Stones of Aran (50 page)
Authors: Tim Robinson
But then, what is that creative urge other than a form of insanity, an
over-balancing
of the physical organism; more likely due to some “lack” in the organism than to the presence of some quality not possessed by the
ordinary
male. To females I deny this creative urge, except in so far as they feel the urge to create children. And that urge in itself is the outcome of a “lack” in their construction.
Some homespun pre-Freudian version of this must have been what was occupying Mary’s mind on that walk home from her spring sowing. Woman is, by biological predestination, cyclical, subordinate, earthbound, a metaphysical peasant.
Incorporated at the end of
Shame
the
Devil
is the short story with which he burst out of this spell of introspective sterility, “The Caress.” A party of Aran men mockingly accompany a dried-up bachelor in a drunken match-making expedition,
breaking
off to amuse themselves by galloping a mare up and down the beach. (The equation of a desirable woman with a mare, explicit in several of O’Flaherty’s works, is diffused into the structure of this one.) In the chaotic upshot, lusty youth and beauty find their way to each other in the purity of desire, the old snatch what
ignominious
pleasures they can, the ridiculous bachelor is dragged home like a sack.
After the ’fifties O’Flaherty published nothing more and
disappeared
from the Dublin literary scene. Several of his novels had been banned by the so-called Free State’s Censorship Board on
publication and were hard to obtain, and it was not until 1976 that Wolfhound Press began to republish them, a slow process which is still not complete. Nowadays however there is a tatty and much underlined copy of
Dúil,
his collection of short stories in Irish, in every school satchel, and the Aran clergy smile a
sophisticated
smile over
The
Tourist’s
Guide.
O’Flaherty’s returns to Aran were rare, but in 1980 he was
persuaded
to take a day-trip attended by an RTÉ film crew and an
Irish
Times
photographer. At Gort na gCapall he was presented with an indefinite number of little relatives, all female as it
happened
, until he protested, “Show me the boys! I’m not interested in the girls!” Outside the house he was born in, he stopped to apostrophize a rock:
“Bail
ó
Dhia
ort,
a
chloch
mhór;
tá
aithne
agam
ortsa!”
(“The blessings of God on you, big stone; you I know!”). Portraits of O’Flaherty from all periods of his life show a virile, sombre and romantic personage; now the photographer had him pose against the grey waters of Port Mhuirbhigh, a craggy pyramid of accumulated experience. Long before this, he had written:
I was born on a storm-swept rock and hate the soft growth of sun-baked land where there is no frost in men’s bones. Swift thought and the swift flight of ravenous birds, and the squeal of terror of hunted animals are to me reality. I have seen the sated buck horn his mate, and the wanderer leave his wife, in search of fresh bosoms, with the fire of joy in his eye.
When the cameras had had their fill, he turned to the
companion
of his latter years and said “Come on, Kitty, let’s get the hell out of here!” It was his last time in Aran. He died four years later, at the age of eighty-eight.
I have mentioned three ways of getting from Fearann an Choirce
to Gort na gCapall; a passage in O’Flaherty’s
Skerrett
points out another. A villager called Ferris is walking home from the chapel with the schoolmaster:
He left Skerrett a little to the east of the school and turned up towards his village of Cappatagle along a footpath over the crags. In his rawhide shoes he hardly made any sound moving over the flat rocks, that had been
polished
as smooth as glass by the impress of human feet for hundreds upon hundreds of years. He moved rapidly tall, lean, erect, with sudden jerks of his shoulders as he lengthened his stride now and again to cross a fissure between the rocks. His walk was like a dance, a movement perfect in rhythm and significant of some mystic bond between this beautiful human energy and the wild earth over which it passed.
Skerret, so heavy and solid compared to this lithe and deer-like islander, struck the road with repeated thuds as he went west.
Note the echo of Synge’s celebration of the sacrament of
walking
, in
The
Aran
Islands,
after the shoes he arrived in have been cut to pieces by the sharp fossils in the rock, and the natives make him a pair of rawhide shoes:
At first I threw my weight upon my heels, as one does naturally in a boot, and was a good deal bruised, but after a few hours I learned the natural walk of man, and could follow my guide in any portion of the island…. The absence of the heavy boot of Europe has preserved to these people the agile walk of the wild animal …
Two markers of Skerrett’s progressive alienation from the forces of modernity emanating from the island capital are his adoption of rawhide shoes and his building himself a cottage in Cappatagle as a potential retreat from the national school and the teacher’s residence. Cappatagle is Gort na gCapall (and Ferris, the islander still in communion with the wild earth and the hundreds upon hundreds of years, is Liam O’Flaherty’s father). Thus Gort na gCapall is represented as the home of natural good feeling in
contradistinction from Cill Rónáin, while Fearann an Choirce is the field of conflict between the rival value-systems. When I first read the novel I was happy with this ideological situating of Gort na gCapall, which agreed what I myself felt about the place, but the geographical relationship between the villages puzzled me, for I thought I knew that there is no such footpath across the crags as O’Flaherty describes.
Certainly a track leads southwards from immediately east of the school; it shortly peters out, but one can persist in the same direction by climbing field-walls until one reaches the near end of a
róidín
coming to meet it from Bóthar na gCrag; we often went that way to the cliffs, and because it was a favourite route I marked it on my first map of Aran by a string of dashes, as something aspiring to be a path. However, soon after its publication I
received
a copy of my map through the post, on which that dashed line had been energetically crossed out and replaced by another string of dashes veering south-west to Gort na gCapall, defying the rule my explorations had determined, that paths tend to work along the natural grid of directions given by the north-south and east-west sets of fissures. The sender was a Pádraic Ó Flaithearta, formerly of Gort na gCapall and now living in Enniscorthy, or as he insisted on spelling it, Inis Corthaigh. On his next visit to his native island he called on me, and led me across the crags to Gort na gCapall pointing out the amenities of the way: a few blocks thrown down to help one across a gully, a narrow clearance through an area cluttered with loose stone, a tread cut in a
rock-face
, a slit in a wall just wide enough to step through one shin at a time. The ordinary Aran stile, I learned, consisting of two or three long through-stones sticking out on either side of the wall, is called the
staighre
(stairs) and is used between two fields within the one person’s holding. The other sort, marking a right-of-way, is the
céimín
(little step); it is an opening, usually not quite
coming
down to ground-level, between two uprights set so close
together
a sheep could not squeeze through. Since such a gap is virtually invisible until one is opposite it, and the other little
orderings
of stone making up the footpath are indistinguishable from the rest of the stony chaos until they are almost underfoot, our effortless oblique traverse felt to me like a run of good luck. I trotted after Pádraic Dan Phatch across this familiar terrain with a new and disorientating freedom, such as one would find on
being
shown how to pass through the walls of one’s own house.
This footpath is Gort na gCapall’s right-of-way across Fearann an Choirce territory, its shortcut to the school and the main road leading on to the chapel and Cill Rónáin. “There used to be a shine on the rocks so many people went across there,” an old man of Gort na gCapall told me later on, “but since the bicycles came out no one goes that way.” There is a similar right-of-way going south-west from Cill Rónáin to Bóthar na gCrag, of which Dara the postman says, “There used to be a white line worn by the nailed boots all the way across the crags; you could even see it at night.” So in fact it was “the heavy boot of Europe” that for a while paved these ancient paths with a new magic, until the
advance
of technology left them to the slow recarpeting of lichen. What O’Flaherty calls a “mystic bond between this beautiful human energy and the wild earth over which it passed” was
actually
something less ineffable and more interesting, a temporary concatenation of compromises between nature’s immortal
symmetries
and the ordinary mortal’s will to cut corners.
Over the years I have been shown several others of these
formerly
shining ways. A particularly attractive one, which was much used at night by seaweed-gatherers and kelp-burners, runs from the upper end of Fearann an Choirce down to An Duirling Bhán, the village’s kelp-shore, dropping from terrace to terrace by little steps nested in ferny clefts of the scarps. It would be
reasonable
to suppose that there was one cutting north-south across the great crags behind Cill Rónáin, and the tradition that the saints used to go that way between Mainistir and Cill Éinne probably represents the memory of such a path. If Nell of the Tower knew that shortcut and could follow it by night, something of her
mystery
might be explained; if there was a “shining way” from Gort
na gCapall right across the back of the island along the line of the present Bóthar na gCrag, then Nell might well have been able to make her famous journey from Gort na gCapall to Cill Éinne faster than the man on horseback going round by the road through six hospitable villages. Few people would have known any of these intimately local routes other than the ones linked with their own village; the exceptions would be such anomalous characters as wise women and cartographers, who are not above cultivating a reputation for paranormal powers of way-finding.
Today’s schoolchildren seem not to know of the shortcut to Gort na gCapall, or they prefer the chance of a lift along the roads. The sides of one or two of the little stiles have leaned
together
, quietly closing the way; grey forgetfulness has wiped away the footmarks that mapped out Aran for the moon. I spoke about this way once to a lady of another village who was born in Gort na gCapall, and it was as if I had reopened the gates of Eden. Raptly she recalled the adventures of that daily to-and-fro with her school-friends. The spots they rested their hands on in
clambering
up and down ledges were polished smooth, she said. Once she dropped the silvery cap of her new fountain-pen down a
fissure
; they could see it glinting, but “You might as well have been looking down into Hell, that
scailp
was so deep!” They marked the spot with a pile of stones, and that evening her brothers came with a crowbar, levered out a great slab, and reached out the
pentop
. She could show me the very slab today, she remembered
every
stone of the way. And as she talked, her eyes reflected the gleam of silver gifts unwrapped after years unseen.
The finest limestone pavements of the island lie like a fallen sickle moon, some days old, some days new, along the curve of the land beyond Gort na gCapall; one can walk over great open tracts of
rock, west and then north-westwards, all the way to the village of Cill Mhuirbhigh. On one’s left are, at first, the jagged ridge of the storm-beach around Port Bhéal an Dúin, and then the slightly higher ground, sparsely grassed and salted by spray, rising to the cliffs of An Sunda Caoch. A few hundred yards inland on one’s right, the terrace-edge is a sharp drop of fifteen or twenty feet, rimming a busily subdivided lowland of milking-pastures and potato-gardens. The walk from village to village could be made as little as a brisk mile, with only a few awkward walls and ravines to be negotiated, but the best route is indefinitely more
complicated
.
Pádraic Dan Phatch first showed me the bee-line right-of-way across the crags from Gort na gCapall to the villagers’ favourite fishing perches on the cliffs. This used to be another of the silvery ways I have described, but its moonshine had long evaporated; I remember that at one point when I was walking a couple of paces to one side of him he gestured me back onto the correct path, which he could see or perhaps feel through his feet, although to me its humps and cracks were as illegible as the rest. Pádraic, that day, was an exile home on holiday, his long strides and
declamatory
reminiscences were an exultant reappropriation of the land of his youth, and the jottings I made on my map in his turbulent wake were far from clear to me afterwards. So I returned several times to go over the ground at my own pace, and gradually
accommodated
my eyes to catch the residual luminosity of the past even in the brightest present-daylight; and then I found that, apart from the fishermen’s shortcut, I could make out yet another and finer web of human investment in these crags.
Some of the stiles of the right-of-way have collapsed or been filled with stones, but the first is clear to see, a substantial
staighre
in the wall of the boreen from the village where it turns south to the shore, and the second, a
céimín,
is straight opposite it, across a hundred yards of pavement which the glaciers have moulded into long smooth billows. After that the route is crossed by more recent walls, and the next clear
céimín
is three hundred yards
further west. My wanderings over the intervening crags in search of traces of the true way revealed so many intriguing little
adjustments
of the ground to the foot that I ended up by mapping it in detail; any islander seeing me nosing out these rocky hints and nudges might have wondered if I had trodden on the
fóidín
mearbhaill
or “stray sod,” for one who steps on such a spot loses all sense of direction and has to wander till moonrise, the only remedy being to take off one’s coat and put it on again inside out.
I am tempted to write a guide to this crooked acre, to push further into absurdity the pretensions of this book to
comprehensiveness
. But such a guide would have to be addressed to the cow’s hoof rather than the human foot, and would fall into a browsing, straying, gait, petering out in ruminative stillness, for the expanse of stone is interrupted by oases of grass, and the purpose of all this micro-engineering is to link these into a maze of grazing, that the desert may yield meat and milk. Thus:
To begin at the beginning (Oh Cow!), you should wait patiently while Rónán Dan Phatch or Oisín Rónáin Dan or whoever is conducting you throws down the “gap” in the boreen wall twenty yards south of the first stile mentioned above. An unusual oblique gully in which some knee-deep and more than worthwhile grass is growing guides a narrow track to the next gap, beside the second stile; this track looks comparatively recent, and where it crosses rock the fissures have been filled with small stones and the way edged with larger blocks and surfaced with clay for your comfort.
Beyond
the second gap there is a deeply fissured outcrop on the right; roll your eye at this and remember Tom O’Flaherty’s essay “Bó i Sgailp.” (Easily translated:
bó,
a cow, is one of the noble ancient words of Irish, and indeed as the late Professor Vendryes puts it in his indispensable and most
regrettably
uncompleted
Lexique
étymologique
de
l’Irlandais
ancien,
“C’est le nom indo-européen de l’animal bovin, conservé dans la plupart des langues,”—and he instances among others Sanskrit
Greek
and of course the Latin
bos;
from
bó
derive such foundational terms of Irish culture as
bóthar,
a road, originally a way that could accomodate two cows,
buachall,
a boy, originally a cow-boy, and, to butter you up no further, Boand, the cow-goddess who gave her name to the River Boyne. The word
sgailp,
nowadays
spelled
scailp,
plural
scalpacha
í
or (my preference)
scailpreachaí,
a cleft, fissure, cave, etc., is in Aran of almost equal weight, being with
creig
the most important term of topography in this island composed almost entirely of
creigeanna
and
scailpreachaí.
Hence:
bó
i
sgailp,
a cow in a cleft.) Picture, then, young Tom’s alarm when:
…the most wierd and feared cry that ever smote the ear of Aran islander fell on the village like the crack of doom.
“Bó I Sgailp! Bó I Sgailp! Bó I Sgailp!”
The meaning of this was that somebody’s cow had caught in a cleft among the rocks, and that it was almost certain the animal was lost.
In that case the precious beast had broken its leg and had to be “put down”; here though there is no danger of such a disaster, because Dan Phatch
himself
long ago built a little rim of stones around the patch of
scailpreachaí,
to guide you leftwards. Better still, the stones he used were fished out of a saucer-like depression of broken ground in which the grass therefore grows unimpeded; room to swish one’s tail here! A trodden path winds
southwestwards
across the grass to another gap, giving onto a crag that is deeply scored across by long depressions a couple of yards wide made by the
glaciers
that grazed the island fifteen or twenty thousand years ago. Each of these
gleainníní
or little glens has a thin carpet of heather and some mouthfuls of grass to be snatched while following the first of them to the north for a few paces. Now cross the intervening rib of limestone to the next
gleain
nín
—the fissures at the crossing-point have been packed with stones and a row of small blocks placed on either side to stop you straying onto rock which might be slippery after rain. The second hollow offers thirty or forty paces of grazing flavoured with tormentil, milkwort, fairy flax and a dozen other herbs too minute to be savoured individually but all said to be good for you. This brings you to the wall separating this enclosure from the one north of it, which is even less interpretable as a field than this enclosure. A bit of smoothening and infilling of the
creig
has
made a passable route along the wall—mind your flanks, especially if pregnant, on the projecting angles
of its stones—to a gap in the western wall of the enclosure, opening into another grassy hollow going south again. A cutting hacked through the next long finger of rock—rather narrow and sharp-edged at hock-level, please note—opens up one more dip the glacier bulldozed out for grass to grow in. The
staighre
in the wall immediately west of it is of course not good enough for cows, but the wall makes this a sheltered corner in which to chew the cud.
The point to which I have brought the cow is only two
hundred
yards from the gap in the boreen wall, and after so many closely considered paces it is exhilarating to rove more widely over the crag of almost uninterrupted bare rock to the north, which forms a salient of the terrace-rim, sticking out like the nose of the Man in the Moon over the lower land beyond. The tip of it is called Aill na Sagart, the cliff of the priests, and there is a vague tradition that the Mass used to be celebrated here, perhaps during the time of the Penal Laws against the Catholic religion some three hundred years ago. It is a lofty-feeling spot, though I
suppose
it is not more than twenty feet above the little fields that congregate around its foot. A green and flowery boreen, a
favourite
walk of ours when the primroses are in bloom, passes
immediately
below on its many-angled way from Gort na gCapall, of which the nearest houses are not far away on the right, to Cill Mhuirbhigh beach, half a mile ahead to the left. This fertile area is called An Caiseal, for no clear reason; a
caiseal
can be many stony things from a great stone fort like Dún Aonghasa (which overlooks the entire scene of this chapter from the western
skyline
), to a little pile of stones left over from a children’s game, but this is Gort na gCapall’s most stone-free land, of good
duramhán,
sandy loam, and well watered from springs under the terrace-rim. Seen from above like this, the fields in their low walls look up with the innocency of rooms in a doll’s house when one lifts the roof and peeps in. This would be the setting of “Spring Sowing”—in fact there they are, Martin and Mary, at their midday bread and butter and tea. Should one look?
Martin ate heartily, revelling in his great thirst and hunger, with every pore of his body open to the pure air. Then he looked around at his neighbours’ fields boastfully, comparing them with his own. Then he looked at his wife’s little round black head and felt very proud of having her as his own. He leaned back on his elbow and took her hand in his. Shyly and in silence, not knowing what to say and ashamed of their gentle feelings, for peasants are always ashamed of feeling refined, they finished eating and still sat hand in hand looking away into the distance. Everywhere the sowers were resting on little knolls, men, women and children sitting in silence….
From Aill na Sagart I look away, into the distance. Poking my nose into the island’s tender moments, when there is work to be done, sense to be harrowed out of the rock! Back to my
moonscape
!
In that distance beyond Cill Mhuirbhigh bay, a crisp pleating of grey-blue and fawn along the horizon represents the highlands of Connemara. According to most accounts of the last Ice Age it was from an ice-cap on the mountains to the right in this vista, the Maumturks, that our local glaciers emanated. Listening to one’s footsteps ringing on the pristine pavement above Aill na Sagart one could imagine that the ice had only just retired from its polishing. The name of this particularly fine tract of crag is Creig na Leacht, and it seems that here
leacht
means, not a
monument
or cairn, but simply the same as
leac,
a “flag” or rock-sheet. When a low sun plays obliquely across this wide-open expanse it adumbrates every inequality of the surface, overlaying the rock with transparencies, dim maps of all the dimly understood
processes
that have worked on it. Among these diagrammatic
apparitions
are a number of approximately parallel channels, a few feet wide and a few inches deep, their shelving flanks delicately carved into scarps of half an inch or so, traceable in places for thirty yards or more; they look like gentle rivers of space or fossilized breezes. They have not been created by erosion along particularly close-set joints of the limestone, like the much deeper
gleainníní
with their bottoms of broken, fissured stone and heathery sward,
for these channels have floors as bare and smooth as the
surrounding
pavement. I have noted them in many parts of the
island
, but these on Creig na Leacht are the most striking examples. They seem to occur mainly, or at least to be more apparent, on rock-exposures with very few joints, that is, on the hardest, purest limestone, and they tend roughly north-north-east, just a few
degrees
more easterly than does the principal set of joints. (Here their bearing is about 21 degrees east of true north, whereas the main joints, the field walls and the
gleainnín
í
run at about 12
degrees
east,
i.e
. in the direction I have been calling Aran North). That they pre-date the opening-up of the joints by weathering is demonstrated by the fact that they run on from clint to clint; where the rainwater swills off them between two clints their lips have been worn down into wide funnels, but otherwise their beds are continuous across the grykes. This seems to suggest that
although
they have been modified by weathering since the crags were left bare, basically they are the work of glaciation—and, looking out along them, their perspective converges very
convincingly
on the Maumturks. However, if they were excavated by loose rock being dragged across the land surface by ice, one would expect them to be very varied, whereas throughout the islands they are rather similar in their dimensions. My sources of
geological
understanding are unwilling to commit themselves to an opinion on the origins of these tracings, so I leave them among the enigmas of Aran.
