Stones of Aran (52 page)

O’Donovan’s Ordnance Survey letters, 1839:

This is the only substantive reference we have to “the church of the sea-plain,” of which nothing is remembered. “Atharla, site of” is marked on the old OS maps, about forty yards south of the main road where it makes a little detour around the head of Port Mhuirbhigh. On several occasions I have hopped across the low roadside wall into the big field to look for it, never quite
reconciled
to the fact that not a trace of it is to be seen. I was usually on my way to the Conneelys’ shop, guest-house and post office in the village, half a mile further west, which was a focus of the island for us. If, to the islanders of long ago, going to Cill Mhuirbhigh meant going to the church of the sea-plain, in our time it meant going to Conneelys’. Now Conneelys’ lies derelict, and on recent visits to the island I have stayed at Kilmurvey House, the former O’Flaherty residence O’Donovan refers to, which in its turn has become for me the centre of gravity of the village.

The sea-plain itself, Na Muirbhigh Móra, around the head of the bay, is the heart of the Kilmurvey House farm, a smooth tract of sandy grassland divided by straight walls into near-rectangles of two thousand square yards or so, in striking contrast to the Gort na gCapallites’ crumpled pocket-handkerchiefs of land
immediately
to the south in An Caiseal. Each year one or two of the fields are in hay, and dry cattle roam the rest. Parts of this area used to be tilled, and the evening sun brings out the shadows of old potato-ridges that must have seemed eternally long to those who had to dig them. In a damp hollow there are traces of
unusually
broad ridges, about three yards across, in which I am told flax used to be cultivated. On a knoll by the roadside at the west end of the beach is a small, walled, cemetery, from which the Celtic
cross marking the O’Flaherty grave-plot overlooks the entire
productive
basin of land; seeing it, I imagine James O’Flaherty JP watching the scythes work across his fields from that vantage-point and reading the self-gratulatory motto
“Fortuna
favet
fortibus,”
“Fortune favours the brave,” on his father’s tomb.

The westernmost of these big fields below the cemetery is
favoured
by a fortune of wild-flowers. A honeyed breeze rolls across the road from it in high summer; it breathes out more riches in an afternoon than the O’Flahertys gathered in all their history. The usual meadow-herbs such as purple and white clovers and the yellow kidney vetch, bird’s foot trefoil and lady’s bedstraw are abundant; there is also the less common squinancywort, and clambering and twining through all these a rare curiosity, the common dodder. This parasite, a network of reddish, hair-fine, filaments, virtually rootless and leafless, blossoming in tiny
clusters
of minute pinkish bells, taps the juices of other plants through tiny suckers penetrating their tissues. It seems to enjoy a
superfluity
of sweets here; I think that much of the aerial mead
intoxicating
the bees is distilled by its flowers.

This field falls away shallowly to the south-west, and under the wall of the boreen going by it to An Caiseal are three hollows where water wells out of the ground after rain. One December M and I decided to walk round that way, after having been kept in for days by thunderstorms charging across the island on great thick smoky stalks of rain, each one darkening the house for a few minutes and turning the garden shrubs inside out before rushing off eastwards. Having edged our way down the road between the hard lumps of wind, we found that Bóithrín an Chaisil had
disappeared
into a small angry lake. There were two or three whooper swans on the water, and some wild duck I could not identify in the winter twilight. I went down again after calm had had a few days to establish itself. This time, it was the hour accurately termed in Irish “the ring of dawn.” Stepping out of the house into a stillness that was just beginning to be quartered by birdsong, I found my wellington boots so noisy on the road I had to go back
and change into shoes, by which time the moment of perfection had been replaced by some mere gritty-eyed early-morning
clock-hour
. But down by the wintery lake I was rewarded by a glimpse of a bird I hadn’t seen in Aran before, the water rail, like a little grey-brown hen, going off high-stepping and tip-tilted into the ranks of curled dock along the further shore.

Even in droughty weather one would guess that the lower half of the field is a turlough, from the ragged hanks of black-brown moss on the stones of its southern wall, and the striking
distribution
of plants that are particular about how much immersion they can take. In their respective seasons the small dandelion-like
autumn
hawkbit,
Leontodon
autumnalis,
and the big white ox-eye daisy make vivid contour-maps of the slopes around the hollows. The hollow nearest to the main road—Poll an Chapaill, the pool of the horse—must go down nearly to sea-level, for the stones in its bottom are draped with livid green tresses of
Enteromorpha
seaweed; it probably connects with an outflow of fresh water on the shelving beach across the road and four hundred yards to the north, that shows up in the bright clean sand as a dark patch smelling of vegetable decay. Each of the three foci of the turlough has its own flora. In Poll an Chapaill, on the mud between the stones there is water speedwell, and around that a stratum of
silverweed
and marsh bedstraw, with creeping cinquefoil on the rough outcrop that makes a little mantle to the swallow-hole. The second swallow-hole, a hundred yards further inland, is
shallower
. A dark-toned area of spike rush surrounds it, mixed with common redleg and the rather rare marsh yellow cress,
Rorippa
icelandica,
and in the muddy centre grows a white-flowered crowfoot,
Ranunculus
trichophyllus.
The third is in a small triangular field over the boundary wall in Gort na gCapall territory. Most of the hollow is deeply carpeted with silverweed, round its rim is a zone of marsh ragwort, and on the bare mud in the middle squats the miserable-looking toad rush.

In summer the air over these mud-ponds is zipping with small brown dragonflies; the common
Sympetrum,
I think. They mate
in flight, with Kamasutral contortions: in both sexes the genitalia are under the tail-end of the long abdomen, but the male also has claspers on his tail and accessory sex-organs under the front end of his abdomen; with the claspers he holds the female by the back of the neck, she secures the grip by flexing her head or neck, and then she bends her own abdomen forwards and applies the
sex-organ
near the end of it to the male’s accessory organ; and off they go looped together like some letter out of an erotic alphabet. When she is ready to lay her eggs, her mate helicopters over the pond with the female still hanging from his tail and lowers her until she can dab her abdomen into the mud or the water again and again, washing off the eggs one at a time. Admiring these antics one day, I saw a lone dragonfly pursuing a linked couple. She—it must have been a she—attached herself by the neck to the tail of the other female, which brought the whole train of them crashing to the ground. The male quickly disengaged himself and flew off, the female in possession got herself free and darted after him, and the interloper stayed there flicking her wings. It was impossible not to see the three of them respectively as exasperated, insatiate, and disconsolate.

One day in the summer of ’75 I found this last part of the
turlough
covered with ragged sheets of something like a thick
whitish
paper, draped over the rampant tussocks of silverweed; there were perhaps a hundred square yards of it. I was baffled as to this nature of this substance, which seemed to have appeared
overnight
and was to shrivel away over the following few days. Later I learned from Máire Scannell of the National Botanic Gardens that it was “algal paper.” It forms in turloughs when hot weather causes microscopic algae (
Oedogonium
and other species) to
proliferate
in a matted scum, which is left high and dry as the
water-level
drops away, and is baked and bleached to the consistency of paper. Since then I have seen acres of it around one of the big turloughs in the Burren, but outside the turlough areas of the west of Ireland it is an exceedingly rare occurrence. A German scientist told me it had only been reported about a dozen times in
Germany, where it is known as “meteor-paper” because it used to be thought to fall from the sky. It is curious that Praeger, who recorded the turlough flora very thoroughly, makes no mention of the phenomenon, which suggests that it has become more
frequent
since his time—but why that should be, I do not know.

Loch an Mhuirbhigh, the lake of the sea-plain, is the name of this turlough. I love the place. Its moods are less coercive than the hyperventilating lucidity of the crags or the hypnotic intricacies of the thickety little scarp-foot plots. In its relaxed openness and the grace of its distinctions, not to mention the cards it keeps up its sleeve, the quality it suggests is
intelligence.

Going on towards the village, the road climbs past an odd detached length of cliff like a bun sandwich, a thin slice of shale between two fat layers of limestone. The tall umbellifers
flourishing
on the cliff-face, with dark glossy leaves and yellowish
flower-heads
, are alexanders. The cemetery lies along the south of the road at the top of the slope, and opposite it is a wide, rough field looking back to the bay, called Fearann na gCeann and said to be a battle-site. The earliest reference seems to be J.T. O’Flaherty’s article of 1824, though it is likely he got the information from Hardiman, who was a friend of the Kilmurvey O’Flahertys:

The “remote period” must have been some time before the
expulsion
of the O’Briens by the O’Flahertys in the 1560s. The little cliff by the road is called Cnocán na mBan, the hillock of the women, who are said to have stood on it to see their men-folk making history. I am told that the cemetery itself was called
Cnocán an Chochaill, or Reilig an Chochaill, the hillock or graveyard of the cloak, a name that perhaps has a connection with the story of St. Colm Cille’s cloak told in my first volume. According to an old villager, some such name was written on a “flag” set in its wall, but when the wall was being rebuilt in the 1930s a woman who was not quite right in the head took it and carried it on her back all the way to Teaghlach Éinne, and it is now lost. The old recumbent gravestones here are hard to read except in certain lights; now and then, in necrological mood, I used to kick through the tousled grass and little sandpits to see what death-notices were being posted by the circling sun. Old limestone and new marble agree that Hernon is the predominant name in this cemetery’s mortal catchment area, principally the village itself. There are also many small, blank, boulders marking the graves of those too young, too numerous or too humble to have been granted even one parting line by the hard art of
writing
. A stray occupies a discreet corner: A. Tizzard, a Royal Air Force gunner, fished up in the nets in 1941. Another non-Aran name occurs on a well-carved and prominent slab near the O’Flaherty tomb: a Jane Gibson, died 1824 aged five. There is a place—a vertiginous brink in fact—on the west side of the
peninsula
of Dún Dúchathair called Binse Ghibson, Gibson’s ledge; it is vaguely supposed that some Englishman must have fished from it long ago, and I had marked the spot on my map without much expectation of ever learning more of the man. Then, years after I had left Aran, my telephone rang late one night, and
Gibson
spoke to me, through the voice of his great-great-grandson who was following up the clue of his name on the map in search of his ancestry. Thus I know that James Gibson was from the Scilly Islands and came to Aran as a coastguard with his wife Catherine and four children, of whom Jane was the youngest, in about 1823. They had another child who died at birth in the same year as Jane, and three more who survived, over the next eight years. Later James was transferred to Casla Bay on the south
Connemara
coast, where he died of a heart attack while pulling a boat
ashore. His widow and orphans crossed Ireland in an open cart and eventually returned to Scilly. One son, John, born in Aran, grew up to be a pilot. A passenger on a liner he was piloting once happened to leave an early model of camera on board, and when the captain and the crew had all failed to make anything of it, John took it, mastered it, became well known for his photographs of wrecks, and founded a photographic business, Gibson and Co.

The highest spot in the graveyard is occupied by the O’Flaherty tomb, with its tall Celtic cross patriarchally surveying the former estate. The cross is primarily