Stones of Aran (33 page)

A few little fields and gullies separate the lighthouse enclosure from the outer rampart of Dún Eochla. The great cashel has been looking out from this north-eastern corner of the island’s central plateau for perhaps fifteen hundred years, perhaps much longer; nobody knows its date and it has not been investigated since the Board of Works shored it up during the drastic “restoration”
carried
out in the 1880s. The inner rampart encloses a rather squarish oval area measuring ninety-one by seventy-five feet, and it is over sixteen feet high in places; with age it had grown potbellied, and the Board of Works’ buttresses take the strain at the south-east and south-west. According to O’Donovan this wall is made up of three layers one outside the other, totalling thirteen feet in
thickness
, and raised to different heights to form two terraces around the inside; at present there is only one terrace, the outer two layers having been levelled off into a broad, stable, walkway. Numerous little flights of stairs—more than the three O’Donovan
recorded
—lead up from the terrace to this outer parapet. In his day the north-eastern sector of the wall, where the doorway is, was nearly destroyed, but now it stands eight feet high on either side of the entrance. The doorway is just four feet three inches wide, and its jambs are made up of huge stones—over nine feet long and fifteen inches square—lying horizontally. Two stone huts inside the cashel were in ruins at the time of O’Donovan’s visit; one has been tidied into an oval heap, but the other has totally
vanished
. The interior in general has a neatness and openness about
it, which covers like thick make-up the face of the dishevelled ruin that so excited the romantics who rediscovered it. The outer rampart, up to twelve feet high in parts, consists of two layers totalling five and a half feet thick, forming a terrace and a
parapet
. It surrounds a roughly circular area about a hundred yards across, now divided by stone fences into several fields; the inner enclosure is off centred towards the southern and higher-lying part of this area. The ground falls steeply to the north and east, giving the
dún
a commanding site over the Cill Rónáin valley, and wide views across to the promontory fort of Dúchathair that is darkly outlined against the Atlantic to the south-east, also to the smaller Aran Islands each crowned by a similar fort, and to the Burren’s long western flank, on which there are eight or ten comparable forts as well as many minor ring-forts. What the
network
of political and economic relationships between these foci of settlement was, is unrecorded and perhaps irrecoverable, while their daily life, in the margins of the godlike deeds of Cú
Chulainn
, the wizardry of Fionn Mac Cumhaill or even of the Lives of the Saints, is hard to imagine.

Projecting my mind back into that dusk, I light upon a
moment
from the time when Oengus son of Nad Froích ruled at Cashel. A man is resting his back against the knobbly masonry of the great wall, enjoying a moment’s rest from dragging yew logs from the wood in the valley below up to the highest point of the island, where the great midsummer fire is about to be lit. He is a crooked-legged, underfed, wheezing thing whom his master has humorously nicknamed Stail Yorke; both of them sometimes wonder where in the cycles of time that fabulous beast had its stabling. Distant corresponding fires are beginning to show in the twilight, from the Dún of Irghus on Black Head, the Dún of Conchúr on Inis Meáin, the lake dwellings of the Conmaicne Mara to the north. But the slave’s eyes are following a small boat paddling into the bay of Port Chorrúch. It is too far away for him to make out that there are nine cloaked and cowled men on it, and that the boat itself is a stone—the annunciatory miracle, the
impossible unsupported pivot upon which the island will soon be swung out of its ancient, familiar, horizontal web of mutual fires, and turned like a sky-sign towards Eternity. Staring, yawning, flexing his knees slightly to scratch his shoulder-blades against the old fort of Eochaill, Stail Yorke lets his mind go blank.

The only shop between Cill Rónáin and Cill Mhuirbhigh is in Eochaill, and gives that long, strung-out village what focus it has. The visitor unused to rural Ireland and unable to interpret the two or three tins and packets discreetly displayed in the window of the first house west of Bóithrín an Lighthouse would not know that it was a shop at all. This is Tigh Eibhlín, the house of Evelyn, and in it transactions are conducted according to the ways of an earlier, slower, more mannerly Aran. The space before the counter in the front room of the house is small, and it is the custom for only one person to go in at a time, while the other shoppers wait in the narrow hallway, leaning against the wall or sitting on the lower steps of the staircase. The analogy with the confessional is inescapable. The whispered exchanges in the shop itself seem to go on interminably while the rest of us, waiting patiently to reveal our mild desires for bacon, aspirin or woollen socks, stare out of the front door at the robin and the pied wagtail that share rights to the crumbs on the steps after bread has been delivered, or at the breakers twinkling on the shore half a mile below, or at the rain slanting across a thousand little grey fields. If anyone speaks it is about the weather, but usually the silence is unbroken, merely being underlined by the unintelligible monotone from within, which sinks to an intriguing hiss whenever some more personal information is being passed on—passed
in
, I should say, for I have never known any gossip to be passed
out
from Evelyn's
sanctum
. On the rare occasions when something is said in the hallway
the prevailing silence puts it in quotation marks and gives it the status of a
bon
mot.
I remember a young man who came bounding up the path to join me there in peering out at the drifting
mistglobules
, saying with deliberation, “It's a fine—soft—damp—warm—
flexible
—kind of a day!”—producing the last adjective with the flourish of a magician finding yet another rabbit in his hat.

Sometimes in summer a tourist looking for icecream or a Coke discovers the shop. Evelyn, glancing out of her window, spots the unfamiliar face approaching up the path and calls out to us,
“Tá
stráinséar
ag
teacht!”
(“A stranger is coming!”), and we all freeze into an impenetrable silence. The stranger steps into the hall, looks blankly at the mutes on the staircase, just as I did on my first visit, walks straight into the shop behind whoever is
occupying
it, is served instantly, comes out again and goes off with another puzzled look, perhaps wondering if a wake is in progress. When this happens, I too sit unprotesting, immobile and
expressionless
like the natives, which gives me an exquisite sense of
sharing
one of the island's secret jokes.

Evelyn's can be less amusing in the winter, when the steamer is often gale-bound in Galway for a week or two and there is nothing in the shop but a tediously familiar selection of plastic buckets and the like. Even if the steamer does come, the goods unloaded onto the quay may be caught by a downpour, and then when the tractor with its trailer piled high with sacks and boxes at last
arrives
at the shop, and the patiently waiting customers pull their coats over their heads and run down to help unload it, the
bottoms
burst out of sodden cartons and children go chasing after rolling tins of beans, loaves have to be hastily grabbed together in damp armfuls, and dribbling flourbags and sticky packets of sugar lugged hastily up the steps and dumped into the backroom, where the lady of the shop struggles with a mounting chaos of things spilt and spoiled, eventually to emerge, white in the face, and serve us with unruffled sweetness of manner.

On such wild days we shoppers from farther west, with the week's provisions hung about our bicycles, have to force our way
home against the staggering blows of the wind. If the rain is not blinding us it is an exciting ride. For the first mile, the road takes the outside edge of one of the great steps of the island's northern flank, and the ground falls away so sharply on the right that it feels as if one were riding the crest of a huge breaker. Often a winter sunset exploded by the last of the gale into ragged purples and oranges comes flying to meet us from the western skyline; we know that our chimney draws well in such winds and a glowing fire will greet us with the proposal of long hours of reading. Only the densest fog can quite deprive us of the immense aerial
amenities
of this journey from Evelyn's. Even if the grey and green weave of the little fields is lost within fifty yards to either side, there are vaguely exhilarating pulses of light in the air, hints of clearances hovering above, vaporous nods and winks that make the deserted road unlonely. Do the elderly folk, though, who shop a little every day, plodding along with their canvas shopping bags, heads down whether it be sunny or drizzly, share any of our
delight
in the immeasurable annexe to Tigh Eibhlín that is opened up to the north by fair weather, in which Connemara is displayed as if on a shelf, supplementing the limited fare of Evelyn's shop with a paradisal trifle of sherry-soaked plumcake topped by a
dollop
of whipped cream bigger than the whole of Aran?

I wrote the above in 1982, and no sooner had I finished it than news came that Evelyn had retired and her house, the last
traditional
shop of the island, was closed. Too often, in writing of Aran, I am writing elegies unawares.

An old saw gives this advice: “If in Ireland, be in Aran; if in Aran, be in Eochaill” (
“Má
bhíonn
tú
in
Éirinn,
b
í
in
Árainn;
m
á
bhíonn
tú
in
Árainn,
bí
in
Eochaill”
)
.
The good sense of the first part is beyond argument; the second perhaps relies on the elevation and centrality of this village among the island’s fourteen villages, the only one from which the outlooks to east and west confirm a sense of the wholeness of the island settlement. Some such thought must have helped to determine the siting of Eochaill chapel, which stands above the road a little west of the shop. It is a plain,
whitewashed
, slated building, with no spire but a little bell-turret, and its best features are its airy situation and the broad flight of steps, flanked by veronica bushes and sloping lawns, running up to it from the gate. A plaque set in the gable of the porch states that:

From the extinction of the monasteries and the ruination of their churches, down to this date of 1833, the islanders worshipped in secrecy, and then as the Penal Laws were gradually relaxed, in mere obscurity, in buildings hardly different from their cottages, that also served as schools. About a hundred yards downhill from the present chapel a few stones of such a building can be seen, by a side-road called from it Bóithrín an tSéipéil. A Randall
McDonnell
is recorded as the teacher here in 1821, with 46 boys and 25 girls in his charge; oral history says he was a refugee from the suppression of the rebellion of 1798 in Mayo. The building of the comparatively grand chapel on its more prominent site above followed close on Daniel O’Connell’s great victory, the Catholic Emancipation Act of 1829, by which nearly all the remaining
restrictions
on Catholic participation in political and social life were removed; his national campaign, funded by the “Catholic Rent”
of pennies contributed by an enthused populace, re-energized the Church in Ireland, and here we see Aran’s response, erected in a time of cholera and want. Even the Protestant landlord, the Rev. John Digby, was moved to contribute £21 to Fr. Gibbons’
fund-raising
appeal. “Pobal Árann,” the new chapel was called (
pobal
meaning literally “congregation”), until St. Brigid’s in Cill Rónáin supplanted it as parish church in 1905.

Such is the message of renewal preached by this commanding height of the island community. But before entering, hear also the intimidatory peal of thunder with which the inscription on the porch prefaces its historical note:

This is Jacob’s exclamation upon waking from the dream of the ladder on which angels pass between heaven and earth: “How dreadful is this place! This is none other than the house of God, and this is the gate of heaven.”

Can it be so? To step inside here chills my spirit. The air is dank with repetitious pieties. The walls are plain white plaster; nothing relieves the visual tedium. There is a gallery at the back, favoured by those who want to conceal their inattention and by the younger males in general, though many of these, I observe, prefer to lounge and lurk outside, taking an occasional peep in through the door at the progress of the service. The pews are kicked and scuffed. In the porch a foxed pamphlet, offering
theology
to girls in trouble, curls on a rusty drawing-pin.

Perhaps I imagined that last detail. Also, the place has now been refurbished; I have described it as I saw it when I first came to Aran, with a full set of anti-ecclesiastical prejudices. Now,
although
I understand that the Church’s view of itself is that as an institution it is divine, and that its failings are due to the human
weaknesses of its members, my (fallible) opinion is that the truth is the other way around: if the thing has any spark of worth, it is only because of the human nature of its members, many of whom do exceedingly well, considering they belong to a body mired in ontological error. At first we had no contact with the Aran clergy. Occasionally on our rambles we would see the dark-clad, portly figure of the Parish Priest in the distance; we had the impression that he was avoiding us, by turning aside down a boreen if
necessary
. Then during one period when I was alone in Aran, he called on me, under cover of some query about a bird or a plant. We found we had interests in common, and when M came back from London she was amazed to find that Fr. Moran’s visits had become an institution. Thereafter when he called she would show him into the little parlour where I did my writing, and serve us with two mugs of tea and a plate of biscuits, on a tray with a tray-cloth, and then retire on satiric tiptoe to the servants’ quarters, as it were, pointedly leaving us to such patriarchal concerns as the classification of Aran’s saxifrage species and the use of the filter in photographing clouds. But by degrees even she softened, and when Fr. Moran was finishing off his great work of renovating the Cill Rónáin chapel, he was able to call on both of us for moral and aesthetic support. To our bemusement we found ourselves on our knees on the church floor helping to stretch hangings of holy emblems. The altar had been turned about to face the
congregation
in line with the edicts of Vatican II, the chilly plastering of the interior had been removed and the stonework pointed, the scaffold-like gallery and its staircase swept away, and the floor carpeted in pale grey; in fact a humanizing breath had blown through the entire building. A set of Stations of the Cross by a well-known wood-carver, Fr. Benedict Tutty of Glenstal Abbey, had replaced the rows of morbid, blackish oleographs in
pinnacled
, gothic-horror frames. The general result, with its light tones and tasteful textures, seemed to me, an outsider, to bear some reassuring and unexacting relationship to heaven, more that of a departure lounge than a ladder. But the gallery-birds regretted
their eyrie, and others of the faithful were not pleased; they
resented
sermons on the importance of wiping their feet, they did not appreciate Fr. Benedict’s post-cubist medievalism and thought his figures looked like monkeys. Our role then was to drop
reconciling
words into influential minds here and there about the island: wait and see, look again, perhaps with time …

An attractive feature of the Christian year in rural western parishes is the celebration of the Mass in private houses. In each village, the honour of hosting the annual Stations, as the
ceremony
is called, passes from household to household in rotation. The form is that, after the hearing of confessions and the service, breakfast is provided for the priest and the curate, and to some this is the most stressful part of the obligation, even though
nowadays
it is understood that only the simplest repast is called for. Soon after our noted alliance with the priest, the Stations fell to the turn of an elderly bachelor in Cill Mhuirbhigh, a retiring and solitary man whom we had become fond of. He was very
reluctant
to take on the obligation, as his house was neglected to the point of sordidity, he had no
bean
a’ tí
or
housewife to play hostess at breakfast, and he feared that if he asked any of the
neighbouring
gossips to step in they would be ferreting through his privacy. However Fr. Moran was insistent—he probably saw it as a chance to reintegrate the old fellow into the community—and to our surprise old Beartla, as I will call him, came and asked M if she would be his “woman of the house.” It was an invitation into a sanctuary; she accepted it at its full weight.

The day before the ceremony I was sent down to Cill
Mhuirbhigh
to help Beartla freshen up the house. We swept and painted and laid linoleum; I condemned the rotting tea-chest on which his gas-ring stood, and fetched the similar but green-
vinyl-covered
tea-chest from our own kitchen. Beartla exhumed from an outhouse a large, peculiarly long-legged table his father had made, to serve as an altar; he tied a rope around it and carried it to the house on his shoulders, struggling over the back wall rather than bringing it round by the gate in view of the neighbours. In
the middle of all this the priest’s big car drew up before the house; I had just time to swoosh the dust out of the back door and slap the green tea-chest into place before he was upon us. Everything passed muster; his only question to Beartla was as to who would be making the tea, and when he heard that it would be M, he looked taken aback for a moment, but raised no objection.

When the rough work was done, M appeared at the door with a sentence that had caught her fancy in one of Séamus Ó
Grianna’s
Donegal-Irish novels;
“An
bhfuil
rud
ar
bith
le
déanamh
anseo
ar
fearr
fhoireas
lámh
mná
dó
ná
lámh
fir?
(“Is there anything to be done here better suited to a woman’s hand than a man’s?”) She prepared the breakfast table in “the room,” decked the altar, which was in the kitchen, with the stiff embroidered linen Beartla produced out of an ancestral coffer, polished up the two brass candlesticks, and laid out the ritual items according to Beartla’s directions—water to be blessed, in a plastic milk-can, a saucer of salt, two towels. The next day we were down there early in the morning, wrestling with the worn-out wicks of Beartla’s kerosene stoves, trying to take the chill off the house without filling it with fumes. Then the people started to arrive, M withdrew to the room, and I hopped over the back wall and wandered the crags with the dogs until it was all over. About twenty people attended, and one of the rascal lads whom Beartla often chased off his
property
materialized in spotless white as altar-boy. After Fr. Moran had given a brief homily in Irish he came into the room (flushing out M) to hear confessions; people went in and out at a great rate, she reported. Then he celebrated Mass with the close-packed
congregation
standing in the kitchen; there was only one chair, for an old lady from across the street. Everyone shook M’s hand as they filed out.

Afterwards M served tea and the bread rolls she had made for the occasion to the priest and the curate, declining their
invitation
to sit down with them but standing with Beartla at the end of the table. The meal concluded the event with decent simple formality. Once the clergy had gone, Beartla and I fell on the
remaining bread rolls. He was joyful and amazed; “If Anyone had told Me!” he kept saying, “that an English Woman! Would be serving breakfast to the Priest! In my House!”—and we were not less amazed and pleased.

Later that morning Dara the postman came up the path to our door with more than the usual impetus. “Is it true that the missus was
bean
a’
tí
at
the Stations?” he asked as he handed me the
letters
. “It is!” I replied. “Well, it’s all over Cill Rónáin that you’re ‘turning’!” he said.

No, we are not turning. But we are glad to feel that the Church’s monopoly of ceremony does not exclude our participation. Indeed we assert by our presence on such occasions, that
Catholicism
, that Christianity in general, is a dialect of a universal
language
. This is Aran’s view too. (One inquirer into our religious affiliation, when I told him we were atheists, looked troubled for a moment, and then said as if to comfort himself and us, “Ah well, it’s all the same God really.”) Of course there are difficulties in it, passages of the rites during which we just have to keep a low profile, not kneeling but not defiantly sitting back. I know that their religion has an eternity in pickle for such as us, but no
islander
has ever expressed disapproval of our stance. In fact the Aran woman who notes out of the corner of her eye how we slip into the back pew or stand just within the porch for the baptisms, weddings and funerals of those whose comings, pairings and goings concern us, probably murmurs a prayer that at the last we may be found, similarly discreetly, in heaven. And I thank her for her orisons.