Stones of Aran (9 page)

… and the list continues with seven other churches further east in the island, two in Inis Meáin, and three churches and a former monastery in Inis Oírr.

The second of the Cill Éinne churches on this list is (in
modern
Irish) Teaghlach Éinne, and the sixth is Teampall Bheannáin, the little oratory on the skyline to the west. Of the missing churches, three would have belonged to the ancient monastery: the parish church, Cill Éinne, from which the village takes its name, and two presumably smaller chapels close to it. The “Mac Longius” to whom one of these was dedicated might be the same as the St. Mac Luagna, mentioned by Colgan as a brother of St. Ciaráin and the successor of St. Enda as abbot. Equally
dubiously
, the “Mac Canonn” of the other chapel might have some connection with St. Gregory of Inis Meáin, who is known in Connemara as St. Ceannan or Ceannanach.

The fourth missing church, St. Mary’s, must have been the chapel of the Franciscans’ monastery, for the old annals of the order state that it was
sub
vocatione
Sanctae
Mariae
Virginis
et
omnium
Sanctorum.
Very little has been recorded of the history of the Franciscans in Aran, except that they came in 1485, probably under the patronage of the O’Briens, and that they were of the Third Order. Perhaps they took over the buildings of St. Enda’s foundation, which may have been deserted by that date. O’Flaherty supposes that the line of St. Enda’s successors in Aran
continued unbroken to “the time of the suppression of abbeys,”
i.e.
the reign of Henry VIII (who was declared King of Ireland in 1541), but the last of these successors he found mentioned in his sources (lost, it seems, to us) was “Donatus O’Leyn, abbot of Aran, Anno Domini 1400.” Long before Henry’s time, though, the abbeys of the old Gaelic church, torn between the English colony and the resurgent Gaelic chiefdoms, were in decline, and by the early sixteenth century both Clonmacnois and Ardagh were almost deserted and open to the sky, and the word of God had been largely abandoned to the vigorous hands of the friars of the European orders. When the Franciscans came to Aran they may have found St. Enda’s sunk in weeds and torpor; in 1506 their report was that “in the islands of Aran of the Saints… things of the church are neglected and there is ignorance of Christian
doctrines
.” Nothing seems to be known about their monastery thereafter until 1629, when it was recorded as being deserted. In 1645 there were monks here again, under the rule of a Fr. Gaspar Fonte. He was among the priests held prisoner in Aran by the
Cromwellians
after their triumph in 1652, and probably saw the quarrying of his monastery for stone to rebuild the castle. After the
Restoration
in 1660 the Franciscans returned, using what buildings we do not know, and their abbots are recorded down to a Fr.
Proinsias
Bodkin in 1697. The Penal Laws must have driven them out after that, for although abbots were appointed down to 1717 none of them took up the office.

The only physical trace of the Franciscan monastery, Tobar na mBráthar, the well of the friars, is reached by a little dog-leg track running westwards past the hayfield with the fragmentary high cross in it, behind Cill Éinne village. It is a round, stone-lined hollow with the remains of steps down into it, waterless, full of the long pointed fronds of hart’s-tongue fern. O’Donovan said that the Franciscan monastery was to the south of it and that the older monastery’s churches were to the north, but on what
evidence
he based this one does not know

Leaving these dry speculations and the Franciscans’ dry well,
by following the crooked boreen for a few more yards to the west and climbing with it up the first scarp, one attains to a more heaven-inspired level. To the right, the terrace above the scarp continues around the curve of the hillside like a broad grassy promenade overlooking the back-gardens of the village; this is Cosán na nAingeal, the path of the angels, where it is said that St. Colm Cille used to stroll every day with celestial acquaintances. To the left is the stub of the round tower, and straight ahead, against the next little rise, is St. Enda’s holy well, with a roughly built stone altar beside it. The “well” is only a dry hole in the ground, but an old lady of the village told me it was a spring, until someone stepped into it wearing his boots, whereupon it dried up. (Holy wells are touchy things and stories of their withdrawing themselves when insulted are widespread.) Its name is Dabhach Éinne, a
dabhach
being either a deep pool or a barrel, and former generations regarded it as that very barrel in which the seed-corn came sailing to Aran from Corcomroe, leaving a wake of perpetually calm waters, by the ministry of angels and to the consternation of the pagan Corban, who was persuaded by this miracle to make over the island to St. Enda. Barren women used to sleep by this well, in hope that the saint might ease their condition.

The tower was known as Cloghas Éinne, Enda’s belfry (but in today’s Cill Éinne Irish it is simply
an
Rountower
),
and there is a tradition that the saint’s “sweet-toned bell” is buried somewhere near his holy well. O’Donovan in 1839 “made every cautious
enquiry
about the tradition preserved amongst the oldest inhabitants,” and learned that the tower was once five stories high; my own enquiries, less cautious, in Fitzpatrick’s bar, tell me that its top was level with St. Benan’s chapel on the hillside above. Like most of the extant towers of Ireland, this one was no doubt slightly tapered, with a slit window on each storey, a door fifteen feet or more above ground-level, and topped by a conical roof of
corbelled
stonework. But before investigating the tower further, which is a matter of sounding the great well-shaft its absence
sinks into the sky, it would be wise to finish with the material remains of the monastic complex, by ascending to this little
ruined
chapel, a hundred feet or so higher up.

Teampaill Bheannáin is its proper name, the church of Benan, which the lazy centuries have reduced to “An Mionnán,” and since one sense of
mionnán
is “a goat-kid” some locals will tell you it is “the kid’s chapel.” Indeed there is something goatish in its horned and shaggy outline and its sure-footed stance on the very edge of the skyline, looking down into the green crescent of monastic fertility around the base of the hill, alert and frisky, as if at any moment it might take itself off into the stony hinterland of the plateau behind it. O’Donovan found that it was also called The Hermitage, “from some modern Maniac who took up his residence in it.” Nothing is remembered of this man—perhaps a scapegoat from the village below or from that outer world whose hilltops, visible from here, stand around a vast three-quarter-circle arc of the horizon. Perhaps it was this “maniac” who left a clay pipe found here recently, with a cock stamped on its bowl and the legend
W
HILE
I LIVE I’LL CROW.

Watchfulness must always have been the keynote of life on this perch. Sixty yards to the north-north-west, on a small, crudely revetted, terrace on the verge of the steep drop to the
village
, are the confused remains of a stone hut known nowadays as The Watchman, from which I am told would-be pilots used to look out for sailing ships that might be persuaded they needed guidance into Galway harbour. The archaeologists who studied Teampall Bheannáin in 1984 also ferreted into this “
subrectangular
drystone structure of indeterminate plan,” which it turned out was originally a little square hut with a window to the north, later enlarged to the east and wrapped around with another wall against the weather; all had long collapsed, and odd corners of it been resurrected as goat-pens. As well as shards of nineteenth-century crockery, residue of merry picnics perhaps, two lead musket-balls were found on its rock floor, suggesting that it started life as a lookout-post connected with the Cromwellian
citadel below. Another ruined hut just a few paces north of the chapel itself, of which two walls are the living rock of a right-angled nook of the hillside, looks as if it must have been the ideal anchorite’s troglodytic nest, half burrow, half eyrie; however, the rubbish found under its fallen-in stones was all
seventeenth-century
or later.

Teampall Bheannáin stands only a couple of yards from the edge of a natural shelf of the hillside, which has been
supplemented
by a bit of drystone terracing to the east, to make up a little walled enclosure, scraps of which can be traced around the south and west of the chapel. The building is tiny, just ten foot nine inches long by seven feet wide inside. Its long axis runs almost north-south, parallel to the major fissuring of the bare rock it stands on. If this basic structure of the site helped to determine this very unusual orientation, the prevalence of south-western and western winds must have supplied stronger arguments; the little building confronts the worst of the weather with solid
masonry
, the door being in the north gable-wall, while the one little window, unexpectedly but logically, is in the eastern side-wall. This window is a round-headed slit twenty inches high and only four inches wide on the outside, slightly narrower at the top than at the bottom, and splaying generously inside; there was no doubt originally an altar below it. The side-walls are over two feet thick, and they lean inwards slightly as if hunched against the elements. Some of the blocks of the western wall look like the work of
giants
, one of them being over four and a half feet square, but they are in fact rather thin slabs set on edge and do not make up the full thickness of the wall. The roof is missing; it was presumably of timber, and it must have been very steep, for the gables rise to fifteen feet even though they have lost their finials, making the little building about as tall as it is long. There may well have been corbels projecting at the bases of each gable, as in a similarly primitive chapel in Inis Meáin, but some masonry is missing or has been replaced at each of these points. The door is only five foot six high and tapers upwards in harmony with the side-walls
and the slit window, from one foot nine wide at the bottom to six inches less than that at the top, so that it seems to crouch under the five-foot-long block above it. Such flat-lintelled doors with inclined jambs are characteristic of early stone churches, as are those putative corbels and the masonry of slabs set on edge.

As to dates, the only firm evidence is from radio-carbon dating of charcoal in its mortar to about the eleventh century. The only inscription is the word
CARI
running down a quoin-stone at the south-east corner, which it seems is uninformative even to
epigraphists
. Dates and names recently scratched by brats from the
village
do not fall under the notice of archaeologists, and nor does the huge footprint in the bare limestone a few paces west of the chapel, which an old islander tells me was made by the saint himself. Neither can the name of the church help, for St. Benan or Benignus is supposed to have been St. Patrick’s disciple and
successor
at Armagh, where, if there is any reality in the chronologies of the medieval annals and the Lives of the early saints, he died in 467, at which date Enda perhaps had yet to set eyes
on Aran; and so it was not he who founded this church.

For some unknown number of centuries, then, an unrecorded succession of anchorites stood at the altar in the vertical blade of dawn from the east window, and by craning their necks this way and that could have squinted at the round tower, perhaps co-eval with this hilltop oratory, and the populous confusion of buildings around its base, until first St. Enda’s churches and then the
Franciscan
abbey were left unpeopled and finally demolished in favour of Caisleán Aircín. “Soe all-devouring time ‘Diruit, aedificat, mutat quadrata rotundis,”’ sighs Roderic O’Flaherty, recounting this matter thirty years after the Cromwellian catastrophe by which he too had been pauperized. But for long after that, the headless trunk of the tower would have still dominated the scene of
desolation
, for according to Petrie it stood eighty feet high, having lost only two storeys to the Cromwellian delapidators, until it was struck by lightning and collapsed early in the nineteenth century. O’Flaherty’s Horatian tag about Time which destroys, builds and
makes what is square round, reminds one to ask what became of those hundreds of splendid blocks cut to the curve of the tower’s wall? According to the invaluable Fr. Killeen, whose manuscript history shows that he was one of those who hearken to such
reminders
, these stones went into the foundations of the quay in Cill Éinne, the quay called Céibh an Rice because it was built by men working for payment in rice, during the famine of 1822.

What stands today of the tower is a stone drum about fifty feet in circumference and twelve feet high, on a plinth that forms a little kerb around its base. The masonry, of large, closely fitted and mortared blocks, is time-scarred enough for one to be able to scramble up and lean across its four-foot thickness, and look down into the interior—empty, and pungently carpeted with the white flowers of garlic mustard. The circle of stone is
uninterrupted
, for the threshold of the doorway would have been higher up the shaft and reached by a ladder that could be pulled up in times of danger. Most round towers date from the late eleventh and the twelfth centuries, and it has been suggested that they were a response to the pilgrimage frenzy of that period, that as well as being belfries and symbols of heavenly aspirations, they served as beacons to guide the distant traveller, and that the
monasteries
’ greatest attractions, their sacred relics, were displayed to the multitudes from their high doorways.