Stones of Aran (17 page)

Cataclysms are in preparation beyond the bay in which
O’Flaherty’s
cattle fell to their deaths. The western boundary wall of Ceathrú an Turlaigh, which runs to the point of a headland called Binn an Turlaigh on the west of the bay, crosses a fissure a foot or so wide, thirty yards inland and extending almost all the way across the headland for a distance of a hundred yards or so; it seems that an enormous area of at least an upper stratum several yards thick is detached and has begun to slide outwards. A third of a mile farther west, just beyond the next headland, is another
fissure
, nearer the edge but much wider and deeper, called Scailp na bPlátaí, the cleft of the plates, because a stone thrown down it
disappears
with an echoing clatter that is supposed to sound like the breaking of plates. Scailp na bPlátaí is wide enough for a
rock-climber
to wedge himself down between its sheer faces, and it is the beginning of a traditional route to the terraces at the foot of the cliff three hundred feet below. The details of the climb, as
recollected
for me by an Aran man who some forty years ago was one of the last to do it, make me feel the chill breath of vertigo. While I can play with the idea of getting down the fifty or sixty feet of Scailp na bPlátaí with the aid of the various fallen blocks and granite boulders wedged here and there in its jaws, and working westwards along its gullet to a window-like opening in the cliff face, my imagination quails at the next stage of the descent, Ulán na mBos, the ledge of the palms of the hands, so called because it is apparently necessary to sit on it and use one’s palms to ease
oneself
sideways along it, first southwards and then eastwards around a corner of the cliff. This leads one to Ulán na Téide, the ledge of the rope, where one attaches seven fathoms of rope and lets
oneself
down onto the top of An Clochar, a tower of debris from an ancient rock-fall stacked against the cliff to a height of a hundred and fifty feet or more. Scrambling down this stone-bank or
clochar
presents no difficulties, it seems.

The sagging megatons of rock that have pulled open the
scailp 
overhang and will eventually collapse into a cavern called An Poll Dubh, the black hole. The sea-cave in its depths is said, in all
geological
improbability, to connect with An Loch Dearg, the red lake, on the north coast; a piper once entered it and was never seen again, though his music is sometimes heard under the village of Creig an Chéirín. Tom O’Flaherty mentions this legend in one of his autobiographical pieces. According to him the piper was a fugitive outlaw from Connemara, and “anyone who hears his mournful music will before long be called to the Piper’s Castle, from which none return.” A similar tale is told of a cave in Inis Oírr said to connect with one in Inis Meáin, and in this case the music is heard from under Carraig an Phíobaire or Piper’s Rock in the channel between the two islands. The almost identical legend of Poll an Phíobaire, the piper’s cave in Camas, Connemara,
suggested
one of Patrick Pearse’s Irish stories for children, and both the name and the tale occur elsewhere in Ireland. I am told by a spelaeologist that similar legends are widespread in other countries too, connecting certain caves with the traditional musical
instruments
of the locality. Orpheus himself was probably not the first musician to visit the Underworld.

The central interpretations of this universal theme are in the hands of Freudians and others, but perhaps the Aran instance could be spared for adoption into a personal mythology. Thus: the artist finds deep-lying passages, unsuspected correspondences,
unrevealed
concordances, leading from element to element of reality, and celebrates them in the darkness of the solipsism necessary to his undertaking, but at best it is a weak and intermittent music, confused by its own echoes and muffled by the chattering waters of the earth, that reaches the surface-dweller above; nor does the artist emerge; his ways lead on and on, or about and about.

The ruinous pagoda of An Clochar has its base on a broad
terrace
that runs back around the headland and as far east as Binn an Turlaigh. A hundred-yard-long arm of this terrace extends
southwards
into the sea from below the point of the headland like the deck of a foundering aircraft carrier. In wild weather the waves
clamber onto Leic an Chlochair, as this sheet of rock is called, but on calm days it stands serenely out of the water, an ideal platform for any fisherman able to face the climb down the cliff. Only
cormorants
fish there now, but it used to be a famous place for
catching
mackerel, wrasse, pollock and especially bream, as these last could only be caught in plenty from a shore that faced into the wind, and such a position could nearly always be found on this long peninsula.

A Gort na gCapall man has written me a lyrical account of a boy’s first expedition with his father and other men of the village to Leic an Chlochair. They walk along the cliffs to Scailp na bPlátaí before sunrise, carrying ropes and fishing gear in baskets on their backs. The boy follows his father down the cliff to the Leic without difficulty, and spends magical hours there as the
red-gold
dawn blazes along the cliff face and the rockfish come in in shoals. He sees the life of the cliff foot: a silky-furred seal spends the morning in diving and putting its head up to watch them with curious eyes from Cloch na gCollach, the stone of the males, a flat rock on which seals mate just east of the Leic; otters hunt for their breakfast even more nimbly than the seal, a skua harries the gulls to and fro until they disgorge their last meal which it catches in mid-air, and the basking shark dozes in the sparkling water within a few yards of the fishermen. But when it comes to time to go home the lad looks up at the seagulls as small as swallows around the top of the cliff, and remembers the story of the clumsy fellow who slipped and swung on his rope over An Poll Dubh out of reach of the cliff face, and of the man who fell screaming from Ulán na Téide. He masters his panic enough to scale An Clochar, but when he is half-way up the rope-climb the raven of An Poll Dubh swoops out at him and he is paralyzed by fear, so that his
father
has to climb up after him to encourage him with a clip on the ear and tell him that it is no harder than the little cliff under the village so long as he keeps his eyes on the rope. His pride
reawakened
, he completes the climb, and is never again afraid of Leic an Chlochair.

No doubt this climb was an initiation for many lads. Younger children used to play up and down another climb in the eastern angle of the headland, where there is a way down to a grassy ledge called Ulán na mBuachaillí, the ledge of the boys—although I have heard of at least one woman who visited it in her girlhood. The man who showed me it kept well away from the edge, crouching down to clutch the ground and saying “I used to go down there when I was young, but look at me now!” In those days the usual Sunday afternoon pastime of children from the western villages, strictly forbidden by their parents, was to go down the cliffs after birds and eggs, which having brought to the top they had to throw down again, not daring to risk a beating by bringing them home. Although many children thus became immune to vertigo and are still at ease when sitting on the clifftop and leaning out with a fishing line, others had terrifying experiences they never told anyone about and never got over. There are men who have not visited the cliffs for half a lifetime and still occasionally wake up shuddering in the night as the ledge crumbles or the rope parts in their dreams.

This psychopathology of the clifftops finds its ultimate
expression
in a plank of rock that projects from the brink a quarter of a mile west of Scailp na bPlátaí. It is about two feet across and eight or ten inches thick; it looks about fifteen feet long and was once rather longer until someone paced it out and the end broke off under his weight. That at least is one version of the origin of its name, An Troigh Mhairbh, the dead step. Island tradition specifies that it was an English army officer who walked out to the end of his life here, and according to one cryptophallic telling of the tale he was driven to his death by the mockery in the eyes of his newly wedded wife: “Go on! Even the village lads go as far as that!” she cried when he hesitated half-way along its length. This fearful rock-spur is well-known in Connemara folklore as An Troigh Mharfach, the deadly step or foot. In the Connemara tale when the man has paced out every step of the spur the woman urges him to pace out “the step that isn’t there,” and he steps over the
end of it. It is certainly true that Aran lads used to dare each other to go some way out onto it, and Tom O’Flaherty mentions an old cliffman no longer able to tackle the cliff face who could not resist the temptation every now and then of walking out and standing on the very tip of the projection.

These reveries over the void reveal their deathly and obsessional side in such stories, a concern that lies deeper than a perverse harping on the theme of challenge to a narrowly conceived virility. It is because of the inadequacy of our step to the earth that bears it that we are fascinated by “the step that isn’t there.” Implicit in this book is the conviction that to refuse “the leap” of faith is the
honourable
alternative and, if fully accepted, the more demanding one; these demands are what I hope to clarify for myself through the writing of it. At this stage in the construction of my
metaphysical
Aran, however, I can already clearly identify An Troigh Mhairbh as the antithesis of that good step which would be, if one could take it, the human equivalent of the dolphin’s wavelike plunge among the waves.

Because I know little about it, the final mile of this sequence of the highest cliffs has, now I come to write about it, a certain grand simplicity in my memory. I have walked it often enough alone, and in conversations with people from the western villages I have heard many of its placenames mentioned, but since it is so remote I have not been able to persuade any of the elderly men who could give me its lore in detail to accompany me there, and so the
pairings
between names and places remain indeterminate and therefore barren. This fortunately permits me to compress the decrescendo into a few generalities and bring my book swiftly down from dizzy elevations to a moment of relaxed retrospection.

The last of the tall promontories is Binn an tSléibhe Mhóir,
which answers to and derives its name from An Sliabh Mór, the big hill, a low ridge crossing the uplands, beyond which the island declines step by step to its western tip. At each stage as one follows this descent along the cliffs a wider view opens up to the
north-west
. The little uninhabited Brannock Islands appear off the end of Árainn, low, flat and curiously shaped like two bits from a giant jigsaw puzzle, with the vertical white-black-white-black-white of the lighthouse on the farther of them. As one advances, a vast panorama pivoting on the lighthouse is slowly revealed. Far away on the Atlantic horizon are the glittering teeth of the Skerd Rocks and their leaping breakers; then comes Slyne Head and the first low hills of the mainland, and then by degrees the deep heart of Connemara unfolds such an arcanum of colours that it appears a painted fantasy realm quite unattainable from the grey shores of Aran; I remember that, having looked across at it for years, I could still hardly believe in it when at last I went and climbed among those mountains and learnt with my hands their strange sphagnum-greens, heather-wines and scree-silvers.

Once past An Sliabh Mór the coast steps down sharply over a scarp leading inland to the village of Bun Gabhla hidden in a
hollow
to the north. Then the gravity-demons that rule the heights make a last stand on An Carnán, a curious turret of rock, half a conical hillock left hanging over the sea by recession of the cliffs. A cliffman who had spent some years in America and forgotten his native skills fell to his death here once. He was being lowered down on a rope, and clumsily let himself turn away from the cliff so that the rope caught in a crevice. The team tried to jerk it free, and it broke.

Half a mile on, the coast drops again by one main division of the limestone, where the upper storey of the cliff turns inland and runs northwards. A ledge marking the shale band between that storey and the one beneath it leads back along the sea-cliff from that same place, and although it narrows rather alarmingly at one point and there is still a considerable drop of perhaps forty or fifty feet below, one should master ones nerves and go along it and
look up at the face of Binn an Iarainn, the cliff of the iron, which is marvellously streaked from top to bottom with every colour of a rusty spectrum.

The opening of this ledge (Ulán na gCrosán, the ledge of the razorbills) is a natural resting-point from which to study the final quarter-mile of coast that lies ahead, a study that throws a light on all that has gone before, the entire succession of the bays and promontories of Barr Aille. A storm beach has formed along the lower tract of shore between this point and an isolated flat-topped hillock that terminates the southern coast. This hillock stands a little south of the general line of the coast, and the glen that cuts it off from the rest of Árainn is, with one exception, unique in the island in that it runs parallel to that line. The heaped boulders of the storm beach obscure the nearer end of the glen, but one can see that it is continued in an east-south-easterly direction by a
little
gorge running down into the sea, where breakers seem to
extrapolate
its trend back along the line of the cliffs. The southern side of this gorge is a peculiarly smooth rock face like that of the fault-plane revealed at An Sraoilleán, for the relative movement here has left the strata on the landward side of the glen about twelve feet lower than their continuations on the seaward side. Apart from the two very small faults encountered previously, this is the first sign of such disruption of the rock-layers we have come across, every other valley in Aran being explicable in terms of
erosion
opening up joints of the limestone, without relative
movement
of the ground on either side.

If on a map one rules a line through this glen and produces it back along the entire length of the south coast, one finds that the line passes just offshore of all the major headlands, and that nearly every point of the cliffs is within a quarter of a mile of it. Now this overall straightness of Árainn’s cliff coast calls for geological
explanation
, and perhaps this fault provides it. Could this be the initial weakness that formed as it were the starting-line from which the cliffs have been slowly eaten back by the sea? Or is there another fault farther out and parallel to this one that explains the linearity
of the coast? At one time, presumably, the strata that dip so
regularly
across the breadth of the island to the cliffs continued in the same gentle slope to sea level, as they still do in Inis Meáin and Inis Oírr. Some such break in their structure may have initiated the development of the cliffs—a development that is still
proceeding
, for the sea’s steady excavations are in fact increasing the height of the cliffs as they are cut farther and farther back into the
sloping
strata. We are talking here, most soberly, of processes
continuous
over tens of millions of years; the fallacy of the wilder theories that have been spun about formerly existent land to the south of Aran, inhabited by Celts and guarded by the dúns, is that they fail to distinguish between such geological aeons and the brief
thousands
of years of the human presence. In fact this little glen is like a window in the whole human experience; to look back through it along the headlands that stand as if fixed for all eternity, one
behind
another to the limits of vision, is to look into the jaws of time.

This valley of such theoretical potency is called Gleainnín an Ghrióra, the little plateau south of it is Maoilín an Ghrióra, a
maoilín
being a flat-topped hillock, and the wide terrace sloping gently into the sea south of that is An Grióir itself, the Gregory; thus the saint is celebrated at either end of the island. The
eighteenth-century
natural philosopher, Richard Kirwan of Galway, had a theory that Galway Bay was originally a granite mountain that was “shattered and swallowed,” and he notes that there was a vast mass of granite called the Gregory on one of the Isles of Aran, which was shattered by lightning in 1774. However, it seems that the local tradition was merely that it disappeared one night. No doubt it was an especially big glacial erratic like the other granite boulders of Aran, and if it stood on the terrace now known as the Gregory it is quite possible that a storm swept it off, for gigantic blocks of limestone have come and gone here in the time I have known the place.

An Maoilín itself is cliffed on the south and west, and a few paces beyond its western face the terrace of An Grióir is separated
by another small vertical drop from the final, most westerly,
expanse
of the shelving rocky shore, Na Leacracha Móra, the big flags. This little cliff again marks a fault and it is faced with calcite (the rust-tinged white crystals like little skew-sided bricks) and quartz (the tiny glittering crystals with six-faceted pyramids on their ends), which were deposited geological ages ago from hot
solutions
forcing their way up the fault-plane from deep in the earth. Faults tend to occur in lattice patterns; this one is roughly at right angles to the larger one aligned with the cliffs, and there are one or two more of either orientation to the west and north. As well as such breaks in the continuity of the rocks, vague
undulations
of the limestone thicknesses and the shale bands are visible all around this end of the island. For instance if one looks back at An Maoilín from Na Leacracha Móra one sees that its strata are slightly arched. Nothing similar is to be seen elsewhere in the
islands
or in the corresponding strata of north-west Clare as far as the south-eastern limit of the Burren, where a much more intense folding has produced the strange swooping terraces of the Mullach Mór.

An Grióir itself, the great field of rock standing out into the sea south of An Maoilín, is the most sociable spot on the whole southern coast. On a fine Sunday afternoon in August when the mackerel are coming in on a rising tide a row of men and boys from the western villages stands along its edge, casting out their lines as far as they can to where the gulls and gannets are diving. After walking the cliffs we often stop there to sit on the
uncomfortable
wave-nibbled rock and watch a friend reel in the silver flashes that will be our dinner, and look back along the way we have taken. From this viewing-platform uniquely set out beyond the line of the cliffs and mysteriously exempted from the
engulfment
of all the rest of the land that formerly stood south of the fault-line, one can see and try to identify all the headlands, one beyond another, fading back from vivid reality into gold or grey oblivion, bearing with them their seabirds, flowers, brachiopods and ghosts of the old cliffmen. However beguiling the sun and
breeze, however fascinating the life and lore of the clifftops, I can never walk those heights without bringing home like burs on my clothes the seeds of nightmare. This retrospective spot itself
belongs
in spirit to the northern reaches of the coast, which are more frequented, more touched by the life of roads, fields, and villages, more humanized. The long cliff sequence of this circuit of Árainn, a walk along the brink of one’s own unbeing, is now completed.