Stones of Aran (20 page)

Blue was winning over grey, above and below. I began to savour the aimless life of the beachcomber, and stretched myself out,
feeling
a not-unpleasant vacuum in my mind. After a while of dozing, a sound like mice rehearsing a crowd-scene opened my eyes. A fleet of small birds, portly as bath-ducks, black with neat white flashes on either wing, was bobbing in the ripples beyond my boots: ten black guillemots. My mental note-taking reminded me that my project was to see all that was to be seen on this island in the time it would take Seán and Beartla to visit a dozen
lobster-pots
. I jumped to my feet, and a hundred herring gulls flapped up from a ridge close by to the north. There I found a swathe of
boulders
whitewashed with droppings, and nests everywhere among them, little pads of grey grassy stuff, but no eggs as yet. I looked for terns as I had heard that they nest here, but it was still too early in the season for them. Beyond the ridge I climbed a rise to the west, and found myself looking down a most unexpected cliff onto a sea-washed terrace fifty feet below. The cliff was deeply
undercut
. Two rectangular caverns ran far back into it under my feet, and huge blocks had dropped out of the overhangs to leave two long lintels above their entrances; the larger of these lintels was a single forty-foot span, accurately cut to a section about four feet wide and six deep. I followed the clifftop south and then west again to look back at this Egyptian fantasy of Nature. The caverns were massively pillared, and shafts of sunlight slanted down into their shadow from the openings above. I wished I had time to clamber down to the terrace and explore those operatic portals, strike a pose perhaps (to the applause of herring gulls?) as High Priest of some netherworldly cult. I was amazed that I had never
even heard report of this, the most magnificent piece of Aran’s cliff-architecture. Later I learned from the currach-men that it had no name; they supposed that it must have come into existence since the time of the
seandream,
the old folk, that dateless but
definitively
extinct generation to which the naming of every feature of the islands, if not of the world, is attributed.

The cliffs steadily declined from that magnificence towards the south-west, and the storm beach I was following along their tops grew and finally merged into the great bank of boulders, An Clochar Bán, that shields the little anchorage from westerlies. Seán and Beartla had not yet reappeared, so I set out along the
clochar
, slipping among mounds of seaweed and gurgling
rock-pools
, towards the islet a quarter of a mile to the south-west.

This appendage to Oileán Dá Bhranóg turned out to be a scale model of Árainn itself, as it rises in terraces from a low northern coast and then slants very slightly southwards and ends in cliffs. The other islet just east of it has the same form; so does An Creachoileán Mór, another islet attached to the south end of the Bun Gabhla shore, and so does Maoilín an Ghrióra, the curious flat-topped hillock separated from the rest of Árainn by the fault-line running back along the general trend of the whole cliff coast. If that fault, which could be connected with the origin of the cliffs, also extends westwards, it should pass under An Clochar Bán (and then just south of An tOileán Iarthach), and these four strikingly similar little end-stops to Árainn would lie along its southern side, like a row of points of suspension…. And indeed I found a slanting cleft running in the right direction; it was
obscured
by boulders and seaweed and the first limbs of the
incoming
tide (and I haven’t yet inveigled a geologist out there to check that it is a fault); but when I looked along its course to the
east-south
-east, there was the little valley of the fault-line, Gleann an Ghrióra, making a notch in the skyline of Árainn through which all the headlands of the Atlantic coast appeared one behind
another
in diminishing perspective to the horizon, as simple in their old age as ABC.

The islet I had now reached, a two-hundred yard slab of rock (An Gob Thiar, the western tip; the other is An Gob Thoir, the eastern tip), must have been much frequented by previous
generations
as it has a number of named features. Along its western face is a shelf called Leic na Creathnaí, from its dense red carpet of
creathnach
, a sort of dulse, a small edible seaweed which used to be gathered here. I tried a bit: deliciously sweet and salty, and then chewy, with a savour fading to rubbery zero. Dulse is still sought
after
in the West of Ireland. Country women take an apron-pocketful of it to nibble while standing behind their vegetable stalls or
baskets
of eggs in Galway’s street market, as I have observed. Beyond this “flag-stone of the
creathnach”
is the cliff-profile of the
hunchback
bully, An Bodach Crom, which Seán had pointed out earlier in the day. Beyond that again, the last few feet of the islet are
almost
divided from the rest by a fissure full of surging sounds, Scailp na mBallach Mór, the cleft of the big rockfish. And finally Carraig na bPiseog, the rock of the bream (the Aran for “bream” being
piseog
rather than
bran
as in the dictionaries). Standing on this ultimate fisherman’s perch from which one can cast an eye over an uninterrupted hemisphere of ocean—I saw the currach coming to fetch me home, and turned to hurry back across rocks and seaweed and the little gasping inrushes of the tide.

Seán and Beartla had finished putting the day’s catch into the crate moored in the bay by the time I reached the sand, and I splashed out through the shallows to meet them. There were fat little starfish washing about in the bottom of the currach, and a few rockfish giving occasional twitches in a bag under a thwart. I was pleased with all I had seen; they were moderately content with their takings of sixteen lobsters, though they had been doing
better
before the storms. And now they were eager to be home, and sent the currach skipping through the waves to Bun Gabhla shore. We threw all the gear ashore and leapt out. Beartla, looking off
towards
the horizon, silently filled the plastic bag I had brought for plant specimens with crab claws for me (the disarmed crabs
having
gone into the
pota
stóir
to feed the lobsters). Then they rolled
the boat upside-down, raised it on their shoulders and staggered up to its parking-place. They ran back for the engine, the oars, the rockfish for their supper. “That’s our day’s work done!” cried Seán delightedly. They stepped out of their oilskins and left them
exactly
where they fell on the shinglebank, and I suddenly
understood
what a familiar and private place this wilderness is to the Bun Gabhla men, who expect to see neither tourists (except
during
a few weekends of high summer) nor their own womenfolk here, and scatter their clothes and nets about it without a thought, the utmost of their care being to put a stone on top to stop them blowing away if it might turn windy. The two fishermen roared off on the scooter and I toiled up the hill after them on my bike, tired, but feeling the day’s moods settle down and jigsaw together into contentment. Seán was at the door of his house as I came by, and I turned in to thank him and to drink my tea. I asked him to check all the placenames I had scribbled on my map and make sure I had them all in the right positions, which he did most scrupulously. The children were just coming in from school as I left.

The score of miles that will close the circuit of Árainn, leading back from the Bun Gabhla shore by way of the north coast to the eastern tip of the island, begins with a brief reprise of the
cliff-theme
of the southern coast, and thereafter unfolds its own
individualities
. Individualities in the plural, because the experiences it offers oscillate between two extremes. The grim rock-banks of the more exposed stretches of coast, in grey weather almost
intolerably
desolate, alternate with bays in which a degree of shelter has allowed the accumulation not only of bright sands and shingles but of history, of a residual human warmth that the fogs and
winter
storms do not quite dispel. A walk that takes one in and out of these bays dips into various eras of the past—the Age of the Saints, the centuries of Aran’s military significance, the birthpangs of the modern fishing fleet, the brief and dazzling reign of Flaherty the film-maker—each of which has brought lasting life to its elected sites. On the other hand the intervening monotonies were dedicated only to a laborious task, perennial throughout the darkest times but now abandoned, the cropping and burning of seaweed; and that whole long Kelp Age has no monument other than a few stones scattered and scarcely identifiable among
millions
of others on the storm beach.

In general the severity of the coast moderates from west to east, from the cliffs that face the north-western gales, by way of low rocky shores and shinglebanks, to the sand dunes in the shelter of Cill Éinne bay. The smaller bays that punctuate this modulation
(one can distinguish about a dozen of them), and in particular Port Mhuirbhigh which almost makes a separate island out of the western third of Árainn, produce the sort of focusing of the landscape that is one of the ways in which mere location is intensified into
place.
By these hearths even the wandering sea pauses. On the coasts between them, however, even the most soundly situated
human
can wander into uncentred and uncentering moods.

The north-western coast of Árainn, from the wind-shadow of the Brannock Islands to the point where it turns east and faces Connemara, is open to the Atlantic, and rises in cliffs to stand against the gales and look out onto the ocean beyond Slyne Head. A fault parallel to the one at An Grióir breaks this mile of cliffs into two ranges, the western one lower than the eastern. One can walk around the coast from Port an Choma under the lower cliffs on a wide terrace of green-fringed rock-pools. If the weather is blowy one may have to time a dash between a rock-pool and the foam leaping up over the edge of the terrace at one point, but
unless
the tide is very high one can usually pick one’s way around a jutting angle of the cliff called An Coirnéal, the corner, to the loveliest seclusion of this rarely visited facet of the island. There is an odd rakishness, a mettlesome spirit, running through the
cubism
of the rocks of this natural esplanade, which must be the combined effect of its undulant surface, the general twist the nearby fault has given to the vicinity, and the carefree poise of a square-faced block—I am sure it must measure forty feet each way—that has detached itself from the cliff against which it leans one elbow, and stands on two fat little legs looking as if it were about to skip into the sea with the ponderous charm of one of Picasso’s surreal beach-girls. Just beyond it a boulder-filled creek marks the fault, and by comparing thicknesses of rock one can see
that the terrace one is standing on here matches up with a level thirty feet higher in the cliffs on its east. This is quite insignificant compared to the faults geologists can trace in other parts of the world, with vertical “throws” of thousands of feet or horizontal displacements of many miles, but this disruption is on an
exhilarating
, only-just-superhuman scale, like the Picasso bather; the gloss of its slanting fault-face on the other side of the creek makes its energy palpable, and yet by scrambling up the wave-worn cleft of the fault-line to the clifftop beyond it one can surmount the
little
cataclysm in a couple of minutes.

From these higher cliffs, one fine Easter Sunday, I watched a basking shark rolling lazily in the sun-filled water below. I
remember
the date because the visitor with me had just discovered a few dusty shards of chocolate-egg in the bottom of his knapsack, and I associate the unexpected taste unfolding as we rested there with the materialization of the strange shape in our idle view. Its black dorsal fin arose first and its long snout with a little bow-wave, and then we saw its submerged bulk vaguely embodied in a slowly gliding net of ripple-shadow and sun-spangles. As its mouth gaped, its gills opened like five huge ruffs. I could not say how big it was—basking sharks of over forty feet in length and weighing more than three tons have been recorded, but I think our
specimen
was not quite in that class. By an irresistible paradox this, the world’s biggest fish, eats only the smallest specks of life, and when it comes to the surface to yawn and loll about like this it is
straining
plankton out of the copious floods of water (up to twenty tons a minute) pouring in at its mouth and out by its fringed gills. In Irish it is called
An
Liamhán
Mór
or
An
Liamhán
Gréine
,
the great
liamhán
(is this word derived from the biblical Leviathan, I
wonder
?) or the
liamhán
of the sun, and in English it used to be known in these regions as the sunfish too, because of its appearing inshore in the spring, to browse off the billions of copepods and other small fry multiplying in the sun-warmed surface waters. Not much is known of the rest of its life, except that after a winter of fasting and torpor out in the deeps it seems to make its way slowly
northwards up the Atlantic coasts of Europe, and disappears again.

The commercial value of the basking shark, which lies in the oil from its gigantic liver, used to be so high that in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the shark fishery was second only to the herring in importance for the Galway Bay fleet. The men of Aran, Connemara and the Claddagh, Galway’s fishing quarter, used to hunt the monsters from small open boats with hand-held
harpoons
. There is an account in Tom O’Flaherty’s
Aranmen
All
, given in suitably gargantuan terms, of how his grandfather
organized
the man of Gort na gCapall to the hunt when after many years of absence the sharks were once more spotted from the clifftops. All available tackle—“spears, gaffs, bocáns, pocáns, buoys, bireógs, straimpíns, long knives and poles and chains taken from a ship wrecked at the Big Cleft”—was assembled and carried down to Port Bhéal an Dúin; a spear was attached by a rope and a cable to a chain wound around a big boulder in a deep pot-hole of the shore; five three-man currachs were launched, a shark was eventually speared, and when it had run itself to exhaustion another team of fifteen men hauled it ashore. The livers used to be boiled in iron cauldrons to extract the oil, which was sent to the mainland in barrels. Some of it was used in Aran for burning in the little lights called
muiríní
,
consisting of a piece of rush as a wick lying in a scallop-shell of oil; shark oil was preferred to
dogfish
oil when it could be got, as it was less smelly and smoky. But when paraffin become available the oil lost its value, and the
fishery
was abandoned.

It seems the shark was absent again for years around the turn of the century, but it had reappeared a few seasons before Robert Flaherty arrived to make
Man
of
Aran
,
and the shark-hunt was
revived
to give him a climactic episode for the film. Flaherty even had ideas of interesting buyers in the oil from the sharks caught on that occasion, and so restoring the industry to the islands, but the price at that time was too low for profit. Since then nobody in Aran had troubled about the fish, until the day described above on
which we watched one from the cliffs and at the same time an idea was occurring to an Aran man on the hilltop behind us. We met him on our way home—a Cill Rónáin trawlerman who, when on land, spends as much time as possible looking at the sea, and on Sundays likes to put the family in the car and drive to some
vantage
point from which he can use his binoculars while they drowse and squabble and read the newspapers. This time he was watching a small trawler out in the North Sound which he told us was a Norwegian poacher making a big killing in a shoal of basking shark. Every few minutes we could see splashing as a shark was hauled on board and its carcass flung off again as soon as the liver had been cut out. At that time such plunderers had little to fear from the sparse patrols and mild penalties that guarded Irish
fisheries
, and in any case this massacre was not one to which the local fishermen objected, as they preferred the risk of catching one of the drifting corpses in their salmon-nets to that of a live shark entangling itself and destroying the net entirely. The Norwegians’ example interested our Aran friend considerably and it prompted him to make enquiries of a firm in Achill Island, where the shark is still caught in fixed nets off the headlands. He found that there is a market for the oil, which has engineering applications as a fine lubricant—we were even told that a few drops of it went to the moon with the Apollo missions—and for the fins, which end up in Chinese shark’s fin soup. So two or three owners of half-deckers entered into agreements with the Achill concern, and hired and mounted harpoon guns, and in the following year, 1980, the
ancient
fishery was briefly resurrected. Ever since
Man
of
Aran
the basking-shark hunt has been part of the romantic myth of Aran, and such was the interest in its revival that more boatloads of
journalists
than trawlers set forth, and many more photographs than sharks were taken. In fact sharks were few that year, and a vast amount of costly diesel fuel was burned in criss-crossing the seas from the Cliffs of Moher to far out beyond the Earragh lighthouse looking for them, and then in creeping up on them close enough for an inexpert harpooner to take a shot. The fishermen eventually
tired of hearing from ambivalent shore-loafers like myself that a shark had been spotted, off the other end of the island the day
before
yesterday; then the salmon season took precedence and the harpoon guns were dismantled. The experiment was tried again with similar results in 1982, so one hopes that from now on the sun-loving basking shark will be able to take its vast and
mysterious
stroll, at least through Aran waters, in peace and safety.