimism verging on despair. Beartla’s body is a long line of what would be poetry if one could only get the hang of its metre: a loose linkage of lean and rigid lengths, a Swiss knife of bladed and pointed implements (scythe, pitchfork, spade) capable of
unexpected
leverages (crowbar, pickaxe) and fierce twists (wrench, vice), which works with dogged grimness or folds up completely (crouched under a wall from the rain) or sprawls abandoned (
leaning
back in his chair till nearly horizontal, heels at the hearth and hand raised at the gaping door of his cottage to every passer-by); his brows, nose and lips are blades at work too, sickles and
bill-hooks
, impatiently and dangerously hacking away in the long hummocky field of his face, around two deep eye-wells brimming with darkness, tenderness and melancholy.

Beartla’s eloquence is not verbal; Seán on the other hand has a word for every moment. Now he interrupted Bríd’s marshalling of the children for school to make them show me the baby wild
rabbits
they had in a cardboard box; and then, as Bríd recaptured the children, stuffed their arms into sleeves, hung satchels about them and herded them out to the car, he told me what a plague rabbits have become on the islands in recent years. They are destroying pastures, and it seems cattle refuse grass fouled by them. Many Aran people will not eat rabbits as they believe they interbreed with the half-wild cats that live on the crags; a neighbour of Seán’s
had actually seen a rabbit and a cat in a field doing something which Seán wouldn’t quite specify but which proved the point. I said that that was completely impossible, and that the cats one sees waiting by rabbit holes are hunting, not courting. But Seán was doubtful. “You wouldn’t know,” he said. “The cats and the rabbits down on the football-field are getting that friendly they’re practically walking about hand in hand!”

It seemed to have been decided in the meantime that it was worth going down to the shore at any rate, so we finished our mugs of tea and left: the warmth of the kitchen range. Seán took Beartla on the pillion of his scooter and I followed on my bike, whirring down the twisted mile of road and track that finally jolts to a stop among the stones of Cladach Bhun Gabhla, the shore pertaining to Bun Gabhla village. We climbed the shinglebank and considered the outlook. This is Aran’s most westerly shore, and the nearer of the two uninhabited Brannock Islands faces it across half a mile of rock-strewn water. Waves were rolling into the channel from either end; not very menacing ones, I thought, but my companions looked dubious. And then the waves were suddenly much larger; grey humps were bulging and jostling in the middle of the channel and blasts of foam were jumping over the southern point of the island. This was decisive. We turned away, and without a word Beartla wandered off along the
tidemark
, stopping here and there to pick up a few thick stems of
seaweed
, flinging them up the shore to be added to a small collection of them he had drying on a wall nearby. (An alginates factory in Connemara buys these “searods” at a price that makes collecting them worth while when nothing better offers.) Meanwhile I
persuaded
Seán to walk a sector of the coast to the north with me and tell me the names of all its ins and outs. But after half a mile or so the rain came on heavily. Seán took a short cut directly up the crags to his house on the skyline; I turned back for my bike and cycled home drenched.

The gales gave up the game after a few days and a suitable
morning
showed itself in my bedroom window. It was still and grey as I cycled westwards; a few small cloudbanks were sitting on the
water
in the North Sound. The children and Bríd were about to go eastwards to school and Seán and Beartla westwards to the shore when I arrived. By the time I had caught up with them again they were inspecting the currach which was lying upside-down
supported
by its thwarts on little piles of stones, with one or two others by a field-wall near the end of the road.

Currachs, being made of tarred canvas stretched over a
framework
of laths, are easily holed on rocks and easily repaired by
tarring
on a canvas patch. Some people still make their own currachs, but this one had come from the boatyard in Inis Oírr where an aged craftsman pursues his hereditary trade. Seán told me that it had cost him £30 in 1968. (One like it would cost six or seven hundred pounds today.) The Aran currach is a narrow keel-less boat, sharp-prowed and square-sterned, with two to four thwarts; Seán’s had three thwarts and was twenty-one feet long, which made it a heavy load for two to carry down to the water—but to have a third man sharing the catch would have been
uneconomical
. Seán’s currach, thick with old patches and lumpy black from repeated tarrings, was worn but water-tight. He heaved up its prow, Beartla crept in under it and straightened up with the
forward
thwart on his shoulders, Seán went in behind him and shouldered up the rear thwart, and then they walked slowly and unsteadily under the eclipsing load, holding it by the thole-pins, up the shinglebank and down over the slippery rocks to the
margin
of the sea. (Books on the West of Ireland invariably liken a currach carried thus by two or three men to a giant black beetle, very accurately; but the sight always makes me see, nonsensically, a short procession wearing a huge communal hat.) At the water’s edge Seán and Beartla lurched sideways and let the currach roll off them into the foam swilling over a sheet of rock that has been slightly improved into a slip. Then they got into their bright
yellow
oilskins and put their gear into the currach—buoys, nets,
bait, two oars, the outboard motor, a flask of tea and a bag of
buttered
scones. A few stones for ballast and a little plastic bottle of holy water jammed behind a rib of the bows completed the
outfitting
. I asked them to put in another pair of oars so that I could try my hand at rowing. They intended to visit lobsterpots set here and there around the Brannock Islands, and it was decided they would land me on the farther island, where the lighthouse is, transfer me to the nearer island after a few hours, and collect me from there at the end of the day.

The first pots were not far away, so the morning silence was spared the motor for a while and Beartla and I took the oars. I was to take the stroke from him, behind me in the bows. The currach oar is a hefty pole with one face of its outer third flattened to give a blade no wider than its stock. A thick triangular tab with a round hole in it on the side of the stock fits over the thole-pin, a stout wooden peg set in the gunwale. The handle is long, to give more leverage, and so the two oars overlap and are pulled
cross-handed
. I soon found out that the beginner tends to bump the knuckles of one hand against the opposite handle; the trick, as Seán pointed out, is to keep the handle on the windward side higher than the other, the difference in angles of the oars then compensating for the tilt of the boat away from the wind. The stroke is fast and rather short. In fact we shot off as if in a race—probably Beartla was trying to test my stamina—until one of his thole-pins snapped and he did a complicated jack-knife into the bows. As he moodily groped around under himself for a
replacement
for the pin and battered it into place with a stone from the ballast, Seán made a few sententious observations such as: “That would be bad, now, if we were under the cliffs!”

The first two pots hauled up were empty, so Seán mounted the outboard and we sped away round the southern point of the first island, outlying slabs of which reared up over us black and
dripping
, with the sea fighting itself in clefts and caverns below. Seán shouted out little volleys of placenames and pointed wildly as we drove past the promontories and I wrestled with my flapping map
and notebook in the spray. I got An Bodach Crom, the
hunchbacked
lout, in the right place at any rate, on the outside of the south-westernmost point; the cliff profile with its tiny punched-in nose and great barnacled chin was unmistakable. Then we were approaching the south-east corner of the farther island, where a long jetty about a yard wide comes angling out, with a flight of slippery little steps down its outer face. A heavy swell coming round the corner made the currach buck, and Seán inched us in with extreme caution, while Beartla held me back from trying a leap until the three or four small waves that always follow four or five big ones came; then at a moment when we were almost
motionless
: “Out with you, quick!”—and I was slithering up the steps on all fours while the boat wallowed away below me. The jetty deposited me, rather shaken and chilled, on a wide wet flag of rock, where I paused to wave to the fishermen as the currach pranced off into the uneasy ocean.

A faint worn mark led across the rock-sheets to a neatly
consolidated
gap in the mighty storm beach that hid the interior of the island. The Irish name of An tOileán Iarthach, the western island, as it is called, is anglicized as Earragh Island, but in English it is more often called Rock Island. It is in fact all rock, as I saw when I passed through the gap in the storm beach, except for one or two little hollows in which there is enough soil to have prompted someone, probably a bored lighthouse keeper, to project a
vegetable
patch, which had not prospered. From the gap a track leads north to the high-walled enclosure about the lighthouse and its living-quarters. I diverged from the track and roamed to and fro across the interior as far as the rock-bank that sprawls over much of its western half, feeling rather self-conscious ferretting about in the silent emptiness under the cold observation of the
crystal-headed
tower. The only human touches to the intimidatingly
barren
terrain were a few roofless outhouses, a ruined limekiln and occasional wedge-marks in the rock where blocks had been levered out for the building of the lighthouse over a century ago.

By degrees I worked round to the gateway of the great
barracks-square
and went in to look at the tower (cylindrical, white with two broad horizontal bands of black, and a little green door) and the living-quarters (a long, single-storied building of grey cut limestone, with more green doors), and after some knocking found one of the keepers in a room full of comfortable smells and warmth. A radio was giving out brief yelps and long crackling
silences
. The man keeping an ear on it couldn’t leave his post but said that if I wanted to go up and see the light I was welcome to do so; the tower was “on the latch.” I crossed the yard again and opened the green door of the lighthouse. A spiral staircase led me up, green banister-rail of iron on the left and a curved grey wall of impeccably cut stone full of fossil shells on the right. A lacy black floor of cast iron surrounded the light, a gigantic prismatic pineapple of glass and brass, a model universe inhabited by
rainbows
and sunbursts. I tried to summon up a practical
understanding
of it and thought about Fresnel lenses and acetylene lamps for a bit; I dutifully copied from a plaque on the wall: