Stones of Aran (8 page)

By 1857, according to Griffith’s Valuation, Hill Quarter was occupied by a Maryanne O’Malley; presumably this is the Mary Anne of the census, now a widow. I have no image of this
dowager
, long withering out O’Flaherty’s bargain; perhaps she retired to Dublin on the strength of his hundred pounds per annum and enjoyed her uncalled-for longevity there.

Other protagonists in the later anecdotes of the Hill Farm, such as the Kilmurvey O’Flahertys and Fr. Farragher the Parish Priest, will figure in various contexts further on in this book. The Saucepan episode was filled out with a bitter realism about island mentalities by Liam O’Flaherty, in his novel
Skerrett
,
and Roger Dirrane, deservedly or not, will have to live with the character O’Flaherty gave him in this
roman-a-clef
(the key to which is simple enough: Moclair is Farragher, Ardcaol is Cill Éinne and Griffin is Dirrane):

Liam’s childhood coincided with the period in which Fr.
Farragher
was beating the island like a recalcitrant donkey along the road to modernity; he served as altar-boy to the priest, while his schoolmaster, David O’Callaghan, was the original of Skerret, the progressively unhinged champion of “Republican nationalism, anarchism, and the cause of the Irish Language.” According to Fr. Killeen, Liam’s family, the O’Flahertys of Gort na gCapall, supported the Saucepan faction, and “as a result developed a bitter anticlerical attitude. Liam’s filthy novels illustrate the fact. Possibly there was unnecessary antagonism on the side of the angels.” But there are no angels in Liam O’Flaherty’s world; it is the violent and overbearing who are the carriers of history. In his
version
of the Saucepan events, which he uses to precipitate the
culminating
struggle between priest and schoolmaster, the origin of Griffin’s swelling ambition is clear:

So it was the demons of progress that puffed up the simple frog to its pathetic little explosion.

When the land was subdivided the Lodge was sold off by the Land Commission to a Mr. Smith, the representative of a British trawler company resident in Cill Rónáin, and later sold on by him to the McDonaghs of the pub by Cill Rónáin harbour. It was briefly the home of Coláiste Gaeilge Mhic Phiarais, which had been founded in Galway in 1919, and after a few years in Cill Éinne moved to Na Forbacha six miles west of Galway. In more recent years, left to the damp in the winter and subjected to
raucous
holiday lettings in the summer, it became more and more delapidated. Then, suddenly, in 1986, these deleterious atmospheres were replaced by the holy and the ecologically sound. The Lodge became the headquarters of an interdenominational
community
called Aisling Árann (roughly, Aran vision), led by Fr. Dara Molloy and inspired by the early Celtic Christianity whose memorials are all around one in Cill Éinne. Now it has been beautifully restored, and offers its hospitality to anyone ready to share its frugal and spiritual lifestyle.

But that took place after I had left the island, and for this and other reasons I do not feel competent to assess the
transformation
. Therefore, to end with, I go back to another vision of Aran, from the Lodge’s dozy middle years. In May 1895 two ladies in their thirties took it for a fortnight’s holiday: Edith Oenone Somerville and her cousin Violet Martin. Each was the daughter of a Big House, Edith of Drishane in Castle Townshend, Cork, and Violet of Ross House on the Galway side of Connemara. (The Martins of Ross were the senior line, from which that of
Ballynahinch had diverged in the time of Nimble Dick.) The
literary
partnership of “Somerville and Ross,” which through the medium of Edith’s “automatic writing” was mysteriously to outlive Violet herself, had then been in existence some six years. Their equally longer-than-life love, which perhaps only revealed itself in the automatisms which haunt all writing, breathes in their
account
of this vernal fortnight, when “land and sea lay in rapt
accord
, and the breast of the brimming tide was laid to the breast of the cliff, with a low and broken voice of joy.”

If the Aran landscape proved worthy of their sensitive natures, most of its human aspects only awoke their patrician and
sometimes
overwrought sense of humour. Life at the Lodge on the hill, they wrote, had “aspects that were wholly ideal, and aspects that were unreservedly scullion.” Among the latter were the
pampootied
and beshawled creature that began the “strange, arduous, trifling day” by coming in with a bucket and the monosyllabic announcement: “bath,” and a glance of saturnine amusement at “the weakling of a later civilisation still in bed”; the lack of saucepans, obliging them to boil their eggs in a portly black pot and fish them out with the tongs; the “tall, brindled dogs that gnawed sapless bones in the porch, as in an accustomed sanctuary”; the tactless cuckoo sending its hoarse and hollow cry down the
chimney
—“Not thus does the spirit voice poise the twin notes in tireless mystery, among the wooded shores of Connemara’s lakes.” Ideal, though, was the outlook from the chief windows across a plain of sea to that beloved homeland:

A fitting hour for the séances it is said they held in the Lodge, but of which they left no record. Perhaps on such evenings they called up Florence Fitzpatrick, so uninformatively memorialized by her
relatives, and had her tell her story, or materialized O’Malley of the Hill, to find what manner of man he was. For the Lodge is full of ghosts unamenable to the séances of history.

Tangible and intangible, the remains of St. Enda’s monastery are all around one, along the track between the Lodge and the village. Three miscellaneous vertical objects form a line leading the eye up the hill to the west: nearest the track, in a hayfield, the shaft of a high cross; on a terrace of the hillside beyond that, the drum-like stump of a round tower; and perched on the crest of the slope, a little oratory, roofless, its two gables sharp against the sky. On the other side of the track, to the east, hummocks and ridges in the grass sketch vague plans of sizeable buildings. A thousand yards beyond them the cemetery by the sea is visible, in which is the church known as Teaghlach Éinne, Enda’s
household
, half buried in the sand. Ecclesiastical stones are secreted here and there in the village. The sill of a musket-loop in
Cromwell’s
castle wears a Latin cross as the badge of its previous career; an octagonal wayside pillar lies in the tide below; another cross-inscribed block retrieved by an antiquary schoolmaster decorates the garden of the one-time Teacher’s Residence, together with a few “bullaun stones,” small granite boulders with bowl-shaped hollows, thought to have been used by the monks as mortars. The walls of one or two little haggarts over the road from the castle ruins are draped in clambering hops which may have rambled on since the days when the Franciscan brothers brewed their own beer. Until recent years these leafy vines proved useful to the
villager
gathering seaweed for his potato-patch, who would lay wads of them on his horse’s back under the wooden straddle to protect its hide from the trickling salt water. Like this relict plant, once the bearer of modest religious indulgence, and the crumbs of fallen
churches that serve as doorstops, even the miracle tales which once magnified the saints and through them the Lord are
nowadays
dedicated to lesser ends, and furnish a couple of lines for a holiday brochure or a joke for tourists in the bar. These fragments—of architecture, life’s modes, ultimate meanings—appeal to the renovating mind. A vast vacant axis, the absence of the round tower from which St. Enda’s bell was rung, centres his scattered patrimony. Reconstruction is as impossible as climbing its spiral stairs of empty air. I begin the task on the eastern rim of the broken circuit, at the chapel foundering in the dunes of the graveyard.

This outlier of monastic Cill Éinne is a simple rectangular building measuring about nineteen feet by ten inside. All of it is present save the roof, and perhaps it survived the Cromwellians’ depradations because of its distance from Arkin Castle. In the eastern gable-wall is a narrow little window of Early Christian style, its round head formed in a single stone. Clearly this end of the church dates from a time when stone churches were so new an idea, at least in Aran, that their builders were still constrained by the forms of wooden structures, for the side-walls are continued six inches or so beyond the gable-wall to form a pillar running up either side of it like the corner-post of a wooden chapel. These “antae,” as they are called, may not have been totally superfluous features, though, as they could have supported the barge-boards or end-timbers of a wooden roof projecting over the gables and giving them some shelter from rain. This east gable and part of the north wall are of very large slabs set on edge (one of them is a good ten feet long), and in general appear to be very early.
Professor
Waddell of Galway suggests the ninth century, whereas Peter Harbison thinks there is little evidence that any of the Aran churches are earlier than the twelfth century, and mortar from the masonry of the old part of Teaghlach Éinne has recently been radio-carbon-dated to the eleventh or twelfth century. There is a small round-headed window near the eastern end of this wall, and the big squarish slab in the wall under it under it carries an Old Irish inscription:
OROIT AR SCANDLAN
, a prayer for Scandlan.
The window looks later than the one in the gable, and perhaps there was some reconstruction of the chapel even in this early phase, for the inscribed slab has evidently been moved and is set on its side so that the inscription runs vertically, with scant regard for Scandlan. The present ground-level outside the church lies above this slab, but in recent times the sand has been dug out from in front of it so that the inscription can be read.

The rest of the church is of the more easily handled blocks
indicative
of a later period, when perhaps common-sense had
prevailed
over the zeal that drove the early monks to megalithic excesses. The door, at the west end of the north wall, belongs to this later westward expansion of the church and has a slightly pointed arch of late medieval style, each side of which is a single curved stone. Two square-topped window openings also belong to the same period, one in the south wall and another in the west gable. The date of this enlargement of the church could well be 1666, when the last of the great chieftains of Connemara was buried here. He was Sir Morough O’Flaherty of Bunowen Castle, known in Irish as Murchadh na Mart, Morough of the “beeves” or fatted cattle. For his part in the rebellion of 1641 Sir Morough had been dispossessed of his vast estates, and he retired to Aran where he died in poverty. He must have been witness of the final desolation of St. Enda’s monastery, the long-deserted buildings of which had recently been quarried for stone to rebuild the castle at Cill Éinne. Perhaps the already ancient church in the graveyard was also disused by that time, and he thought to save it by having it reconstructed as his mortuary chapel.

Since then both the Early Christian and late medieval portions of Teaghlach Éinne have been progressively overwhelmed by blowing sand. Nowadays the door is largely below ground-level, and until recent years one had to scramble down a steep hollow to enter, inevitably followed by avalanching sand-grains. Left to
itself
the interior would fill like an hourglass in a decade or two. During an archaeological investigation of the church in 1984, the Office of Public Works took a commonsensical stand against this
process and had a trench dug all round the church, robbing it of a most evocative feature, the timescape seen through its little south window of the layered depths of sand blocking it on the outside.

If the light is right as one enters the church, certain shallow markings in a block at head-height just west of the door may catch the eye. This block is a little pillar-like cross-slab which as recently as 1952 was standing inside the church and has been recycled to fill the place of a missing quoin-stone, without respect for the
sacred
symbol on it, which now lies horizontally. The grooves forming its linear cross and the two concentric circles around the
junction
of the arms and shaft are as simple as fingertip tracings on sea-washed sand. Another small slab like this one, but with a single-ringed cross on either face, was found partly underlying a modern grave-surround near the church in the course of the 1984 investigations. Despite their great age, such Early Christian
cross-inscribed
slabs, of which there are about twenty to be seen in and around Aran’s churches, have the freshness of works from the first decade of modern abstract art, and in one or two of them
Kandinsky
would have recognized a spiritual fervour behind the
ingenuous
charm of their oddly balanced crosses and circles.

Other figured stones rescued from the village have been
assembled
in the church. Some are cemented into the simple altar under the east window, and one of these has a spiral motif incised in it which is dark from the touch of hands lifted to it in prayer. Another has a rudimentary Latin cross and, in the four quarters into which this divides most of its surface, these cryptic syllables (reading clockwise):
BENT
,
DIE
,
F
AN,
and
SCAN
. Expanded
according
to the customary rules of such time-saving messages to eternity, this says
“Bendacht
die
for
ainm
Sanctan”
God’s blessing on the soul of Sanctan. This stone was found face-down in the church in 1936 by Cill Éinne’s national schoolteacher, James
Donnellan
. (I mention such facts, if I happen to know them, not out of pedantry but in recognition of the way in which the patina of history is built up of individual fingerprints.)

Just inside the door the same schoolmaster assembled three
fragments of a high cross, cemented together one above the other to make a little pillar. Two of these were rescued by the Aran
doctor
, O’Brien, when they were on site for use in the building of cottages in Cill Éinne, where they had long been lying in the
ruins
of the castle—and so this is at least their fourth phase of existence. The other was found, heavily whitewashed, built into a cottage garden-wall. They have been shown to belong to the cross-shaft in the field below the round tower, which itself is not in its original (and unknown) location. One of these fragments has the figure of a horse and rider in relief on it, blackened like the spiral in the altar by the hands of people kneeling in prayer beside it. It would be interesting to know what meanings have been seen or felt in this motif over the centuries, for it has been suggested that it bore a very definite ideological charge when the cross was carved. According to a study by Liam de Paor this fragmentary cross shares a number of characteristics with the high crosses in two ecclesiastical centres of north Clare, Kilfenora and Dysart O’Dea. The styles of the abstract and animal ornamentation on it are close enough to those of the Kilfenora crosses to suggest that they are by the same hand or at least from the same workshop; for instance a particular square labyrinth-pattern on the part of the cross-shaft near the round tower also occurs on what is called the West Cross at Kilfenora, but is unknown outside this group.
Below
this square fret on the Cill Éinne shaft is a panel filled by four scrolls, which on close examination one can make out to be coiled-up animals with little ears and large jaws; and below this again is a purely abstract panel of shell-like spirals; these motifs are Scandinavian in origin, and may indicate that the mason had connections with the Scandinavian-influenced areas of northern Britain. Earlier high crosses such as those at Kells and
Clonmacnois
usually had their surfaces divided into a number of panels illustrating scriptural incidents, but this local group of limestone crosses are of a late eleventh-or twelfth-century type in which one face carries a large figure of the crucified Christ, and in a number of cases the other side figures an equally large clerical
figure, as in the famous Doorty Cross at Kilfenora. (And since Dr. de Paor’s article, Françoise Henry has published a tentative reconstruction of the Cill Éinne cross, in which the missing
central
portion has a crucified Christ on one side and an ecclesiastic with a crozier on the other; most of this portion is missing, but hints towards it remain on the other fragments.) Whether the cleric represents a bishop or a pope (the experts disagree) his
authoritarian
stance may reflect the reforms in church
administration
initiated by Pope Gregory VII, under which the abbots of the ancient monastic foundations lost their power over church affairs to the bishops in their sees. The figure of the mounted horseman is also known from east Scotland, and reoccurs on the Doorty cross, where it seems to be riding over a church-like
building
. Given the apocalyptic terms in which the Gregorian reformers fulminated against monkish laxity, this may represent the terrible rider of the Apocalypse of St. John, who will tread out “the
winepress
whose wine is the avenging anger of Almighty God.”

A fragment of another high cross was found under about two feet of sand just east of the church by Conleth Manning, director of the 1984 investigations. It consists of the central and upper
portion
of the cross plus one arm, with part of the ring that linked the arms and shaft. On one side is an abstract interlace ornament and on the other a crucifixion, both carved in relief. A naive Christ with a big doll-like head occupies the hub of the cross, and on the surviving arm of the cross is a peculiar little manikin crouched under Christ’s outstretched hand, holding a pole with a cup on it: Stephaton, the Roman soldier who offered Christ the sponge. Only the head and arm survive of his traditionally
opposite
number, Longinus, who is thrusting his spear into Christ’s side. This is the only known example of a high cross in which these two attendant figures are placed on the arms so that the crucifixion scene spans the full width of the cross-piece. The prominence of the crucifixion again suggests the twelfth century. Most probably there were several such high crosses around the monastery. Originally they would have been painted, and in the
severe Aran light they must have been very dominating presences. But to my mind, and even disregarding the tentative
interpretation
of the late crosses of Clare and Aran in terms of the imposition of diocesan structures, high crosses in general are unlovely assertions of authority. What is most worth saving from the sands of time of the spirit of Cill Éinne is the metaphysical wit of the earlier cross-inscribed slabs.

Four churches have totally vanished from the core of the Cill Éinne settlement; their exact sites are unknown but, thanks to the devotion of two churchmen and the intervention of pure chance, their names have been preserved. During the early years of the 1640s John Colgan, a Franciscan teacher in the University of Louvain, was labouring to fulfil a command to collect the lives of the Irish saints. Fr. Colgan wrote up all the saints with feast-days in January, February and March, but never took this systematic attack further. Fortunately St. Enda’s day is the 21st of March. At about the same time the Archbishop of Tuam and Confederate leader, Dr. Malachy O’Cadhla, made a list of the churches of his archdiocese, as if he foresaw his own defeat and death in battle in 1645 and the great levelling of churches that was to follow the Cromwellian victory. The diligent Colgan had obtained from Dr. O’Cadhla the relevant part of his list of churches, which he appended to the
Life
of
St.
Enda
and which is the only part of the list to have survived. So, in
Acta
Sanctorum
Hiberniae
(Louvain, 1645) we nave the following, from “a tabular description of the churches of the diocese of Tuam, lately transmitted to us, and faithfully written by the most illustrious lord Malachias
Quaelaeus
, archbishop of Tuam, a man distinguished for his zeal in religion, and endowed with every virtue; extracted as they lie”: