Stones of Aran (4 page)

Coming across such structures in rambling across this rather inscrutable terrain, one feels reassured that the field-system has or at least had its uses. But after an hour or two of struggling in its toils, the endless proliferation of walls seems inordinate to any practical requirements; one is forced to read it as the expression of an urge to control space for its own sake, to hug and hoard and
hide away the land in minute parcels. In fact these walls are the fossilized land-hunger of the “Congested Districts,” of the Land War, of the Great Famine and above all of the century of
population
growth that preceded it. As such, they do not necessarily express bitter competition. A farmer in an equally subdivided tract of the Burren once told me about two brothers who inherited a few tiny fields there some time in the famine century. One of them was married, and it seemed the only future for the other was emigration. But on the eve of his departure the married brother said suddenly “Don’t go!”; and they took the wooden yardstick the wife used for measuring her homespun, and divided each plot equally, marking a line down the middle with small stones. The mearing-stones of brotherly love must have divided Aran’s fields as well and have been built up into walls between later
generations
grown apart. Down to the present day, the nuisance of
holdings
in scattered lots and acrimony over rights of way to them are part of the island’s patrimony. Having produced a map of Aran, I came to be regarded as a semi-official cartographer, and as I was almost the sole guardian of such occult lore as:

which I found in an old pocket-diary, I was often called upon to measure and divide land. Once I calculated the areas of no fewer than twenty-six patches broadcast over the hillsides of Cill Éinne for a man who was sharing the inheritance of them with his cousin in America, and found myself drawn into conniving with him in dividing them so that access to the absentee’s portions would be across my client’s land, putting him in a strong position to persuade the other to sell out. I took no money for it, I was paid as usual in place-names, in which these subdivisions are most prolific; nevertheless I am implicated in the peasant cunning of these crooked walls, and the devil has me in their net.

If there are only fourteen thousand fields in Árainn, it would not take a lifetime to explore them, devoting a day to each. I have probably looked into the majority of them in my obsessive
coursing
about the island. On the lower levels many fields are so
overgrown
they defy inspection, but on Na Craga they exhibit their little economies of grass as resignedly as nineteenth-century
objects
of charity. In one field there may be nothing but a grey, taut-looking sheet of rock crossed by a few shaggy lines of tufted, wiry stuff rooted in fissures; in the next, a hollow filled like a pool with feathery grasses and meadow flowers, with the stones that have been dredged out of it piled in cairns around its brink. The walls are all shifts and accommodations too; swerving from their
rectilinear
principals to incorporate a boulder too big to be removed or a heap of masonry that some residual use-value or superstitious regard has preserved from centuries ago. In spring and summer and autumn each field is a sample garden of flowers and
butterflies
so specific to the season that one could tell the date to within a week or two by them; in winter they are as cryptic as a jigsaw puzzle all made up of missing bits.

In exploring this terrain it is best to let oneself be led by its inbuilt directionality. A few fields in the possession of a single household will be linked into a sequence, nearly always running north-south, by gaps closed with stones if there are cattle to be confined and otherwise left open. It is often stated that the Aran farmer lets his cows into a field by knocking down a length of the wall and rebuilding it after them. This misconception arises from the fact that when the gap is closed with stones it looks
superficially
like the rest of the wall. However, this is an illusion, as was revealed to me by a rain-shower that briefly wiped across the island one day when I was wandering on Na Craga. The limestone, both of the ground and in the walls, was left black with wet, and took some time to evaporate back to pale grey when the sun came out again. But dotted all over the landscape around me were what
looked like brightly glinting doors in the dark walls—the gaps, all filled with granite boulders. This focused my mind on the question of gaps, and after some research I wrote the following little treatise:

Having thus formulated the Aran gap, I wandered out to have another look, eyes sharpened by theory. And behold! Every
conceivable
ad
hoc
concoction of concrete blocks, thornbushes,
driftwood
, worm-eaten oars, carcases of oildrums, iron bed-heads, complicated pipework looted from wrecks, bicycle-frames—
anything
and everything redundant and outworn will serve to stop a gap just as well as the granite boulder. So it is at least around the fallen world of houses and roadsides, but up on Na Craga, closer to the Platonic ideal of Aran, the classic gap exists, as theory
prescribes.

But I see these things all wrong. It is the world of Na Craga that is outworn and redundant. I remember coming across an
elderly
man harvesting a rye-field in a sheltery glen up there. In fact
I heard him long before I saw him, for when the straw is wanted for thatching, the rye is pulled up by the roots and the harvester slaps each
dornán
or fistful against his boot or the wall to knock the soil off it, and the spacious, lazy rhythm of this sound is
characteristic
of hot July and August days in the fields. It is sweaty and tiring work, and men hate it; the endlessly repeated, quietly
vicious
slaps sound out against themselves, against the walls that bind their lives. And yet every stage of the harvest is visually charming—the area of stubble or bare ground, decorated with the lines of fistfuls, slowly widening through the day as the
standing
crop dwindles, the sheaves each belted with a twist of straw, the plump stacks of sheaves topped off with an upside-down sheaf like a huge sun-hat, the donkey waiting to carry the stacks one by one to the outhouse. On Na Craga that day I learned the
arithmetic
of straw:

—five fistfuls make a sheaf, twenty sheaves and one make a load (
i.e.
what can be carried roped together on one’s back), four loads make (that is, thatch) a house. My instructor, who had learned the hard way, added a footnote, that fifty fistfuls make a
half-load
. So the extra sheaf, the extra five fistfuls in the full load of a hundred and five fistfuls, is like the extra twelve pounds in the so-called “hundredweight” of a hundred and twelve pounds, and whether it is to be regarded as generosity or extortion depends on the perspective of power relations. For once, this man, who had no doubt always been at the thin end of that perspective, found that he had something of value to impart, his multiplication
table
, and extorted a little money from me. He was uneasy about it, simultaneously ingratiating and brazen; his earthworm-sad
features
told me he needed the money for drink. I imagine his daughter is one of the smart young women I see driving into Cill
Rónáin as if they were on a freeway to a shopping mall, slamming themselves through the island’s spaces, trading them in for time; she runs a chilly, hygienic, tourist-board-approved B&B, and hardly tolerates her father in the back kitchen. He is a
discrepancy
, the old reprobate of Na Craga; he whines like a dog left behind as our world drives off into the future. I am, I know, less interested in the concerns of the forward-looking generations than I should be (perhaps because they are so tediously
universal
); my sympathies hang around with those trapped in or
fascinated
by the fading mazes of the past. Not all of these are old and despairing; they include, in Aran, some joyously creative souls. But all I can do for my man of straw is to reveal him in his
predicament
, while hiding away his identity in my cryptographic reconstruction of his island.

When the mind begins to weary of the intricacies of Na Craga and the body to balk at walls, one naturally welcomes any
sequence
of gaps that tends in the general direction of the
inhabited
, northern side of the island. And usually this homing instinct is rewarded, for it is the daily coming and going of farmers between house and field that have written those ways into the
palimpsest
of walls. There are two or three such escape-routes from the terrain west of Túr Mháirtín; they lead up the gentle rise of the back of the island to the ridge line and connect with narrow, walled paths on the steeper, north-facing escarpment, which in turn are gathered up by a wider track running across the slope, and so crookedly down to Iaráirne.

Pausing at the crest of the escarpment, it takes a few moments to ascertain one’s relationship to the suddenly opened vista. The cluster of a dozen cottages and bungalows is a few hundred yards down to the left, the north-west. Its background is an oval
expanse
,
of sea or of sand depending on the state of the tide, almost enclosed by long levels of dune-fringed grassland. A congregation of grey, standing forms is gathered on a knoll on the nearer rim of this bay, the gravestones of St. Enda’s ancient cemetery; from here they appear to float above the roofs of the village. Above them again, out beyond the western rim of the bay, a child has left a toy aeroplane; as one watches it teeters forward a little, turns and sniffs the wind, gives a puny growl, and takes itself off—one identifies it as the Aer Árann ten-seater—into a tremendous sky that has a tiny dark blue panoramic replica of Connemara’s mountains all along its foot. The road that passes just below the village goes by the graveyard and the airstrip and disappears into the crumpled patchwork of Cill Éinne’s walls and roofs nearly a mile away, among which the old castle ruin shows as a dark stain. In Cill Rónáin harbour, another mile away and on the far side of a further bay, breadcrumb boats maneouvre at a matchstick pier. The town itself is a spill of lozenges, some of them scattered up the treads of the hillside beyond.

In this perspective the terracing of Árainn’s northern flank is very clear; the island is visibly carved out of a small number of enormous beds of limestone laid one upon another. The geology is so simple in its nakedness that the lacy ribbon of habitation laid along it appears as a passing fancy, a frivolity, a plaything. And yet the pattern of settlement also has an impersonal structure to it; the two abstractions twine together in some paradoxical
geometry
of tenderness. One aspect of this relationship is obvious as soon as one begins to descend from the ridge-line and drops out of the prevailing south-westerly wind; the scarp-slope of the island offers a degree of shelter. Almost every one of the villages has its heart, its original core, snuggled into a concavity of the
escarpment
. At Iaráirne the ridge is quite low, but it rises close behind the village, and to the west a slight but distinct swelling of the slope tempers the wind to the old cottages and the modern
bungalows
occupying old sites; the newer houses off to the right and left forego this advantage, for the sake of privacy or the view. In
other parts of the island houses have recently been built on heights not previously settled, and not only do they look uncomfortable and irremediably bleak, but unmannerly towards the landscape, disdainful of its hospitality. Admittedly, the degree of shelter to be enjoyed anywhere in Aran is small; in Iaráirne, for instance, it is obviously difficult to grow trees, and its two bent mountain ashes perpetually mime a westerly gale. But the traditional sites of settlement were determined by the coincidence of various small amenities of the rock, as I shall show, and while modern building technology may liberate us from this determinism, it can deafen us to old harmonies between house and land.

If the cardinal directions of the Aran field system are given by the joints criss-crossing the limestone, to understand the
situation
of the villages one has to descend into the third dimension of the rock and consider its natural horizontal partings. This
dimension
is time-wise; it arises from the succession of deposits on the Carboniferous sea floor. Sundry geographies came and went
during
that era, untrodden, unwritten-up, and were reduced to
distinctive
layers of sediment. In the sequence of Aran’s strata, the nearly horizontal beds of limestone are interleaved with thinner layers of shale. Where a hillside now cross-sections one of these it is visible as a dark band, usually two or three feet thick, with the limestone rising above it in a steep scarp or a cliff ten to twenty feet high. In places the shale seems to have been eaten back so that the impending limestone overhangs and shadows it. For instance that track leading down into Iaráirne—it is called Róidín Mháirtín, Martin’s little road, no doubt from the same shadowy figure whose name is attached to the broken-down tower further east—runs along the top of a north-facing grassy bank. At one point a few trodden footholds lead down from it to a recess
almost
under the
róidín
itself, from which the hart’s-tongue fern sticks out its long pointed fronds, and cool water lies in a small stone-lined basin below a thick ledge of limestone. A few flattish stones lie at the rim of the basin like uncomfortable kneelers
before
a shrine; if you stoop and peer under the great limestone
altarpiece
you see the shale at the back of the recess. It glistens with moisture, and it comes away in horizontal flakes when you pick at it. It looks like the edge of a huge mouldering book, shut forever by the weight of rock above it, and in fact it is the history of one of those fleeting lands whose hills were weathered away and
carried
off as mud by rivers, and piled in layers on the sea-floor
during
the gestation of Aran. There are about eight such shale-beds running right through the body of the island, very nearly level but with the same slight dip to the south-south-west as the limestone. On the Atlantic cliffs they show as slots and ledges etched back into the rock-face by the waves. The very highest cliffs are divided into four stories by these recessed string-courses. On the northern side of the island the land steps up from shore to
ridge-line
in abrupt slopes or cliffs separating broad levels, and the same shale-bands crop out along the feet of these risers.

These north-facing scarps are hospitable to human settlement as well as to fern growth. The spring well by Róidín Mháirtín is Tobar Iaráirne, and it is the proximate reason for the siting of the village nearby. There are good green pastures all along the foot of the scarp here; a skim of soil weathered out from the shale-band has added to the attractions of the locality. The correlation of shelter, water and soil along particular levels of the island suggests the thought that all possibilities of life derive from material
differences
, just as electric currents are powered by potential
differences
. In Aran the difference is that between limestone—rigid, susceptible to fracture, soluble in water—and shale—plastic,
foliated,
impermeable. The joints of the limestone, enlarged by
erosion
down to a certain depth, do not penetrate the shale-bands. Therefore the rainwater they swallow off the surface is channelled laterally through the web of fissures until it seeps out of a
scarp-face
, trickling down the shale exposure and filling any natural or artificial basin at its foot, before overflowing and disappearing into the grykes of the next terrace, reappearing as another line of springs below the next scarp, and so on until it reaches the sea.

But why are there these scarps? Their formation obviously has
to do with the different resistances to erosion of the alternating layers of limestone and shale, but the processes by which a hillside is sculpted into steps are not known beyond argument. Limestone exposed to weathering on a hillside will tend to degenerate into loose blocks, which further erosion (and perhaps glaciation) would eventually annihilate, whereas the limestone protected by a shale-layer will stand firm; one can imagine the terraces being roughed out in this way. On the other hand the shale itself is vulnerable to attack along its exposures, and just as on the
sea-cliffs
it is gouged out by the waves to leave grooves along the
cliff-faces
, so in many places it is being worn back under the inland cliffs, by weathering and perhaps by the spring-water perpetually washing out over it. The overhang of fractured limestone will eventually collapse, and in fact along many of the scarps there are huge fallen blocks of limestone. This rubble no doubt protects the shale for a bit but breaks down in the end, allowing the process to recommence. Thus once a scarp is formed it will slowly recede; in fact the whole sequence of terraces and steps will gradually bite its way back and consume the hillside. Something similar is
happening
on the Atlantic coast, where the cliffs, pounded by winter gales, are an ongoing catastrophe. On the northern slopes,
however
, sapping and ruination proceeds on a time-scale that human beings can live under; indeed it is the ground of their existence.

Because Cill Éinne bay takes a huge bite out of the eastern third of the island, reducing it to less than a mile across, the
sequence
of scarps and terraces is not fully developed here. Most of the other villages have terraces below them as well as above, but Iaráirne is unique in that immediately to the north of it is a wide tract of sandy land just above sea-level. Na Muirbhigh Móra, the big sea-plains, it is called; ecologists would describe it as “
ma-chair
,” from a Scots-Gaelic synonym of
muirbheach
that has been adopted into their terminology. Its smooth ground-hugging sward is a closely-woven web of plant-species resistant to salty winds and heavy grazing. Together with its long north-easterly extension, Barr na Coise, it is commonage, shared in proportion
to their other land-holdings between about a dozen households of Iaráirne, and used for grazing dry cattle in summer. Milk-giving and calf-bearing cattle are kept in the meadows of lush grass
watered
by the springs under the scarp, handy to the village.
Sometimes
one sees the beasts galloping madly around these little fields, tormented by warble flies that puncture their skin to lay eggs in their flesh, edible housing for the grubs. This is another reason for not keeping the cattle on the crags in summer, where they would be more likely to break their legs in the grykes. But in winter the crags have the advantage of being well drained and comparatively dry underfoot, and as in this mild oceanic climate cattle do not have to be brought indoors they are wintered on Na Craga, and get by on its sparse grass and the occasional sackful of mangolds. (I am told, however, that the poor
slóchtaí,
the cattle brought in from Connemara for the winter, whose keep was paid for in turf, would spend it on the open commonage—though their Connemara owners may not have been aware of this frugal arrangement.)

Thus the economy rotates around the village like a year-hand on a clock, turning the land to best advantage with the turning seasons. Wells like Tobar Iaráirne are crucial to the mechanism, though since the village is now piped up to the mains coming from the big reservoirs behind Cill Rónáin, they are only used for watering the cattle. (When I revisited the well to refresh my memory recently, I found its water full of what looked like
handfuls
of chopped lettuce. I brought a bit of this stuff home to
identify:
Aneura
pinguis
‚
a liverwort. Liverworts, obscure denizens of wet and shady places, absorbing their nutriment directly through their leaves, and, having no roots or interior canals, rank below flowering plants in the Whig view of evolution. They are not a life-form that had much caught my attention previously, so I note here that Tobar Iaráirne not only supports
Homo
sapiens
but also houses this other creature, and no doubt a thousand others to whose life-cycles I am oblivious.)

The
róidín
by the well long predates the main road, which was
extended to Iaráirne only in this century. West of the well it winds down the scarp and enters the village without much changing its half-grassy half-stony nature; indeed the terrain hardly alters either, as there are little hayfields and tillage-plots between the houses, and overgrown empty sites where long-gone cottages have mouldered into craggy mounds. Coming from above in this way, one takes in the village by its roof-tops. The nearest is a
dishevelled
straw thatch sprouting thistles, nettles and yellow ragwort flowers; beyond it are old grey cement tiles, modern curved red tiles, thunder-blue slates, and—the very newest—a pin-sharp reed thatch that curves over an upstairs dormer window and has a decorative trim along the roof-ridge. The boreen branches within the village; each way leads down to the main road, and the little circuit knots together most of the houses, except for two recent bungalows that have strayed along the road to the east, the reed-thatched house isolated in the fields to the west and, a
hundred
yards beyond it, a guest-house that has recently expanded almost into a hotel, called Ard Éinne, Enda’s height, on the
hillside
above the old cemetery. One cottage has a little garden with eight-foot-high tree mallows brought over from the cliffs, a red rambling rose, nasturtiums, and by the doorstep a big clump of bloody cranesbill on which the baby’s bibs are spread out to take the sun. In the lee of one of the taller gables two
Pittosporum,
an evergreen shrub that does well on the western seaboard, have
attained
to tree-height. The long thatched cottage at the top of the village turns out to be disused except as an outhouse, and all the surviving cottages have had their thatches replaced with
something
less laborious in the upkeep. The smart reed thatch of the isolated house is of a style promulgated by government-funded craft training schemes, and this is its first appearance in the
island
; it makes one think of prosperous English villages, and has nothing in common with the shaggy Aran thatch roped down to pegs beneath the eaves like a woolly cap pulled well down over the ears in the face of the storm.