Stones of Aran (36 page)

But at this moment I hear strange voices from beyond the turn of the headland; it sounds like a row. I leave my puzzling and hurry on, full of curiosity.

A crowd of hairy-chinned, bald-pated men in dingy robes make a frieze against the sky along a low clifftop. Their eyes are focused on a scene being played out on the shore below; their gestures
express
awe, embarrassment, edification, glee, etcetera. The
protagonists
are a gaunt, implacable elder and a fervent youth, both skeletal but hardy, both illuminated by their passion for God in the first place and for Aran in a very close second; saints,
evidently
. Enda, founder of the towers of learning I can see rising from the hillside beyond, has just refused his pupil Columba or Colm Cille, a small share of Aran by which to be remembered. Colm takes off his cloak and flings it on the ground. Mastering his anger he says between his teeth, “Give me the width of my cloak thereof.” Enda can hardly refuse the modest request, but his eyes are very wary. And indeed the cloak is already spreading
miraculously
; it has gobbled up an acre before Enda recovers from his
astonishment
, snatches it up and shakes it back to its normal size. He rears up in outrage at this use of God-given powers against his own God-given authority over Aran of the Saints. He grabs the younger man, swings him high and dashes him down against the rocks. As Colm Cille crawls into the surf, a hand to his ribs, Enda raises his arm to the horizon and pronounces immediate
banishment
. No currach will be provided either; let the ambitious
neophyte
take himself off by another of his miracles. Colm Cille wades out a little way and then turns, raises both fists and curses the place he loved too greedily:

Then he strikes out for the open sea, and is last seen heading for Kerry with a powerful dog-paddle. The other revenants dissolve into thin air, crossing themselves. I advance to investigate the site of this divine knockabout.

To this day, it is said, the mark of St. Colm Cille’s ribs are to be seen on the stone. I have never been able to find them, but
perhaps
they are represented by the fissures of a sheet of rock near low tide mark, opposite a curious embayment of the coastal field-wall around a bare patch of land. This piece, visibly excerpted from the rest of Aran, is Gort an Chochaill, the field of the cloak. Very high tides claim it and relinquish it. A hundred yards to the south-east on a little bluff below the line of small cliffs that continues the shore east-wards, is an altar of rough stone blocks with an old stone cross. On the saint’s day, the 9th of June, many islanders come to visit Altóir Cholm Cille and make their “rounds,”
repeating 
the Creed and the Ave Maria, for if the island lies under the cloak of any saint nowadays it is that of Colm Cille, while Enda’s own well on the hillside above Cill Éinne is little attended. The
altar
has a sink-like hollow in its upper surface in which are a
number
of pebbles, and the practice is to take seven of these pebbles and throw one back after each round of the
turas.
The awkward little path thus tramped out scrambles (sunwise, of course) around the slopes of the bluff, close above the sea. There is no real well but people take a few drops from the seepage under the cliff as holy water. The cross is a strange one, shaped out of a
comparatively
thin slab, with a broad octagonal central area and very short, wide arms and uprights. There is a rather spindly outline cross
inscribed
on its face with the letters IHS above and (of later date) the words “St. Collum Kill” written in a slanting line of cursive script below. An old photograph shows the cross standing on top of the altar, but now it is propped up in the hollow that holds the pebbles, and one of its arms is missing; presumably it was wind or wave that knocked it down. Flowers are sometimes left on the
altar
, so the pebbles in the hollow are usually mixed with bits of broken jamjars, which I pick out now and again, and withered stalks, which I leave.

St. Colm Cille is supposed to have come to Aran after his early studies at Clonard and before founding his own monasteries at Durrow, Deny and Iona, and undertaking his great work, the “Conversion of the Picts.” But since he left Ireland for Iona in 563 and Enda is said to have founded his monastery here in 483, it does not seem likely that they met. The tale of their coming to blows over Aran is already a monkish concoction of the ridiculous and the sublime; my version merely stirs in a pinch of today’s
deplorable
levity, together with the naïve realism of Aran’s fireside tales and the Latinate sonority of Man us O’Donnell’s
Betha
Coluimb
Chille
of
1532 as translated by a Celtic philologist in 1914; we tellers of the tale all come long after the event, if event there ever was, that imprinted this otherwise nondescript patch of shore with so much remarkability.

But to undo the effect both of mediaeval curse and modern
frivolity
I will add here Colm Cille’s love-poem to Aran. It is an apocryphal work, which O’Donovan dates to the ninth or tenth century. My version merely condenses his, abandoning the
four-line
verse structure of the original Irish:

The shoreline backed by little cliffs that leads on from the saints' battleground to the harbour of Cill Éinne is the only Aran coast on which rats are common. It was not always so, on this holy
island
. In about 1185 a Welsh cleric, Giraldus Cambrensis, wrote a description of Ireland for his master, King John, in which he had two remarkable things to say about Aran:

But by the time Roderic O'Flaherty was writing almost exactly five centuries later, either some of the virtue had gone out of the soil of Aran or incredulity was on the increase:

So it is in the vicinity of the two ports of his “territory” of west Connacht, Galway and Cill Éinne, that rats became known in O'Flaherty's time (for the big brown rat is an immigrant and in Irish it used to be called
luch
fhrancach,
French mouse, and today it is simply the
francach).
Rats haunt all the villages of Aran now, but this is the only village with a cliff just at the bottom of its back-gardens, and a lot of rubbish comes sailing over this
convenient
provision of Nature; so that it is only a coincidence that I am reminded of the purity of St. Enda's Aran by some minute
monkish
things rummaging among the pebbles as I approach Cill Éinne, the church of Enda itself. Farther on, the beach is largely made up of broken glass from the pub above and is in any case impassable when the tide is in, so it is better to go up the path through a little break in the cliffs two hundred yards beyond St. Colm Cille's altar and follow the main road through the village itself.

Cill Éinne is a
sráidbhaile,
a street-village, like most of Aran's villages. A mixture of recent bungalows, one or two mobile homes, a few well-set-up two-storey houses from the 1950s,
cottages
built by the Congested Districts Board for fishermen earlier in the century, and the remains of the hovels these last replaced, line a mile or so of roadside, with casual interruptions of little stone-walled fields. The pub, called “Fitz's” from its former owner Tommy Fitzpatrick (it was also known as “Licensed to Sell,” for that was the rather cryptic legend over its door) is on the left, the sea-side of the road. The two attractive and distinctive features it
possessed in the days of Fitzpatrick have been swept away by the younger generation: a fine pair of cypresses, unique in this
wind-shorn
island, and an impressive piece of country signwriting from the days of Tommy's father, displaying his name in the resounding Irish form:

hand-lettered in a majestic Gaelic script, with extra ovals in the loops of the letters P, giving them the look of a pair of wide-set eyes. (In return for these losses, the new interior, a little
lounge-bar
that could be anywhere in Ireland, is preferable to the chilly bare room furnished only with a few benches and beer-barrels and a dartboard that preceded it.)

Opposite the pub begins a line of buildings, only two of them inhabited, set back a little from the road, called
An
Ró
Nua,
the new row, incorporating the derelict remains of a long row of tiny attached cottages that was new some time early in the last century, and whose inhabitants were rehoused in the C.D.B. cottages
farther
on. I once asked an islander how many rooms these old dwellings had had, and he replied that he didn't think they had a room at all—which puzzled me until I remembered that the
traditional
farm cottage of the west of Ireland has a kitchen and a room off it to the west called simply
an
seomra,
the room; these long rows of fishermen's cottages had no such amenities.

The Ró Nua is a memory of that dreadful Cill Éinne of a
hundred
years ago, the village of landless fishermen who had no boats for fishing, which drew a certain amount of horrified attention from the outside world. In 1880 the Duke of Edinburgh was in Galway, interesting himself in the distribution of Indian meal to the starving of Connemara, and enjoying some remarkably fine salmon fishing on the Corrib, according to the reporters covering the visit. In April he was conducted around Cill Éinne by a
member
of the Mansion House Committee, a Dublin charity engaged in famine-relief.

A girl was born into that Cille Éinne during his visit. When
informed
of the happy event by the parish priest, His Royal Highness requested that she be named Marie, after his Duchess, and later sent a cheque. What happened to this Marie? Did she
escape
the fevers, did she gather armfuls of nettles for dinner like the other village children, did her parents save the money to pay her passage to America? The parish records of the period are lost; I have not been able to trace her history, if she had one.

The very first Cill Éinne, that of St. Enda's abbatical successors, looks down on this mingling of decayed nineteenth-century and revived twentieth-century Cill Éinne from the hillside inland, in the shape of a stump of a round tower and a tiny oratory perched as neatly as a robin on the skyline. Another Cill Éinne, the
stronghold
that was of such military importance in Elizabethan and Cromwellian times, obtrudes its broken bones among the houses and gardens on the coastal side of the road opposite the Ró Nua. Then comes a T-junction; a side-road runs inland to the monastic sites and to Killeany Lodge, which I shall visit in the sequel to this book, while the main road turns sharp left to the coast. The old fort, Arkyn Castle, occupied this angle, but the road turns right again so immediately that one could miss the remaining lengths of curtain-wall and the little square tower by the sea, because one's eye is caught by the sudden vistas of the bay and the sand dunes beyond. Here is the harbour, down a slight scarp at one's feet, with just one or two small trawlers and none of the appurtenances of a port.

A small quay was built here in 1826 as a famine-relief project, with the aid of a grant from the Fishery Board; it was called Céibh an “Rice” because the labourers were paid in rice rather than in cash. The Cill Éinne fleet of those days included thirty-eight
hookers employed in fishing and drawing kelp to Galway, as well as many currachs. By the 1890s it had been reduced to just one sailing vessel, and the village was in the state I have described. The C.D. Board when it came to the rescue put most of its efforts into developing the already superior harbour at Cill Rónáin, but here in 1912–13 it provided some cottages to replace the squalid rows of hovels, and some pier-buildings, now vanished; the big square limekiln by the quay dates from this phase of construction. The quay has since been extended, most recently in 1977, but the bigger trawlers of Aran's modern fleet cannot reach it as the approaches are too shallow. For the smaller boats it is a useful harbour of refuge, as Cill Rónáin is vulnerable to south-easterly gales.

The C.D.B.'s row of semi-detached cottages, each with its tiny garden in front, its sentry-box of an outside lavatory behind, and a strip of land running back to a line of cliffs three hundred yards inland, brings Cill Éinne to an end within another quarter of a mile. From there I turn back now, to look more closely at the obscure remains of the castle, around which I will hang a history of its eventful centuries.