Stones of Aran (32 page)

On almost every shore of Aran is a spot called Carraig na Móna, Aill na Móna or Poll na Móna, the rock or cliff or inlet of the turf. These placenames are equally common on the southern coast of Connemara. There they mark places where the turf-boats were loaded, and in Aran the places where they were unloaded. Until recently Aran was almost totally dependent on Connemara for its fuel, for whatever timber it may once have had was reduced to scattered patches of hazel scrub centuries ago, and its well-drained ground of many-fissured limestone had never given rise to more than a few shallow patches of peat. Southern Connemara on the other hand, being mainly of impervious granite and having a
rainfall
much higher than that of Aran, carries hundreds of square miles of bog-land in which, under the living surface of sphagnum moss and heather, a six-or ten-foot depth of plant-remains
compressed
into peat has accumulated over at least the last three
thousand
years.

This dense blackness underfoot has been Connemara’s major resource, for it could be cut as turf and sold to the grey limestone lands of Aran, the Burren, the Gort plain south-east of Galway Bay, and to Galway city itself. The sea and its complex inlets
ramifying
deep into the bog-lands provided the means of carriage. Every year throughout spring and summer turf was cut, spread to dry, turned, stacked, brought out of the bogs in basketfuls, carried by donkey-carts down to hundreds of little quays and rocky ledges from which boats could be loaded, and shipped on the famous black-hulled, brown-sailed hookers of Connemara to the bays and inlets serving as ports for each village of Aran, to Ballyvaughan
and Kinvara and Galway city. Such was the pressure of poverty on Connemara to sell off the turf that even the
scraith
itself, the
topmost
layer of living roots, was dried for burning at home instead of being replaced at the bottom of the cutting. The result after centuries of this trade has been the denudation of the outer islands and peninsulas such as Na hOileáin and An Cheathrú Rua, and to a large extent of Rosmuc and Camas at the heads of the inlets, leaving a bizarre terrain in which soggy dells alternate with
hummocks
of bare rock and scratchy bushes—the soft rainlands of the North Atlantic seaboard stirred together with a harsh
Mediterranean
maquis.
Leitir Mealláin, the outermost of Na hOileáin, was bare more than a century ago and its people had to carry their own fuel four miles from the north of Garomna, the next island in the chain; in fact turf was so precious in Leitir Mealláin that instead of the traditional midsummer bonfire on St. John’s Eve they would set up an oar to dance round. Garomna is bare now except for a few shallow deposits being cut at present, and so is Leitir Móir to the north of it. Emigrants returning to Leitir Móir from America early in this century used to be amazed to find that the smooth green hill they had played football on as lads had become a gaunt crag of straggling furze and ling, and now the people there have been allocated strips of bog on the mainland east of Camas, eight or ten miles away. The removal of the peat has revealed the heavily glaciated landforms of these archipelagoes and peninsulas. The raw-looking outcrops of pinkish granite are strewn with
glacial
erratics, some of them so huge as to have become well-known landmarks, and often when I have been enquiring about the name of one of these monumental boulders my informant has told me, almost with incredulity, that his or her grandmother remembered hearing the old folk say they had once cut turf off the top.

For Aran the only alternative to Connemara’s turf was
buail
treach
,
dried cowdung, which was in short supply and troublesome to collect, and although inoffensive and indeed pleasantly fragrant (it is still in use here and there, especially in Inis Meáin), it gives out little heat, so that if the Aran man complained that the
turf he had been sold was damp or crumbly, the standard retort of the Connemara man was “It’s better than
cac
bó
anyway!”—and
Cac
Bó
,
cowshit, became Connemara’s cruel nickname for the poor Araner.

In fact Connemara was as poverty-stricken as Aran during the last century and the first few decades of this. These two teeming populations, both half-starved most of the time and completely starved very frequently, maintained themselves in life and
occasional
high spirits by exchanging the products of their meagre soils. The possibility of exchange, of life, lay in the difference
between
limestone and granite. Aran’s rock where it is not bare
carries
a good grassland, dry underfoot even in winter, but with a tendency to burn up in summer, especially in droughty periods when the shallow soil quickly dries out. At least the horses, which were principally used in winter and spring for carrying seaweed, could be returned to their native hillsides (for most of them were Connemara ponies) for a few months from June. Connemara on the other hand was short of winter pasturage. The cattle there, according to a report of the 1890s, suffered from two diseases, the “cripple” and the “pine”; the first was in fact rheumatism acquired on the rainswept hillsides in spring, and the second mere
starvation
suffered in those miserable winter pastures of the coastal
region
, waterlogged and acidic, full of rushes and wild iris. Therefore the Connemara man would bring his cow across to Aran for the winter, paying in turf for its grazing. The Aran man, proud of the nutritious grass that puts such “bone” on Aran cattle, would be contemptuous of the starveling beasts from over the Sound; his nickname for them and for the Connemara folk themselves was
Slóchtaí
,
hoarse ones, perhaps because the Connemara dialect sounds low and throaty to the Aran ear, perhaps because the beasts coughed. When the Connemara man came to fetch his cow in the spring he would pretend to be dissatisfied with its
condition
, and the time-honoured joke was to accuse the Aran man of having used it to carry sand and seaweed up from the shore for “making land.” This need to make fields out of bare rock was one
of the oddest features of the life of their much commented-on neighbours across the Sound for the Connemara folk, who were rapidly reducing their own hillsides by turf-cutting to as barren a state as Aran’s.

Among the goods that came into Aran the most important
after
the turf was
poitín
,
the barley brew made in secret stills in
out-of
-the-way corners of Connemara and smuggled across either in small quantities buried among the turf or in larger consignments run ashore at night into the little coves of the north coast.
Connemara
, as a large-scale map shows, is all composed of out-of-the-way corners—islands lost in labyrinthine sea-ways, jigsaw-puzzles of countless lakes hidden among the undulations of vast tracts of bog, glens multiplying and dwindling up into the fastnesses of
mountains
ever on the watch for the constabulary or the coastguards. Aran had a few stills, too, especially in Inis Meáin, but lacking these natural advantages over the Law preferred to leave most of the business to Connemara.

The other goods I have heard of as being traded across the Sound are an odd assortment. Aran’s potatoes are better than Connemara’s and often the turf would be paid for half in money and half in potatoes. Osiers or “sally-rods” as they are called here are grown for basket-making in little sally-gardens in damp
corners
of both Aran and Connemara, but the Connemara ones do not grow long enough to make the circumference of a big
turf-creel
, and Aran sally-rods used to be brought across for that
purpose
. Long strips of turf cut from seashore grasslands in Connemara were taken into Aran, rolled up, for laying on roofs under the straw thatch. Aran’s salted breams were a delicacy for Connemara. Gravestones levered out of Aran’s limestone
pavements
and decorated and lettered by Aran stone-cutters went out in the turf-boats and now pave the ground in the little seaside churchyards of Connemara. Vast amounts of limestone in its
natural
state found its way to Connemara too, for a boat that had brought over sixteen tons of turf and was returning empty
required
up to six tons of ballast. Some of this would be burnt for
lime in little kilns by the shore and used in cement and whitewash or spread on the land; so the basic stuff of Aran itself went to sweeten the acid soil of Connemara.

All these minor exchanges were carried on the back of the turf trade and died out with it as other fuels became available here. Perhaps it was a relief to Aran to be delivered from this
dependence
on Connemara. A vengeful story by Colm Ó hIarnáin of Eoghanacht, “
An
Bádóir
Santach
,”
“The Greedy Boatman,”
describes
the Connemara man bringing his cargo of inferior turf into port here, gleefully anticipating the price he is going to extort for it from the islanders who even in the height of summer are desperately anxious about the long wet winter to come. But to his amazement instead of the usual crowd on the quay all eager to leap aboard and help throw the turf ashore in the hope of securing the load for themselves, there is nobody in sight, until a man with a donkey carrying a little barrel of some sort comes by and greets him with such merriment and mockery that the boatman becomes alarmed, cuts his mooring and pushes out from the quay. The Aran man cries after him, “You’re not going, boatman,
without
being introduced to your enemy, the lad that will be there
before
you whichever harbour or port you go into, that will be on the doorstep before you whichever house you enter? Look, you rascal, look!”—and shows him the barrel, on which is written “Calor Gas.”

The end did not really come so emblematically as that, of course. First coal and then briquettes and gas became more and more competitive with turf as the lorry, the train and the steamer won out against the Connemara hooker. There used to be a
hundred
and fifty hookers working out of Greatman’s Bay alone in the last century, and in my explorations of the Connemara coastline I am always coming across their skeletal remains sunk in mud or bleaching behind a field-wall by that shore which is now so silent. The last few survivors of that fleet today are being sought out,
lovingly
restored, and raced in the summer festivals of little ports all around Galway Bay, and in this year of 1983 one hooker has been
ferrying pleasure-trippers to Cill Rónáin from Ros a” Mhíl. So those tannin-brown sails and tar-black, full-breasted hulls, the lines of which are so unexpectedly fine in work-boats of provincial provenance that one marine historian would derive them from such remote and lordly influences as the pleasure-yachts of
seventeenth-century
Holland, are becoming a familiar sight again after an
absence
of some years, and the craftsman-families who make them, to designs inherited by the mind’s eye only, are busier than they have been for decades.

But the last time I saw a heap of turf on an Aran quay was in Port Mhuirbhigh ten years ago, and I will never see the sight Aran folk recall so fondly, a score of deeply laden hookers lying off the coast with sails furled and the blue turf smoke arising from their cabins where tea was being made and fish fried while they waited for sufficient tide to bring them into the little ports of the villages. Those boatmen of the husky voices and intricate curses have sailed away for ever; the turf has been piled into the donkey-baskets and carried home, the few sods left as if by accident on the quay have been gathered by the paupers, and even the turf-dust has been swept up and scattered on the potato-gardens, Connemara’s mite contributed to Aran soil, all for the last time.

Port Eochla, the shore corresponding to Eochaill village, like so many of the shores I have described, is seldom visited. It has no
remarkable
features, just seaweed-covered boulders exposed at low tide, a curve of shingle, and on its east side a shelf of rock where a boat could come alongside at the flood. One would scarcely notice this rock in passing nor think that it merited a name—but this is Aill na Móna, the cliff of the turf, and what I have written here are the associations waiting off-shore for the tide of recollection rising around that name.

The shinglebank of Port Eochla gives place eastwards to a
scattering
of big slabs lying on a rock-bench knobbed with rough
nodules
of chert. As the bench rises to form low cliffs the storm beach dwindles, and the final stretch of it around the next headland has been cleared and piled aside to increase the grazing along the clifftops. This comparatively high point of a low-lying coast is called Carnán na bhFiach, the hillock of the ravens. A few
hundred
yards farther on one may be surprised by a deep roaring
under
foot; the sea has found various clefts in the limestone of the terraced shore and excavated a labyrinthine cellarage in which it sighs and grumbles even on calm days. If there is any swell on the sea, foam comes leaping up through three gaping holes in the roofs of these vaults. Both sand and seaweed accumulate down there, and used to be fetched up by means of ladders. As these puffing-holes were assets to the various people who had rights on this shore they bore possessive names, and the largest of them is still called Scailp Mhikey.

The terrace punctuated by these holes is the western arm of Port na Mainistreach, the bay of the monastery, and on the
hillside
that rises rather closely behind it are the grey walls of an
ancient
church and the remains of an almost deserted village, Mainistir, which means “monastery.” This is a richly haunted landscape, part of the labyrinth to be explored in the sequel to this book, but here I stick doggedly to the hard going of the shoreline and note some lesser monuments, dating from the kelp-burning era. The first is close by Scailp Mhikey: a kelp kiln of the sort
introduced
by the Free State government in about 1932, almost
complete
, and only a little wave-battered, and in fact the only surviving example in the island. It is like an open-topped
rectangular
box, about fifteen feet long by six wide and three-and-a-half deep, neatly built of the sort of limestone blocks that can be picked out of any rocky spot here. It has an opening like a hearth at either end and two smaller openings on either side, at ground
level. Traces of a fan-shaped flagged area before one of the
end-openings
can be made out. This type of kiln, in which the weed was burnt only for eight or ten hours and raked out as an ash rather than being made to fuse into a solid block, would have been much easier to use than the conventional type, but as I have recounted earlier the industry was failing and set in its ways by the time of these innovations. This particular kiln was never used, I am told. The pile of stones just north of it is the remains of one of the circular enclosures for collecting weed that were built at the same time and equally failed to win favour.

For various reasons Mainistir men did not think themselves lucky in their shore. Along its inner curve, where the coastal road comes close by, it is a very abrupt shingle slope, on which any searods cast ashore tend to be smashed up before they can be
collected
. The sheltering heights all around made it difficult to dry weed thoroughly, and the steep banks did not provide suitably level and airy sites for burning the weed either. At the east of the bay, for instance, one can see the remains of a kiln of the
traditional
type, which has had to be perched most awkwardly on the slope of a grassy knoll (the name of which, by the way, is Tóin-
le-gaoth
, backside-to-the-wind!).

The eastern limb of the bay rises into a cliff thirty or forty feet high called An Caipín, the cap, whose dark and frowning profile is unmistakably that of an Aran man in a peaked cap—a Mainistir man considering the shortcomings of his shore, perhaps, for this point marks the beginnings of Cill Rónáin’s much more favourable portion. Off the point between Port na Mainistreach and the next bay are extensive rocky shallows (Carraig an Lugáin, the rock of the hollow) on which the ribbonweed or
coirleach
grows; the Cill Rónáin people used to be able to lead their horses and donkeys out onto it to fill their straddle-baskets. From the far side of this next bay another great reef, An Charraig Fhada, the long rock, stretches half across its mouth, and because of these sheltering arms the bay has still waters and a fine sandy beach. (This is “The Mooltia” on the Ordnance Survey maps, a name
that used to be the subject of argument among the wise men of the village; their best opinion seems to have been that it derives from Trá na mBuailte, the beach of the
buailte
,
the little pastures of the good sandy grazing-land around it.) The soft sand of the bay made it easy to collect searods here as they drift ashore
unbroken
, but on the other hand it was hard to avoid the contamination of kelp by the sand.

Of all this sequence of small bays from Port Chorrúch onwards to this, the last one, Port Eochla used to get the best prices for its kelp, as it was free from sand and yet was low-shored and open to the winds. But these workday aspects of the shores, which so
intensely
individualized them to their slaves and masters, are in eclipse now that the toilsome centuries are past, and only a few old men could tell you about them. Holiday values emerge in their stead: Port Chorrúch for bird-watching; Port na
Mainistreach
for picking up decorative pebbles polka-dotted in white calcite, fragments from some offshore stratum full of fossilized corals; Trá na mBuailte for sea-bathing, or at least for sun-bathing, or watching dolphins trying backwards somersaults as they were doing, rather gracelessly, last time I was down that way.