Stones of Aran (30 page)

Just one more steep bit, and we are there—Carcair Chlaí Chox, the slope of Cox’s wall. Who Cox was nobody remembers, nor which wall is his. The only notable wall here marks the boundary between Mainistir and Eochaill villages; a little more robust and ivy-clad than the other field-walls, it threads its way between the handful of houses that have been built here in recent years, each one trying to steal the view from the last. The
carcair
becomes rather abrupt in its last few yards, as old Beartla points out every time we climb it. He was employed in building this stretch of the road many years ago—he remembers sitting with the gang of men by the roadside breaking stones with a hammer all day—and he told the young engineer in charge of the works that the slope should be graded a bit more, “But he had a college
education and
holive
oil
on his hair, and he wouldn’t listen to me!” So, even if we have made a mighty effort and cycled all the way up to this point, we are defeated at the last moment and wobble to a stop within sight of level going.

If we have forgotten anything from the shops in Cill Rónáin, this is where we will think of it. If there is a stylistic trick to round off this hill of anecdotes, this is when I must invent it. But what is style, compared to all that substance? Merely the complacent wave of the downhill cyclist to those pushing up.

Pausing to draw breath at the top of the road from Cill Rónáin, one looks round, and sees the earth drawing its breath too. From here the liquid Atlantic is hidden behind the long ridge rising behind Eochaill village, but the Atlantic of vapour it
continuously
exhales rolls around and over the island to fill a vast bowl of vision in all other directions, and suspended moisture in the
distances
between the eye and its objects makes the distances themselves visible. In the deepest south of this aerial ocean there are often the ghosts of blue whales: Mount Brandon in Kerry, and sometimes a lower profile beyond it I used to name confidently as the Great Blasket, but which, checking with a map, I realize is Mount Eagle near the head of the Dingle peninsula. We wonder at these appearances, faded and reduced to two dimensions, not for what they are but for how far away they are, thinking of the precarious journeying and near-drowning of the light that reaches us from them, the dilution almost to extinction of the warm tones issued from those Old Red Sandstone hills, in the scattered blue of sunlight astray among infinitudes of floating water-molecules.

The island chain itself—the eastern part of Árainn falling away from this height, the long grey back of Inis Meáin with that of Inis Oírr appearing above it, a paler parallel—is shown by this
vaporous perspective to be rooted in the mainland beyond, the greater parallel of the Burren. Close at hand the stones of the walls and the wayside weeds are presented in detail by the high light-levels; in broader terms one can follow the complex
argumentation
of the middle-distant land with the sea—the broad tract of the bay ceded right up to the thresholds of Cill Rónáin, the varied points asserted beyond Cill Éinne—but then the
progressive
indefinition of the other islands reunites them with a background that looks as if it has been laid down by the rain itself in layer upon layer and frequently merges upwards into stratified mists. On occasion, though, when a general smother of cloud is driving over the islands and the wind tears a hole in it behind us to the west, a shaft of sunlight picks out some fragment of the mainland and holds it up for close examination; the Burren is a blue-black mystery, but suddenly the dome of Black Head terminating it to the north is spotlit—x-rayed, one might think, its rock-structure is so clarified—or the Cliffs of Moher appear above the south of Inis Oírr as a long line of stiff-folded gold-brocade curtains drawn against the darkness.

The rest of the ever-changing panorama this high point of the road offers swings into place as one turns to walk on westwards. Across the North Sound a vista of Connemara hangs before Aran eyes, a perpetual seductive dream of elsewhere. (In my first
volume
I expressed the wish for another decade in which to explore that “as-yet hardly described land of marvels” as quittance for my decade of work on Aran; and in gratitude to life I hereby
acknowledge
that the wish has been granted.) Meteorology has ten miles of water on which to inscribe itself between the island and the mainland. Halfway across are two reefs, An Bhrachlainn Mhór and An Bhrachlainn Bheag, the big and little breakers, which remember a storm for days after it has died, throwing up great hills of smooth water that swell, blaze into foam, and sink back into calm again as they process to the east. Even in settled high-summer stillness the idle air stirs a little of the milky sky into the waters; a currach picking its way across the pallid meanders
stands out like an insect on a pond. As full of ungraspable forms as the transitions between deep sleep and wakefulness, this wide separation of the two heartlands of my life does not look as if it could be crossed by any means of reality, and even the regularity of the high-speed ferries that now shuttle in and out from Ros a’ Mhíl does not abridge its visionary potential. Sometimes
dolphins
briefly accompany these boats as if in empathy with our linear lives, before turning away into their own fluid dimensions. I remember, on one of these crossings, looking back along the white road of the wake, and an image forcing itself upon me of a dark shape on it, following and steadily overhauling the boat; as it came nearer I saw that it was a man on horseback, galloping. He swerved to overtake us, and, leaning from the saddle, threw a packet to me—a bird with bound wings, which broke loose as it fell into my hands and flew away, to Aran or to Connemara.

Having walked the intricate southern coastline of Connemara when mapping it some years ago, it is curiously fascinating now to retrace that walk in the edgeways-on view of it from Aran, as I can after rain has freshly washed the air. When raked by a
westering
sun, every rooftop glitters on the peninsulas and archipelagos that stretch out towards me, terminating in the little copper stud of the old watch-tower on Golam Head; I can identify the houses of people I met, name the granitic hillocks in the bogs and even some of the offshore rocks marked by patches of surf that look from here like white butterflies alighted on the sea. Behind these low-lying forelands stands the long precipice wall of Cnoc Mordáin, on which the afternoon sun hangs cloud-shadows, and to the west a distant obliquity makes a range out of scattered hills, from the ragged, arched back of Errisbeg near Roundstone, to a tiny knob almost isolated on the beginning of the Atlantic
horizon
, Doon Hill, which is the stub of an ancient volcano. The deepest recesses of Connemara float above Cnoc Mordáin as a third step into absolute distance, the long turf-brown plateaus of the Joyce Country to the east, and to the west the Twelve Bens’ closely grouped cones of glinting quartzite. When we in Aran see
the valley between these two mountain ranges seething like a cauldron with dark cloud and pallid streaks of hail, we bless the fact that the islands are not high enough to trip the heavy skies hurrying over them to spill the ocean they carry onto the
streaming
hillsides of Connemara, swelling its bogs and brimming its hidden lakes.

Tracking the passage of bad weather across the sound and away to the mainland is one of Aran’s pleasures. During stormy winter days when the low sun, hidden behind the island, is being switched on and off by a succession of thunder-clouds coming in on the gale, the abysmal darkness of the northern sky is
background
to an intermittent rainbow of wonderful brilliance,
forming
and reforming in the same position. The perfect circle is so rare in our natural experience that, apart from the disc of the sun seen through mist, the iris of the human eye, and the ripples spreading from a disturbance in still water, it is difficult to think of other examples. The rainbow—not a complete circle, though sometimes from a height like the top of the climb here, a vague sketch of most of the lower arc of it is discernible in the mist
drifting
through the fields below—is so accurately drawn, as if by cosmic compasses, that it impresses upon some temperaments a certainty of its spiritual significance, and on others the question of its material mechanism. A ray of sunlight enters a raindrop, is reflected off the inside of its surface, and exits again, at some
angle
to its original direction. There is a particular angle at which the reflection is at its most intense, easily found by simple
calculus
to be about 42 degrees; I did it at school and have long forgotten how. The exact answer depends on the colour of the light, since rays of different wavelengths, corresponding to different colours, are bent by slightly different amounts in entering and leaving the medium of water. The sun’s rays contain all colours, mixed together into white; they are reflected back to the eye from falling rain at haphazard angles, but at those certain calculable angles the various individual colours will be predominant. Thus the rainbow forms an arc at about 42 degrees to the continuation
of a line from the sun through the eye of the observer. This arc, given the position of the sun and the eye, is fixed in the sky, a perpetually present geometrical abstraction, the Platonic idea of a rainbow, waiting only for the presence of raindrops to bring it forth in all the colours of the visible. Hence arises a lovely
phenomenon
I have often seen from Aran when an isolated squall is travelling along the North Sound. As the narrow column of rain passes across the arc of the potential rainbow, it makes each point of it manifest in succession. The effect is that a short sector of rainbow comes into existence apparently down near the waters of the Sound or out in the Connemara hinterland, and rises smoothly along its predestined curve, passing across the northern sky and descending again to extinction as the squall moves on. An
iridescent
dolphin, or perhaps a salmon, leaping in some solemn mystic time-scale up out of nothingness through our world of vapours and down again into nothingness. The mechanism of the
apparition
is clear; its meaning is open to our determination.

Above and around all the vast circus of the elements one
commands
from the top of this climb is the protective envelope of sky, the delicate, translucent skin of the globe. Its depths are of many intersuffusing layers, visible and invisible; the tenderness of its bending down to and wrapping over the horizon is often clear to the feeling eye. Sometimes dull, bruised by departed gales,
sometimes
glowingly reminiscent of kind weather, it embodies Aran’s short-term memory, as opposed to the ancient lore condensed in the stones. Also it is an arcanum of high predictive signs: storm-dogs, mares’ tails, rings round the sun, cirrus-cloud
brush-drawings
of tomorrow’s winds. Sometimes it is all contradictory; urgent and vociferous here, sullen and opaque there; one doesn’t know whether they refer to the past or the future, these clouds out of which one might expect hot snow or black lightning, these mist-banks full of mermaid ova and the dandruff of drowned sailors …

But what have we done to this hilltop, this calm and attentive brow with which the island gazes upon the weather of the world?
From where I stand in the road I can count no fewer than fifty poles carrying electricity or telephone wires. The delicate
continuities
are splintered. The mountain ranges are scratched, as if a vandal had scrawled on a painting with a nail. Even the sky is shoddy, defaced with graffiti. We must be blind, to let such things be done! Our blindness is that of grubs in the Apple of
Knowledge
.

Eochaill townland has four villages: Mainistir, Eochaill itself, Baile na Creige and Corrúch. The last three of these and the newer houses of the first lie ahead to the west, but to visit the old part of Mainistir one leaves the main road at Carcair Ghanly and follows a boreen that drops northwards towards the sea. After crossing quarter of a mile of rough fields and patches of crag it zigzags down two lines of low cliffs separated by a narrow terrace, the rim of a bowl of greener pastures around the bay and shingle beach of Port na Mainistreach. The lichen-grey ruins of St.
Ciarán’s
church are under the second scarp-line, to the east, and the almost depopulated settlement stretches along a path to the west on the terrace. The two inhabited cottages, well cared-for and freshly whitened, separated by dark, roofless ruins, stick out like the last teeth in an old jawbone.

Once upon a time people here used to complain of the
fairies
—Pat Ganly’s house was badly infested, I am told—but now they grumble if one mentions such foolishness, and I once
overheard
a priest who was living on the island being scolded for
referring
to the steep, overgrown path that shortcuts the bends of the road down the scarps as Róidín na Sióg, the little road of the fairies, instead of Bóithrín an Teampaill, the boreen of the church. Those electricity poles have denatured night as well as day;
nowadays
light is cheap and convenient, and spills plentifully from
windows and torches and headlamps, whereas before it was used very sparingly. On moonless nights perfect blackness pressed close around the houses, and immediately outside the door was a realm of stumblings and strayings and mis-identifications, of pranks and mischief and spying too. Or were moonlit nights more frightening—the luminous rock-sheets riven with abysses, the birds and animals restlessly astir? Sometimes in the dark all things reveal the secret we keep from ourselves by daylight and lamplight, that below the skin of what we see of them they are fathomless pools of potential appearances; it is as if other
creatures
’ deeper vision of them takes priority and forces itself on our own eyes
.
And we too are objects of those alien visions; our
self-recognitions
are shaken. On Hallowe’en, the eve of the ancient Celtic feast of Samhain at the beginning of November, the children put on masks and go from door to door; one plays at
pretending
not to know them and trying to guess who they are; but in those last real Hallowe’ens we experienced before electricity came to the island, the children from a few hundred yards up the unlit road would arrive at our gate in such a panic of doubt about their own identities that they would be shrieking out as they rushed up the garden path, “It’s Gráinne! It’s Clodagh!” The older boys, two by two, used to hobble in, dressed and masked as very old couples, and sit by the fire in silence, occasionally rapping on the floor with their sticks in a slow, solemn, almost unnerving rhythm; we understood that they represented the recently departed dead, who on that evening, which was like an imperfectly sealed gap between two seasons, have leave to revisit the earth. There was a faint threat of mischief, which never came to
anything
, though I remember reading of some lads who didn’t get the welcome and the drinks they were expecting from an old man in Bun Gabhla, and stuffed a billygoat down his chimney so that its head appeared upside down in his
hearth, the Devil himself, horned, hairy, hell-blackened—but that was in the Dark Ages fifty years ago.

The other creaking hinge of the year is May Eve, Oíche
Bhealtaine
,
which together with Hallowe’en defined the two seasons, winter and summer, of the ancient Celtic year. On these nights, it was believed (and is still, to a degree), the fairies change quarters from one side of the island to the other, and it was not good to be out because they resented being seen. And just as the beginning of winter is threatening on this little island naked to the forces of nature, with the sudden encroachment of night on day and the first storms closing the seaways, so the beginning of summer is disturbingly full of challenge, especially for the young, with the scents
and sounds of passion in
every bush, and anguishing in another way to those who no longer feel that the challenge is meant for them. Night and lonely places fill with the shadows of these uncomprehended fears and longings; ghosts, fairies, the
púca,
the
mada
mór
or big dog that has been seen at Carcair Chlaí Chox, the unidentified dark thing in the shadow of the
thornbush
, are born of the coupling of chthonic and psychic
unknowns
.

Mainistir, hidden under the hill, off the track to and out of sight of all the other villages, was particularly haunted by such creatures, and in some islanders’ minds still is. An Oatquarter man told me he wouldn’t live down there for a thousand pounds a month; he remembers that an old man coming home from a wake saw fairies making a coffin; one of them looked like the devil, and the long glowing nails were flying into the wood from all directions. The hauntings of the Ganly house were
inconsequential
vague shoutings at night, harmless poltergeists’ practical jokes. When the Ó hEithir family left the teachers’ residence in Cill Rónáin and built themselves a new house by Carcair Chlaí Chox, the nine-year-old Breandán was told by a local woman that they had chosen a bad site, for everyone knew that the fairy host who lived up on the crags at Carcair na gCat used a path close by when they wanted to
go
west. And a neighbour, Máirtín
Breathnach
, walking into Cill Rónáin at dawn, had seen a man come out of Róidín Chlaí Chox and turn down the hill ahead of him; Máirtín tried to catch up with him, but although he walked fast,
and then trotted, and then ran as fast as he could, the figure
remained
the same distance ahead. Going down Carcair an Aill Bhriste, Máirtín, who had not been afraid of the Black and Tans, was in a cold sweat of fear. The man turned the corner at a
leisurely
walk, and when Máirtín ran round after him there was nobody to be seen. That wasn’t the end of the woman’s stories; she still had a trump to play:

Whether poor Julia’s child was born alive or not I do not know, but if not, it is likely that it was buried with many other tragedies in the mysterious hillock by the seashore, a little east of the foot of the Mainistir road, called An Atharla, the burial ground. The top of this is a roughly rectangular plot about forty yards long by ten wide, enclosed by a slightly-built field-wall, which appears to be standing on the decayed remains of an earlier wall and from a distance looks like a little ring-fort. It is difficult to make out if
the unusually steep-sided mound is all natural or if it has been built up to some extent; there is talk of a buried doorway in its southern flank, but that seems structurally unlikely. Within the enclosure is a set stone just over two feet high on which is carved a Latin cross. Almost hidden in long grass are three even smaller stones on which one can just make out shallow grooves forming simple crosses, and a few uninscribed boulders. The crosses look like Early Christian work, and connect the site with the monastic settlement from which Mainistir has its name. The Ordnance Survey map of 1898 marks it as an “Infants’ Burial Ground,” which implies that it was used for the burial of unbaptized babies. Up until two or three generations ago it was thought that the souls of stillborn children or those who died before baptism would go to Limbo and continue a nebulous existence, neither enjoying Heaven nor suffering Hell. The sorts of places they were buried in—often surreptitiously and by night—share the same ambiguous status, and in Aran it was usually under a “meering” wall between one person’s land and another’s, as if to avoid or dilute responsibility for their resting-places. In the Burren,
children’s
burial grounds are often in a
lios
or “fairy fort” which
probably
originated as a cashel wall around an early chapel, and which, while not consecrated ground still has some lingering association with sanctity. Most Connemara villages have a small overgrown plot with a clutch of unmarked stones tucked away somewhere obscure, often on a townland boundary or on the no-man’s-land of the seashore, unvisited and overgrown nowadays and forgotten by all except the very old, some of whom still have bitter reason to remember them. Nowadays neither Pope nor peasant would deny what comfort the proper graveyard can offer such failed scraps of life or their grieving parents, and the children’s burial grounds with their evasive theology are abandoned to the grass and briars and whitethorn bushes of reconsecrating nature. They are, though, “sheeogy places” still; the
sióga
or fairies make
themselves
felt there, brushing the hair on the back of the passer-by’s neck. At twilight the Mainistir burial ground, rearing up gaunt
and angular right next to the unfrequented road, nudges one with a thought of all the tormented circumstances buried in the phrase “unbaptized infants.”

The name “Mainistir” itself is a ghost. Among the churches listed by Archbishop O’Cadhla in the 1640s is

According to an inquisition of 1581 the territory of the islands then was comprised in three divisions, anglicized as Treumoynagh, Trueconnaght and Trueenagh, which obscurities one can puzzle out as follows: Trian Muimhneach, the Munster third, would have belonged to the O’Briens and presumably included Cill Éinne where their castle was. Trian Connachtach or the Connaught third, perhaps dominated by the O’Cadhlas and later the O’Flahertys from Iar-Chonnacht, included the Mainistir area. Trian Eoghanachta belonged to the Eoghanachta Ninussa and later the Corcu Modruad of what is now County Clare, and included the westernmost townland of Árainn, still called
Eoghanacht
. Mainistir Chiaráin must have ceased to exist by Elizabeth’s time, for its land was among the properties of the monastery of Annaghdown (north of Galway city) which came into the Crown’s possession on its dissolution, and even before Elizabeth took the islands out of the hands of the rivalrous O’Briens and O’Flahertys she was making grants of “a ruined chapel and land in the island of Aryne.” This titbit was dispensed in 1566 to a Florence Lylly, chaplain; in 1570 to the Earl of Clanricarde, who built up a huge estate out of former monastic lands; and finally in 1578 to the Wardens of Galway.

Under the cliff that wraps this anciently-chosen spot away from the Atlantic winds, there are several springs, which keep its meadows green. Around the ruined chapel walls tall pillar-stones inscribed with crosses stand watch, the most patient of herdsmen,
over ruminating cattle; they probably used to mark the “termon” limits, within which there was a right of sanctuary. Some of the field-boundaries are underlain by the mounded remains of a cashel wall, not easy to trace in the ranker grass and briars. The chapel itself, one of the loveliest of the island’s antiquities, is rather later than the Cill Éinne oratories. Its undivided interior is about thirteen gravelly paces long, half that in width, and open to the heavens. The oldest-looking part is the flat-topped doorway in the west gable, about three feet wide, the jambs slightly inclined so that it is a little narrower at the top. Having entered, stooping a little under the lintel made of a single five-foot-long stone, one confronts the east gable-wall, which is of a wonderfully simple and uplifting design. Its slim round-headed light, nearly ten feet high and only five inches wide on the outside, has an internal splay of finely fitted masonry, smoothly finished, lighter in tone than the rough stonework of the rest of the wall, opening out to a width of five feet. A moulding outlining the round head of the splay is borne on little corbels decorated with plant forms (the books say these are grotesque carved heads, but if so I cannot make them out). Another moulding embraces the bottom of the splay, passing under it like a sill and up either side of it to a third of its height, and then steps away from it on either side towards the upper corners of the gable-wall, so that it seems to hold the whole window aloft with a priestly gesture above the simple stone altar. This is late Romanesque work, as is a smaller window in the south wall. A late medieval doorway in the north wall has a
simple
Gothic arch of two curved pieces of stone, and in the same wall, nearer the altar, is a square window with a low opening below it. Knee-high remains of walls outside the chapel at this point give the impression of a small building, perhaps a vestry, built very close to it, which has a flag like a grave marker or part of a pillar-stone lying in it. There are also traces of larger rectangular foundations, presumably of monastic buildings, immediately to the north, and also to the south-east, under the sheltering
cliff-face
.