Stones of Aran (24 page)

Port Chonnla, a steep-sided little cup of a bay with a teaspoonful of sand in it, marks the end of Sruthán’s shore; the boundary wall comes down the middle of the tiny beach, and the coast beyond is the portion of the Cill Mhuirbhigh villagers.

Before cockcrow, some sixty years ago, two little boys came down the boreen from Sruthán, determined to be the first at work on this shore. But they had got up so early they suspected it was still Sunday night rather than Monday morning, and this was making them anxious:

The children were Máirtín Ó Direáin and his younger brother Tomás (who has also published poetry, though his work has not been collected as yet). The poet in exile mulls over the same
questions
as do those who have never left the old shores, but tends to bring books to bear on them. Máirtín Ó Direáin writes:

I have put Ó Direáin’s question to the experts, and they could not solve it, so the name rests in indeterminacy, the seedbed of at least one variety of poetry. As to An Gleannachán, another local writer, Colm P. Ó hIarnáin, who lives close by that shore, would derive the name from
gleann
an
chuain,
glen of the bay, and has taken that phrase as the title of his collection of short stories in Irish. I would prefer a less strenuous interpretation if one were forthcoming.

Other names of this shore are equally elusive. Buaile Ghaeil, the name of an area around an inlet just over half a mile south-east of Port Chonnla, appears to mean the Irishman’s pasture, which would be odd in an island largely composed of Irishmen’s
pastures
; another exile from Aran has written to me deriving it from the mythical hero Gael named in the pseudo-histories of the Invasions of Ireland (and other places such as Scailp Eireamháin, a little cave in Oatquarter, Trácht Míl, a beach in Inis Oírr, and Inis Oírr itself, are named from other “Milesian” ancestors of the race, Eireamhán, Mil himself and Ír, according to my correspondent). The placenames specialist must distrust the poet’s affinity for the far-fetched, but anyone walking this blank stony foreshore might be glad that such august shadows have been cast upon it, even if only in error. And then—to turn the tide of this reverie—the name of the headland between Port Chonnla and Port Sheánla sounds like Cora Scaití Ciúin, the sometimes-calm
cora,
and that is how some of the islanders who bother their head with such questions would interpret it, a lovely and appropriate name for this arm of Aran—I have just glanced at it from my window as I write—that almost always sports a lacy cuff of breakers. However, Colm Ó hIarnáin of Sruthán thinks it should be Cora Scair Tí Choinn, the
cora
of the Quinn family’s portion; there were people of that name living nearby who might have had seaweed rights there. So shadows of the old shore-workers are interleaved with those of giants and demigods.

Rummaging one day among the lumber and dust-filled sunbeams of a neighbour’s barn, I came across a huge and ancient
implement
that clearly dated from some heroic age of toil, although I could not guess its purpose. It had a twenty-foot shaft of wood, with a little wooden blade fixed across it near one end and an iron fork of three curved tines over eighteen inches long at the other. Its owner told me that it was a combination of two
seaweed-gathering
tools: the shaft plus the crosspiece constituted a
croisín,
and the shaft plus the fork a
crúca.
Later, down on the shore, he showed me the situations in which each would have been used. Just south of Cora Scaití Ciúin, for instance, where the shoreline is an
ulán
or shelf about ten or fifteen feet high, the sea has
enlarged
a joint of the limestone into a narrow sheer-sided creek called An Uaimh Mhór. (The dictionary-meaning of
uaimh
is cave, but in Aran it refers to such an open cleft in the seashore as this, like its equivalent
fuaigh
in Connemara.) Here the great fork or
crúca
was used for lifting out the masses of redweed packed into the creek by northerly gales. And just off the point of the
cora
itself
is a reef, one of the many called An Creachoileán, on which
coirleach
was harvested from a currach with the aid of the
croisín.
The pole was thrust down into the submarine forest of weed, and turned until the
coirleach,
whose fronds are several feet long, was tangled into a huge ball around the crosspiece. It was important, my friend told me, to give the
croisín
a jerk after every turn to break the stems, or else one would end up with such a mass of weed still attached to the rocks that “Fionn Mac Cumhall himself couldn’t pull it up!” When the currach was heaped up with eight or ten hundredweight of weed it would be rowed cautiously to shore, the water lapping at its brim.

This business of
croisínteacht
was both strenuous and risky. Once, when walking a Connemara shore, I was startled to see a man apparently sitting in the sea between two weed-covered rocks, reading a newspaper; he had looked up, nodded guardedly
and returned to his paper before I had made out that he was in a rowingboat so heavily loaded that only a mere splinter of the
gunwale
showed above the waterline between the mounds of weed that hid the bows and stern in their draperies. Having brought his cargo across from the islet where he had cut it, he was now waiting for another inch of tide to float him alongside a jetty. Such an
operation
is delicate enough in the unruffled inlets of Rosmuc, and I could appreciate why this man’s greeting of me had been so
restrained
, but days on which it would be practicable off a “
sometimes
calm
cora
”
of Aran must be very few indeed.

Paradoxically, the difficulties of cropping An Creachoileán were once at the origins of a commercial fortune. There are conflicting versions of this piece of folk-history, but according to the tale my neighbour told me as we leaned over a wall and looked out at the foaming reef, the MacDonncha family of Leitir Mealláin on the opposite coast once owned three
cartúir
of land in Eoghanacht, and therefore had seaweed rights here. One day when some
ancestral
MacDonncha was wrestling with the
coirleach
of An
Creachoileán
his
croisín
broke, and he stood up in his currach and swore “I’ll never gather
coirleach
again, if I have to beg!”
Whereupon
he went off to Galway to try another mode of life and opened a little shop, which over the course of generations has
become
that pillar of the business community, MacDonogh’s huge store on Merchants’ Road.

But in Aran, over those same generations, the
coirleach
was still wrenched off An Creachoileán, and renewed itself every year; the
crúca
was wielded in An Uaimh Mhór, the
cleimíní
were dragged into Port Chonnla, the blackweed and the red were cut on An Chora Dhubh;
bainc
was pitch-forked into baskets at An
Gleannachán
, and the baskets carried up to the hungry fields. Aran’s back was bent to the rule of the moon, for lifetime after lifetime. A little rhyme I heard from an old lady of Inis Oírr expresses the griefs of that immemorial labour. The places it names are seaweed shores of the south coast of Inis Oírr, but they could stand for any of a hundred such shores of Aran:

Dún an Ní broke my heart, Béal a’ Chalaidh killed me, Leic Mhór put me under the earth.

Dare one wonder what the product of this heart-break was, in terms of tons per year, of basketloads carried up the shore? Most of the weed gathered through the winter was for fertilizing the
potato
crop and for “making land” by covering barren rock with
layers
of seaweed and sand, but after the potatoes had been set in March and April yet more weed was stacked and dried, and then burnt in little kilns on the shore, for seaweed ash or “kelp” was the island’s principal cash product for over two hundred years. In the 1860S and ’70S, for instance, between 450 and 750 tons of kelp were exported annually. Estimates of how many tons of weed went into the making of a ton of kelp vary and I have read figures as high as twenty tons, but islanders I have consulted would put it at about five tons of dry weed or ten of wet weed. That gives a
total
of around six thousand tons burnt for kelp; then if a basketload of weed is about a hundredweight, as I have been told, a hundred and twenty thousand basketsful were carried up the shore every year during the heyday of the kelp industry, plus I have no idea how many more to feed the land.

Kelp-burning probably became important in Aran around the year 1700 as the industry seems to have originated in the west of Ireland at about that time, spread to the Highlands and Islands of
Scotland within a few decades and rapidly came to dominate the economy of the coastal areas. Its occasion was the demand for
various
constituents of vegetable ash, especially the soda used in glass and soap-making and (in Ireland particularly) in the bleaching of linen, and to a lesser extent the potash used in the manufacture of alum (for dyeing) and saltpetre (for gunpowder). Wood-ash had been the main source of these alkalies, but with the forests
depleted
and the import of alkalies of various continental origins
interrupted
by wars, British manufacturers called for alternative supplies, and the peasants of the Atlantic coast bent their backs to the seaweed.

Hardiman’s
History
of
Galway
(1820) records that kelp sold there initially at 14 to 21 shillings a ton, but that by 1808 it had reached a peak of £13 a ton and the town was exporting 4000 tons a year, most of it made in Connemara. It was Galway’s man of
science
Dr. Richard Kirwan who first devised a chemical estimation of the alkali content of kelp, superseding the old rules of thumb based on appearance and taste. Much of Galway’s kelp went to the north of Ireland for use in the linen industry and, according to Hardiman,

By the time Hardiman was writing the price had fallen to £4 and Galway’s exports to 2500 tons a year because, he supposed, of its inferiority to Scottish kelp. In fact the Scottish boom had
collapsed
too, partly because the Treaty of Paris had opened the way to Spanish imports of alkali made by burning the saltwort plant, and (a more important factor, though not recognized as such at
the time) the discovery of a process of synthesizing alkali directly from sea-salt and sulphur.

The smoke of the kelp-kilns might have died away then in Aran as all around the coasts of Ireland and Scotland, but for a fortuitous discovery that had been made in 1812 by a manufacturer of saltpetre near Paris. In the course of experiments to establish why the kelp solution he used was corroding his copper vessels, he isolated a previously unknown element, iodine. The unfolding of the industrial and medicinal virtues of the new substance gave kelp another century or more of usefulness, and it is only within present memory that the exploitation of other sources of iodine, and its replacement in surgery by modern antibiotics, have brought an end to kelp-burning.

It is impossible to identify any material traces of the earlier, eighteenth-century, phase of the industry in Aran. The kilns were slight affairs quickly put together out of the stones of the shore and pulled apart after use. But the history of the second phase can be written around a cluster of derelict structures by the sea, five or six hundred yards south of An Uaimh Mhór. Their importance is in inverse proportion to their prominence, but the roofless gables of the largest form the only landmark along this morose stretch of coast and serve to guide one to the others, which could be
overlooked
—for the kilns were still the same, ephemeral in form and in substance undistinguished from the shore itself. The
iodine-rich
redweed and searods of the lower shore were now preferred to the more easily harvested blackweed, but otherwise the practice was unchanged, except that during a brief period of boom around 1870 an element of mechanization was introduced. This ruined factory, called by the islanders Teach an Smáil, the house of the ash, was one of three; another just inland of Port Chonnla, is now scarcely traceable, but the walls of the major establishment, An Teach Mór, the big house, still grimly overlook the great
seaweed-shore
of Port Chorrúch two miles farther east. Aran’s annual
production
of kelp had climbed from between 120 and 200 tons in the 1820S to over 700 tons at the industry’s high point in the early
’70s, and agents were competing to buy it. The rapacious Mr. Thompson, agent to Aran’s landlords, had established the “Marine Salts Company” in Galway, with a standing order from London for as much iodine as he could supply. By threat of eviction he was forcing the Aran men to sell him their kelp at his price of £5 a ton (and on his generous definition of a ton, which could be anything from 22½ to 40 hundredweight), when they could have got from £7 to £8 a ton from other dealers in Clare and Connemara. The Aran factories were outposts of his short-lived Galway enterprise, and their tale of extortion, fraud and collapse, as it appears in newspapers, judicial enquiries and even Parliamentary debates of the time, will be read into the record apropos of An Teach Mór, by the waves of Port Chorrúch.

By 1877 Marine Salts was out of business and in the ensuing decade prices were so low that little or no kelp was made. There was a revival in the 1890s and 1900s; the price fluctuated around £4, two-thirds of the population were engaged in kelp-making, the average family producing at least two tons and some families as much as twelve tons. It was estimated that kelp money formed over a third of the total income of a family “in poor
circumstances
” and nearly a quarter of that of a family “in ordinary
circumstances
.” But after 1908 competition from Japanese kelp and from South American guano as fertilizer caused another fall to the point where it was no longer worth while harvesting the weed. Kelp profited from the carnage of the First World War which cried out for iodine; also in 1917 the interruptions of other supplies prompted MacDonoghs of Galway to set up a factory making
fertilizer
using kelp made from blackweed, to which Aran
contributed
. Thereafter, with the discovery of penicillin and the opening-up of other sources for what little iodine was still
required
, the industry flickered to its final extinction in about 1948. That spring when the kelpers went to Cill Rónáin as usual to get the sacks from the agent they were told that there would be no further buying of kelp. So the stacks of weed gathered and dried through the previous winter went onto the land as fertilizer.

It was during this long autumn of the Age of Kelp that certain innovations were made, quite ineffective in practice, but which at least provided the industry with a few monuments more
eye-catching
than the shallow traces of the old kilns. For in the Thirties the Free State government, in an attempt to develop the technology of kelp, had specimen kilns of a more substantial and permanent design built on various seaweed-shores, together with enclosures for the storage of the weed. Of the new kilns only two have survived the fifty stormy winters since then in these islands, one almost complete at Mainistir (which will be described when that shore is reached) and another rather ruinous one in Inis Oírr. The enclosures or
teáltaí
(the islanders call them
teaichíní
little houses) were of two sorts, and one of each can be seen close by the empty walls of the old seaweed factory, Teach an Smáil. The larger is a rectangle defined by low, solidly built walls, about 14 feet by 44 feet inside and with a wide opening in the seaward end,
occupying
the corner of a field by the shore. There is another, inland of An Gleannachán, that fits snugly into the field-pattern, one on the Bun Gabhla shore, and two on each of the smaller Aran Islands. They are floored with small limestone blocks neatly set on edge, between which the brine was no doubt supposed to seep away. The other type was a circle of stout wall measuring about a dozen feet across within, and floored with big ovoid stones from the shinglebank. Apart from the one on the foreshore here which is in good shape, these circles have almost completely vanished. These then are the scanty markers of the failing history—and elsewhere they are probably even fewer, for when I was mapping the whole South Connemara coast from Indreabhán westwards to Cashel I came across only one such kiln and one circular enclosure still standing, on the south of Garomna Island.

Although the Aran labourers appreciated the bit of relief-work money spent on building these things I am told that “not a sop of seaweed ever went into them.” According to my guide to the Sruthán shore, the theory was that wet weed heaped into these shelters would dry “by spontaneous combustion,” but this was
never put to the test as local opinion was and is that “It’s hard enough to dry weed hung over a wall, never mind put down in one of them things!” In fact a contemporary publication in which the kelpers were urged to adopt new ways makes it clear that the shelters were only for holding the weedstack, roofed with straw, secure from rain (which would tend to wash the iodine out of wet weed) until the weather should be suitable for spreading, drying and making cocks of it in the usual way. Similarly the kiln at Mainistir was never used though it would have been less laborious to operate than the old type. These innovations came too late to overcome the conservatism of a way of life falling into senility.

Thus the true memorials of the two-and-a-half centuries of kelp-burning are the temporary kilns of the old type, the remains of which are not easy to find among the other stones of the shore. And so at last the never-used circular enclosure near Teach an Smáil has acquired a certain modest function, for it guides one to the site of such a kiln, just twenty-five paces to its south-east. Having seen this specimen—hardly more than a grassy clearance among the pebbles in the shape of a narrow oblong about twenty feet long, with the interrupted remains of an edging of rough blocks of stone along one side—it is possible to recognize others as one comes across them, like fossil footprints of some extinct monster, at intervals along the shore. Here at last we are on the track of the business to which so much of Aran’s thought and
energy
was sacrificed.