Stones of Aran (3 page)

In climbing past the ruined tower and onwards to the crest of the hillside one has to clamber over a few loosely built drystone walls, or diverge from one’s goal to find gaps in them. But when the
summit is attained (a mere hundred and forty feet or so above the shoreline) the eye is totally beset by walls. The plateau that comes into view here, slightly tilted southwards towards the Atlantic cliff-tops, and stretching, with just two interrupting lowlands, for eight miles along the island, is a walled landscape, uniting the monotonous grandeur of the desert with the petty territorialism of suburbia. This uninhabited back or dip-slope of the island escarpment is referred to as Na Craga, the crags, although most of it is less craggy and more grassy than the areas of bare limestone pavement on the terraces along the northern coast. The first section of it stretches away to the west-north-west for over two miles; then, beyond a valley invisible from here, the higher,
central
, section of the plateau forms a long, straight horizon
declining
very gently from north to south, blocking off the further half of the island.

Balancing on top of the nearest sound-looking wall to scan the disconcerting vista, one makes out that the pattern, for all its countless haphazard irregularities, is dominated by walls roughly parallel to that north-south horizon, and since the controlling direction of this volume is westwards, it is clear that progress is going to be problematic. The waist-high or head-high walls are so close-set that from this low viewpoint they hide the ground
between
them as if the better to conceal their purposes; they
constitute
an obstacle not merely to the body but to the understanding. The network seems too vast and repetitious to be the product of human intentions; the decisions of an individual brain in this transcendental structure are as the gropings of a coral blob
immured
in its reef. Usually nobody is to be seen in this desolation; if anything is being done or suffered here the act is hidden in the obliquity of the grille. If labour reveals its presence at all it is by sound, and almost solely by the clank of stone on stone. One hears how, over centuries, this landscape was created by the
placing
of stone on stone, how it is nowadays barely maintained by replacement of the fallen stone, and how it will lapse into rubble, stone by stone.

I have tried to reduce this inordinate perspective to arithmetic and geometry. The Ordnance Survey map at six inches to the mile shows the field-boundaries as an eye-tormenting tangle of fine lines. By superimposing a square-inch grid on the map and counting squares and bits of squares, I find that the thickly walled areas of Árainn total ten and a half square miles. (Another one and a half square miles, comprising commonage and big
unenclosed
crags, may be omitted from the following calculation as they contribute comparatively little to the results.) The number of fields in thirty randomly selected squares averaged thirty-seven. (In several squares that fell near villages there were over seventy fields, giving an average area of field of only 1240 square yards,
i.e.
typically thirty-one yards by forty.) Hence there are about 14,000 small fields, of average area 2300 square yards or just under half an acre. A random sample of twenty individual fields measured on the map suggests that their average perimeter is 233 yards. (
NB
: Sampling by such methods as dropping a pencil onto the map will produce a misleadingly large proportion of the
comparatively
big fields, and it is not easy to avoid this effect.) Since nearly all walls separate two fields, the total length of wall is 928 miles. Adding a bit to allow for irregularities that do not show up on the six-inch scale, and for some nests of small fields in the generally open areas omitted, and rounding off, I think it is not wildly inaccurate to say that there are a thousand miles of wall in Árainn. Inis Meáin and Inis Oírr would add about 300 and 200 miles respectively, giving a total of 1500 miles. So the islanders exaggerate when they say that the walls of Aran, put end to end, would stretch all the way to Boston—but that is understandable, since it is to Boston that so many of them have fled, rather than be sucked dry as dead flies by the economics of this stone web.

As to the general pattern of this field-system, it is clear that something so regular over such large areas, even if riddled with inconsistency and wilfulness, is structured by overpowering
natural
phenomena. In fact two elemental strengths have laid the
foundations for this labour of generations. First, the cracking of the limestone by earth-forces acting on a continental scale. There are two principal sets of vertical fissure-planes or joints, the more fully developed one being oriented roughly north-south. (The bearing is about fifteen degrees east of north, but I will say simply “north” rather than “approximately north-north-east.” In fact, since the bearing is much more fundamental to Aran geography than true north or magnetic north, I could call it Aran north.) The other set is at right-angles to the first, and on certain levels of the islands a third, oblique set appears, confusing the pattern.

The second elemental force is erosion, which has been guided by the joint system. The small-scale effect of rainwater, widening the cracks into little canyons and dividing the surface into
rectangular
flags or long strips, has already been mentioned. Vastly greater was that of the huge thicknesses of ice pushing across this region of Ireland for a period of perhaps ten thousand years,
ending
about fifteen thousand years ago. The glaciers ripped out strips of blocks to create valleys of all sizes, from the sea-ways between the islands and the wide depressions that almost divide the big island in three, to narrow ravines and little glens, all
oriented
to Aran north. It is difficult even today to override this impressed topography, and in the past the currents of life had to flow with it. An oblique walk across an area of open crag is a
continuous
struggle with little cliffs and ridges and gullies, with no two successive steps on the same level, whereas if one follows the direction of the jointing, smooth flagged paths seem to unroll like carpets before one. Inevitably, walls accept these natural ways, and many of them spring from the natural pedestals
provided
by long unbroken ridges of rock. East-west walls often have to clamber down into narrow glens and then clamber out again, and tend to do this by the shortest way, confirmed in this
labour-saving
intention by the bearing of the minor set of fissures. Hence the fields tend to be rectangular and elongated north-south,
especially
on the plateau where the schema has room to spread itself.
It is as if the walls make explicit the nature of the rock; the
geometry
that could be stepped over and disregarded underfoot is erected into barriers before one’s face.

Of course almost the only visitors who do stray from the boreens, the walled paths between the fields, are those with some botanical, archaeological or geological drive, and in the scientific literature there are many complaints about these walls. H.C. Hart, who made the first careful botanical survey of the islands in 1869, writes feelingly on the subject:

A few years later the botanist Nathaniel Colgan took a bolder line:

These imperial modes reveal a blindness to the “native” and his ways. To cross a wall without bruising one’s shins or jolting one’s spine, one should look for stones that run right through the wall and stick out on either side, and step up and over on these as on a stile, refraining from leaning out from the wall and clutching at the topmost stones to lever oneself upright, but keeping one’s
centre
of gravity as close to the wall and as low over its top as possible. Araners learn this as part of learning to walk. I have seen an Aran father stand back, watchful but not interfering, as a toddler heads up a six-foot wall. If that child does not leave the island he or she will grow up able to cross walls with such fluency one cannot see how it is done. I remember an old man leading me across his land; before my eyes he repeatedly made the transition from being on the near side of a wall to being on the far side with no noticeable intermediate stages, complaining all the while of his rheumatism. A ghost’s proficiency in passing through walls would seem to be only the natural result of such a lifetime’s apprenticeship. But I suspect that that child will leave Na Craga to the old men, and the old men are already leaving it to its ghosts.

The range of rectangularity held up for inspection by the
facets
of individual stones in these walls, from dog-eared squares to thin bony oblongs, images the variability of the field-shapes; one could imagine that each wall is a map of the terrain it hides. The flaw in this fantasy is that whereas the partitioning of the land into fields is virtually complete and every square yard is
appropriated
with what comes to seem like a miserly and obsessive clutch or a scholarly fussiness over definitions, the stones in a wall are usually not tightly packed and admit a modicum of empty space, slippage and instability. An individual wall’s degree of
compaction
depends on its function, the sort of stone to hand, and the skill and taste of the builder. On exposed terrain like Na Craga an open-work wall will dilute the gale more effectively than a solid one which would merely provoke the wind to hammer down onto the ground a few yards to its lea side. Sunset skies often show up a wall like a lace trim to a horizon, a filigree of light and dark.
In certain areas, for instance to the south-west of Túr Mháirtín, the loose stone on offer consists of shaggy crusts or scales two or three feet across like battle-hacked shields, and the field-boundaries there are scrawled in leap-frogging triangles made by leaning these shards together at capricious angles. Elsewhere, and
especially
along waysides, the walls are sober and solid uncoursed masonry-work of well-adjusted blocks; the more substantial “double wall” has two faces of carefully set blocks, bound
together
here and there by through-pieces of longer stones, and with a filling of small stones between them. To enclose a vegetable plot with some hope of excluding rabbits a
claí fidín
(which one could translate as “fragment fence”) is used; this consists of a row of pillar-like uprights (
clocha
mháthar,
mother-stones) set two or three feet apart, the spaces between them built up with small stones carefully packed, and the whole finished off with a row or two of weighty blocks. A visiting preacher once took this type of wall as a metaphor for slipshod construction on inadequate
foundations
, thinking that the word
fiáin
sounded disparaging; let ye not be a
claí
fidín
of the faith, he urged the congregation, but rather a soundly built wall. However, since the
cla
í
fidín
is a highly regarded wall that demands care and patience in the building, his rhetoric fell flat. Some goatish spirits among his hearers might even have wondered if faith is better represented by those walls I mentioned south-west of the tower, which incorporate a lot of nothing by artful adjustment of non-sequiturs, the more
economically
to hem in the flock.

Some of the purposes of this vast communal construction will have emerged from what I have said about its structure. Since grass is scarce, especially on the crags used as winterage, cattle have to be confined to small areas so that they will eat up the less tasty herbage as well as the choicer stuff before being allowed into other fields. The walls give shelter to stock and crop, and loose stones littering the ground are piled along the tops of them—
although
excess stone is more easily stacked into ricks, and in many fields one sees a little ziggurat of stones standing on a rock
outcrop
.
Virtually all the appurtenances of the field system are of stone. Occasionally one comes across a small stone-built barn, usually roofless; though near Iaráirne two or three of them still have a decrepit thatch held down by ropes or bits of fishing net to pegs under the eaves. There are little stone hutches too, for goat-kids, and many walls have lintelled openings at ground-level, about two feet high, easily closed with a few stones, for letting sheep through. A more developed-looking item of field-furniture is the water-trough fed by the run-off from a slanting surface of stone or concrete. Springs are very few on the plateau, and in the old days there was a constant coming and going of women and children carrying water in small wooden stave-barrels to the
cattle
, until, it is said, these troughs were invented by a Cill Éinne man about a hundred years ago. While it may be true that this individual—a Roger Dirrane, whose dramatic contribution to island history I shall be recounting later on—brought the troughs to a standard form and propagated the idea, one finds on the open crags and in the fields examples from every stage of what looks like a long evolution, from natural basins improved with a dab of cement and filled by rainwater trickling down a shelving rock-face, to the roughly rectangular Dirranean trough of
mortared
stonework with a tilted surface like a draining-board of smooth and carefully pointed flagstones built along one side of it, or modern versions of this in concrete, grant-aided by the
Department
of Agriculture, with precisely squared and rimmed catchment-surfaces several yards long. These are the only signs of innovation on Na Craga, where no implements are of use other than the spade, the sickle and the scythe, and a granite boulder to sharpen them on.