Stones of Aran (54 page)
Authors: Tim Robinson
Kilmurvey is, on the Aran scale, a Big House. Square, plain, and stolidly Victorian, it has two storeys, a hipped, slated roof, and a small central porch, with a big sash-window to left and right of it and three similar windows above. The lichen-grey
plastering
is relieved only by shallow rusticated architraves around the windows; there is no fanlight over the door, no pediment or pillars or battlements or any other fancy features. A small
front-garden
is separated by a low wall from the big flat meadow, in which the grass is often tall and rank, that surrounds the whole and is crossed by a curving concrete drive from the gates. The back of the house incorporates the long single-storey farmhouse that preceded it, and a workaday yard and outhouses are hidden to the rear. Behind these premises is a walled orchard gone wild. Over its low door a stone plaque reads “Patrick O’Flaherty Esq. 1809.” One steps through into the heart of a huge
Escallonia
bush, and the harsh tang of nettles mixed with the syrupy perfume of Himalayan balsam arises as one pushes through the undergrowth in search of the mossy old apple trees. A narrow belt of trees
extends
to right and left of the orchard in the shelter of the steep fifteen-or twenty-foot scarp with which the land begins to step up to the bare plateau to the west. This crescent of woodland, scarcely taller than the scarp-face, domed and bevelled by the western gales, is still deep enough to cast a spell not to be felt elsewhere on the island. In August, when men are pitchforking
the haycocks of the meadow onto a high-piled cart, there are
tenuous
shin-high groves of enchanter’s nightshade on the damp ground under the alders and sycamores, and the dim, tangled canopy overhead flickers with the shade-favouring sorts of
butterfly
such as the ringlet and the speckled wood. A trace of
nostalgia
for the regime of the Big House, even, has stolen into this wood, and persists in its shelter when it is denied all rights to
existence
by the harsh crags above.
On the edge of the wood, behind and to the right of the house, is the roofless ruin of a curious old chapel, Teampall Mhic
Duach
. To reach it one has to cross the field under the formal gaze of the side of the house, and for many islanders this is difficult; when one of our elderly neighbours took the opportunity of our
company
to visit it for the first time, he had to assure himself aloud, as we passed the glacial windows, “I have the right to walk here!” The church is picturesquely half withdrawn into the dappled shade of the wood. A few paces from it is a craggy limestone slab about seven feet tall and two feet wide, with the outlines of a ringed cross sharply cut into its west face and a simpler cross,
almost
effaced, of single, broad grooves on the other. It leans slightly, as if it were dawdling about, enjoying an uncanonical hour of birdsong before a bell summons it from the church. But this broad-shouldered brother could hardly enter, for the door, in the west gable-end, is a narrow slot just five foot five inches high, twenty-three inches wide at the bottom and only fifteen inches wide at the top. It looks as if it were compressed by the weight of its tremendous lintel, a block of granite over five feet long.
According
to O’Donovan this lintel was damaged when a Scotsman tried to pull it out to make a quern-stone of it, and was stopped just in time by Patrick O’Flaherty; Wakeman has a better version of the story, in which the church itself prevents the sacrilege by grabbing the thief’s hand in a crevice of the masonry and holding him until he confessed his evil intentions.
The church consists of a nave and a chancel separated by a round-headed arch. The western part, the nave, represents the
original building, and one would guess from the great size of the blocks in its walls, the massive antae prolonging the sides beyond the west gable-wall, and the lintelled doorway with its inclining jambs, that it is of comparatively early date. But it seems that none of the Aran churches are quite as ancient as their
architecture
suggests, and in this case a recent radio-carbon test of mortar from the nave placed it in the eleventh century. On the outside of the north wall, near the west end, is a block with an animal carved into it, a rather long, sinuous horse, perhaps, significance
unknown.
The arch dividing the nave from the chancel is Romanesque, as is the lovely slim round-headed lancet window-light in the east gable. The chancel is a little narrower than the nave at
ground-level
and has been fitted onto the east end of the older building between its antae, but it has projecting parapets along its eaves bringing it out to the full width of the rest, probably added in the fifteenth century. These ragged crenellations give the church a romantic air; one can imagine some aged cleric defying the
robbers
of the wood from them, or preaching to inattentive
wood-pigeons
that go clattering off through the treetops every time he appears on their level.
Whoever the embattled priest of these woods was, he was not St. Colmán Mac Duach, the dedicatee, for the latter is supposed to have studied under Enda in the far-back days of Aran of the Saints. Geoffrey Keating’s history of Ireland,
Foras
Feasa
ar
Éir
inn
,
tells us of Mac Duach’s lifestyle:
When Mochua or Mac Duach was a hermit in the desert the only cattle he had in the world were a cock and a mouse and a fly. The cock’s service to him was to keep the matin time of midnight; and the mouse would let him sleep only five hours in the day-and-night, and when he desired to sleep longer, through being tired from making many crosses and genuflexions, the mouse would come and rub his ear, and thus waken him; and the
service
the fly did him was to keep walking on every line of the Psalter that he read, and when he rested from reciting his psalms the fly rested on the line
he left off at till he resumed the reciting of his psalms. Soon after that these three precious persons died, and Mochua, after that event, wrote a letter to Columcille, who was in I [Iona] in Alba, and he complained of the death of his flock. Columcille wrote to him, and said thus: “O brother,” said he, “thou must not be surprised at the death of the flock that thou hast lost, for misfortune exists only where there is wealth.” From this banter of these real saints I gather that they set no store on worldly possessions, unlike many persons of the present time.
Mac Duach is usually identified with Mochua, brother to the seventh-century King Guaire of Connacht. Guaire dispensed his legendary hospitality from Durlus Guaire, by Kinvara near the head of Galway Bay, and Mac Duach’s principal foundation was six miles to the south of that, where the round tower of
Kilmacduagh
still looks out across the grey limestone plains stretching eastwards from the Burren heights. A tiny, ruinous oratory, a spring well and a cave under the great inland cliff of Eagle’s Rock in the Burren itself are also associated with him. In this savage and lonely “desert,” accompanied by one follower, he observed Lent, living on one meal a day of a little barley bread and
watercress
:
And when Easter day had come, and Mochua had said Mass a desire for meat seized the young cleric, and he said to St. Mochua that he would go to Durlus to visit Guaire in order to get enough of meat. “Do not go,” said Mochua, “stay with me, and let me pray to God for meat for thee.” And on this he knelt on the ground and prayed with fervour to God, asking for meat for the young cleric. At the same time while food was being served to the tables of Guaire’s house, it came to pass through Mochua’s prayer that the dishes and the meat they contained were snatched from the hands of those who were serving them and were carried away over the walls of the dwelling, and by direct route reached the desert where Mochua was; and Guaire went with his household on horseback in quest of the dishes; and when the dishes came into the presence of Mochua he set to praise and magnify the name of God, and told the young cleric to eat his fill of meat.
The latter thereupon looked up and saw the plain full of mounted men, and said that it was of no advantage to him to get the meat, seeing how many there were in pursuit of it. “Thou needest not fear,” said Mochua, “these are my brother and his household, and I beseech God to permit none of them to advance beyond that point until thou hast had thy fill.” And on this the horses’ hooves clung to the ground and they could not go forward till the young cleric had had his fill…. It is a proof of the truth of this story that the Road of the Dishes is the name given to the five mile’s path that lies between Durlus and the well at which Mochua then was.
As further proof, a farmer of that locality pointed out to me the imprints of the hooves on the rock, as well as the marks left by the plates and even the salt and pepper pots. I have indicated the spot on my map of the Burren, together with the grave of the young cleric, who, the farmer’s wife told me, died of overeating.
On the other side of the lane past Kilmurvey House, in the field behind the old stable-yard, are the remains of another little chapel, for which O’Donovan could collect no name from the islanders, but which has somehow come to be labelled as
Teampall
na Naomh, the church of the saints, on the OS maps. It is a featureless, broken-down rectangle about fifteen feet long, the little window in the east gable and the narrow door in the west both almost obliterated. An arc of low stony mounds in the field just north of it indicates the course of a vanished cashel wall, which perhaps surrounded the chapel and may relate to a great mossy bank of stone behind and on the south of the house itself, among the trees by the orchard wall. From these two disjunct scraps it is hard to envisage what George Petrie saw here, fifty years before Patrick O’Flaherty’s cottage was magnified into
Kilmurvey
House. This was:
…the great fortress of Muirbheach Mil…erected by a prince of the
Firbolgs
about the commencement of the Christian era, the interior of which is occupied by two churches, and the numerous round houses of the monks of St. Mac Duach. When I visited Aran, in the year 1821, nearly half of the
fortress remained, and the wall was in some parts twenty feet high, and thirteen feet thick at its summit.
He also discovered, near the churches,
…the ruins of a building that would have been large enough to serve the purposes of a refectory…an oval structure, without cement, of fifty by thirty-seven feet external measurement, with a wall of six feet in thickness.
In fact the ancient references to this Mil, brother of the
legendary
Aonghas, suggest that his
dún
was on some other
muirbheach
or sea-plain in Galway or Clare, but perhaps some Aran chieftain resigned a cashel here to a community of monks, as happened elsewhere according to several
Lives
of the early saints. Little of all this remained even when O’Donovan was here in 1839. Westropp, writing in 1895, noted that
Mr. O’Flaherty, in making his garden near this church, found nine or ten oblong cells in groups of three, connected by passages. Many brass pins were found, and monumental slabs, with inscriptions “like arrow-heads,” unfortunately broken up and used for the wall.
Now the only witness to St. Mac Duach’s foundation, apart from the two chapels, is his holy well, tucked away to the back of the meadow south of the house. It used to be the object of a local pilgrimage, but this died out a few decades ago, and the well itself is dry. Its fern-lined basin, shadowed by the margin of the wood, has a low horseshoe-shaped wall around it, built into which is a stone seat suitable for meditation on the transience of material things.
Having trampled though the nettles and the rank wet grass and the deep sense of privacy all around the back of Kilmurvey House, I will now look into the little front garden, as I find it in my memory from a recent revisiting of the island. A small antique cannon, an O’Flaherty trophy, perhaps from a wreck, lies by the
porch. Also, a limestone block carved with a heraldic device, which used to be set in the wall by another gateway into the grounds south of the main entrance, until someone tried to carry it off, after which it was brought here for safety. Nobody seemed to know what it was, so I made a sketch of it and had it identified: a rowel spur, winged, the crest of the Johnston family. Otherwise, everything here is modern and everyday: a rectangle of lawn on either side of the path, a few marigolds and wallflowers, a child’s tricycle, a couple of tourists’ bikes leaned against the wall under one of the windows. I feel I am bringing in too much ancient
history
like mud on my boots. The old wooden door, I see, has been replaced by a plastic one since I was here last. As I approach, a gong sounds from within. This is not the moment to call; Bridgie will be in the kitchen stirring gravy and minding her new
grandson
while Treasa carries a laden tray into the dining-room,
obstructed
by her little girl scampering up and down the hall. In any case, I do not want to call on these old friends with one hand as long as the other, as they say. Bridgie has often asked me who could write the history of the O’Flahertys. I could not—the
material
is not to hand—but I could go away and do some reading, and come back with a tapestry of O’Flaherty lore, extended to cover the house’s more recent occupancy. Would the gift be
welcome
? It might serve for the children someday, a present from the past to the future.
Argent, two lions counter-rampant, supporting a dexter hand, couped at the wrist, gules: in base, an antique galley, oars in action, sable.âCrest, on a helmet and wreath of its colours, a lizard, passant, vert.âSupporters, on the dexter, a lion, gules, argent, armed and langued, azure; on the sinister, a griffin, argent, armed and langued, gules.âMotto, “Fortuna favet
fortibus
.”
Mere modern trumpery, these armorial bearings, picked up with the rank of knight when one of the O'Flahertys of
Iar-Chonnacht
was suborned into the feudal system by Queen
Elizabeth's
crafty statesmen little more than four hundred years ago. Six hundred years before that ignominious event the
Flaithbheartach
from whom they all descendedâthe name means “bright in sovereignty” or “lordly in action”âwas lord of Maigh Seola, the rich limestone plains east of Lough Corrib and the Galway river. Another four hundred years back his ancestor Duach (called Teangumha, copper-tongued, “from the sweetness of his voice; for the music of the harp was not sweeter than the sound of his words”) ruled the whole of Connacht. Duach himself was
great-great
-great-great-great-grandson of Eochu Mugmedon (lord of slaves), the High King of Tara, while behind Eochu, in the Celtic dawnlight of
Lebor
Gab
á
la,
the Book of the Taking of Ireland, looms the magic father-figure of Ãremón, pre-eminent among the Sons of MÃl who won the island from the Tuatha Dé Danann.
A magnificent descentâbut descent is what it was, from those semi-divine beginnings. For according to the medieval
genealogists
who tried to make history out of these Iron-Age myths,
Eochu
had four sons by his wife and then another by a woman he had carried off during one of his raids on Britain. One day when they were thirsty from hunting, the five sons found an ugly hag guarding a well, who said she would only give water to the one who would kiss her cheek. Niall, the illegitimate son, embraced her, and she changed into a beautiful girl, a goddess in fact, the incarnation of sovereignty. So it was Niall who became High King of Ireland (he was the famous Niall of the Nine Hostages)âand his descendents the Uà Néill held the High Kingship almost uninterruptedly for six centuries. But the O'Flaherty line comes down from Brión, one of the legitimate brothers. He had to
content
himself with the Kingship of Connacht, which for
generations
was disputed between his descendants the Uà Briúin, and the Uà Fiachrach, descendents of another brother, Fiachra.
Duach Teangumha, the third or fourth Christian King of
Connacht, was defeated and killed by one of the Uà Néill who was battling his way to the High Kingship, in about ad 500.
Following
generations of his line must often had need of the magical assistance of their totemic lizard, that lives on in the O'Flaherty crest; tradition has it that when a chief of the Ui Briúin, weary from battle and flight, fell asleep, a lizard warned him of the near approach of his enemies by running up and down on his face and tickling him with its nails. The cognomen of Amhalgadh
Earclasaigh
(
earc
sléibhe,
lizard) suggests that it was of him this tale was told. The genealogies put him at the end of the sixth century, and while his father had been King of Connacht, he was merely king of Iar-Chonnacht (West Connacht), which at that time probably meant Maigh Seola and did not include the lands west of Lough Corrib. Eight or ten generations after him comes the
Flaithbheartach
or Flaherty from whom the clan took its name.
The stronghold of the early O'Flahertys was a fortified
crannóg
or lake-dwelling in Lough Hacket, near the present Headford. Two headlines are preserved of its troubled centuries: in 990 it was “swallowed in an hour” by a great storm; in 1036 it was
destroyed
by the King of Connacht, and several O'Flaherty chiefs were slain. The O'Connors were the rising power in Connacht then, and the Annals recall a few grim deeds from their long struggles and treacherous accomodations with the O'Flahertys. In 1051 Maigh Seola was overrun by the King of Connacht, Hugh O'Connor “of the Broken Spear,” who put out the eyes of the O'Flaherty chief. To blind an enemy was the usual way, short of killing him, of unfitting him for kingship. In 1092 a period of peace was broken by the chief Flaherty O'Flaherty, when the O'Connor king, Roderick of the Yellow Hound, foster-father to Flaherty's sons, during a friendly visit to him, was seized and had his eyes put out, and was consequently dethroned.
This Flaherty O'Flaherty, having installed another O'Connor in Roderick's stead, received his own territories back in return. A description of Maigh Seola from this period lists the various clans subject to the O'Flahertys, including the O'Hallorans, O'Dalys,
O'Duanes and O'Kennedys; it also names the hereditary officers to the O'Flahertys, such as the O'Canavans and O'Lees, medical “ollaves” (masters or experts), also their masters of the horse,
standard
bearers, brehons or judges, ollaves of history and poetry, masters of the feast, stewards and bee-keepers. However, this great following did not bring security, and in 1098 Flaherty O'Flaherty was assassinated by the vengeful foster-father of the king he had blinded.
The early part of the next century was dominated by the
campaigns
of King Turlough O'Connor against his rivals for the High Kingship of Ireland. The O'Flahertys were subject to the O'Connors by then, and several O'Flaherty chieftains died in Turlough's ceaseless campaigns. The tide of battle swept to and fro, with now the Connachtmen laying waste north Munster and destroying the O'Briens' palace at Kincora, now the Munstermen bringing devastation even into Iar-Chonnacht. A castle newly built at the mouth of the Galway river (the town did not as yet exist) was repeatedly fought over, destroyed and rebuilt. Turlough, styled “the Augustus of Western Europe” by the Annalists, had a long and intermittently triumphal reign as King of Connacht and High King of Ireland. His fleet was crucial to his successes,
bringing
his forces up the Shannon to burn down Limerick and
devastate
the surrounding parts of Munster, defeating the combined fleets of his Ulster enemies, the Scottish Isles and the Isle of Man in the greatest of ancient Irish sea-battles, off Inishowen. The O'Flahertys contributed their ships to this fleet, for as lords of the inner bay of Galway and of the huge expanse of Lough Corrib they were a naval powerâa fact commemorated by the “antique galley” of their coat of arms. A poem of this period refers to “the warlike O'Flahertys”:
To flee from their onslaught is meet;
To them belongs the watching of the fair harbours.
The O'Flahertys were not solely devoted to war, though. At
Annaghdown on the eastern shore of Lough Corrib was an
ancient
ecclesiastical site attributed to St. Brendan of Clonfert.
Under
the O'Flahertys a priory arose there soon after 1195, and Annaghdown became a bishopric roughly co-extensive with their territories, to which they supplied several bishops. The monastery was burned down in 1411, but some of its fine Romanesque
stonework
can be seen in the ruins of the later cathedral, together with the remains of cloisters with a distinctly military air; in the
dangerous
world of the O'Flahertys even their religious capital had to be fortified.
Turlough O'Connor died in 1156, and it was during his son Rory's High Kingship that one of his rivals, Dermot Mac
Murrough
, brought the first Anglo-Norman mercenaries into the island, in 1167. Chain-mail, the crossbow, the battle-steed, a new discipline and ideology of conquest, rapidly brought ancient
Ireland
to its end. By a treaty of 1175, Rory became a vassal of the King of England, holding Connacht directly from him and
paying
tribute. The treaty did not long delay the Anglo-Normans' advance. They first invaded Connacht in 1177, coming as far as Tuam and sending an expedition to burn Galway before being put to flight. In 1196 the O'Flahertys rose in revolt against the aged Rory O'Connor and were crushed by his rebellious younger brother Crobderg (red-hand), who captured the O'Flaherty chieftain and handed him over to the English to be put to death. Two years later, Rory, the last High King of Ireland, died as a pilgrim at Cong, the monastery his father had founded at the head of Lough Corrib.
Differences over the succession left Connacht open to the
fateful
advent of the Normans. William de Burgo had paid good money for a grant of Connacht to King John of England, and was looking for an opportunity of seizing the land to go with the parchment. In 1202, and after devious and treacherous
combinations
between Anglo-Norman and Irish forces, he was celebrating Easter with the recently crowned Crobderg in Cong, while
conspiring
with the O'Flahertys against his host. These plans failed, and within a few years he was dead, and for the first time the
O'Flahertys were driven out of Maigh Seola by the O'Connors. Soon they had to hand over all their ships on Lough Corrib, were ousted from their fort at Galway, and retreated into the wild
terrain
of mountains and bogs to the west.
The de Burgos were a powerful family at court, however, and the paper grant of Connacht always threatened. When, in 1235, the Norman lords undertook the systematic reduction of Connacht, the de Burgos' share was to include Maigh Seola. The O'Flahertys, although confined behind Lough Corrib, were still seen as a danger, and the English attacked them and forced them to co-operate in pursuit of some of the O'Connors' troops. On this occasion the O'Flahertys dragged their ships from the head of Lough Corrib to Killary Harbour, a distance of seven miles, sailed from there to Clew Bay and joined with the English in committing slaughter and devastation in the islands of the bay. Perhaps because of this, when the O'Flahertys petitioned King Henry III of England to be restored to their ancient lands, the King was willing to concede that, although “mere Irish,” they and their ancestors had always showed fealty and service to him and his predecessors by assisting the English to reduce the Irish. But the lords in possession were not so amenable, and repeatedly
invaded
the O'Flaherty refuges beyond Lough Corrib. Meanwhile Norman tower-houses had risen all over Maigh Seola, just as in the Welsh borderlands a century earlier.
The name Iar-Chonnacht after this period refers only to the region almost severed from the rest of Ireland by Lough Corrib and the long fiord of Killary Harbour, the almost inviolable homeland of the O'Flahertys. The previous chieftains of these lands were subordinated, the English dared not penetrate so far west, the O'Malleys to the north were in alliance most of the time, and for three hundred years the O'Flahertys' main enemy was their own feuding selves. In Connemara, the remoter half of this territory, was a
crannóg
of some strategic importance,
controlling
the lowest ford on the main river flowing southwards out of the boglands. The history of Ballynahinch (Baile na hInse, the
settlement of the island), as it was called, is almost synonymous with that of Connemara. Near it, during this relatively settled period, the O'Flahertys founded two modest religious houses, a Carmelite monastery on the lakeshore in about 1327, and a Dominican priory at the sea-mouth of the river about a century later.
For the Celts of old, wealth was measured in cattle, but after their retreat into this land of bogs and rainswept stony hillsides the O'Flahertys would have been more dependent on their flocks of sheep, and wool was the basis of their sea trade with the
Atlantic
fringe of southern Europe. But as the outside world changed, with the little walled town of Galway growing into an outpost of commercialism and civility, the unregulated, untaxable comings and goings of the O'Flaherty sails came to be regarded as mere smuggling. Although O'Flahertys now intermarried with the Burkes (
i.e.
the de Burgos, hibernicized), to the citizens of Galway, and especially to the merchant families of Norman origin who formed its oligarchy, Iar-Chonnacht was still the abode of the alien, against whom their walls had to be manned, and it is said that over Galway's north gate was inscribed the prayer, “From the Ferocious O'Flahertys good Lord deliver us.”
Towards the end of the fifteenth century the O'Flahertys
began
to build Norman-style keeps or tower-houses, near their
borders
with Norman Ireland and all around the western coastline. The finest of these still stands: Aughnanure (Achadh na nIúr, the field of yews), about fourteen miles up the west shore of the
Corrib
from Galwayâa substantial castle consisting of a six-storey tower-house with an inner and an outer walled enclosure or bawn, and the remains of a sixteenth-century banqueting hall; its most famous appurtenance was a flagstone in the floor of this hall which revolved upon itself at the touch of a secret lever, dumping the unsuspecting victim into the river below. Most of the other castles were much simpler towers consisting of about three large vaulted rooms one above another, within a single enclosure. At the natural crossroads of Ballynahinch such a tower-house was
built on the ancient
crannóg
itself, using stones from the nearby Dominican priory which it seems had fallen into disuse at that period. The folk memories that still haunt the ruined castles of the sixteenth-century O'Flahertys are not of worthy and heroic clan leaders but of petty local tyrants or fairy-tale ogres. From Renvyle on the north-westernmost peninsula of Connemara, one hears of two serving girls who saw the O'Flahertys hanging someone in the castle; they fled in terror, and rather than be taken alive, flung themselves over cliffs into two creeks that still bear their names, Fó Cháit and Fó Mhairéaid. People living opposite the ruins of Doon, the castle that dominated the long narrow bay of Streamstown, remember how a local man was peaceably
smoking
his pipe one evening, when a spark from it floated off downwind, and a shot rang out from the castle; this incident forewarned the man, so that when he was invited to dinner by the O'Flahertys, he left his hat outside the castle door as an excuse to step outside again, then flung himself into the sea, swam across the bay and ran off along the other shore. The O'Flahertys pursued him, and although they had to go round the head of the bay they
eventually
caught up with him, and a patch of red rock on the seashore still marks where his blood was spilt.
