Stones of Aran (25 page)

The firing of the kilns was the crux of the year’s shore-work, a midsummer dedication of sweat. It was a time of high excitement and anxiety that called upon all the stamina of the young and craft of the old. For weeks on end the shores would be wreathed in heavy creamy smoke. Over on the mainland the weather-prophets
of Cask used to foretell rain if they caught the whiff of Aran’s burning seaweed carried across the twelve miles of sea by a
south-westerly
breeze and held low by a temperature inversion, while at such times the Aran folk would be praying that the breeze would hold steady and the clouds pass unbroken over the island. Luck with the weather, a relentless physical effort sustained over the twenty-four or thirty-six hours of a kiln’s burning, and the
inherited
expertise of generations went into ensuring a successful outcome; a little magic and a degree of roguery were among the ingredients too. From various islanders, the last to practise it, I have pieced together a detailed account of the building and
tending
of the altars of this rite.

The burning was usually done in June, by which time the great stacks of weed gathered in the spring would be thoroughly dry. The kilns were simply made by clearing a level patch of stony shore (it was important to avoid contamination by sand),
arranging
a rim of blocks about a foot high around a rectangle three or four feet across and from fifteen to thirty feet long, depending on the amount of weed to be burned, and then carefully pointing and flooring it with
dóib,
the clay dug out from under the inland cliffs of the islands. Before dawn on the appointed day the men would have drunk their mugs of tea and be walking down to the shore with a bucketful of smouldering turfs from the hearth. The kiln would be heaped high with dry briars, pressed down and lit from a couple of turfs thrust in at either end and in the middle. The driest of the weed would be thrown in, and it would soon be burning fiercely if the wind was suitable. It was essential for the wind to be blowing across the kiln if it were not to smother itself, and helpful if it blew from the same side all the time so that the men feeding the fire were not themselves smothered. I have been told, by an elderly man who in his youth saw it done by “the old folk,” that a
muileann
gaoithe,
a windmill, which was merely a napkin-sized cloth hung between a few sticks, was sometimes erected by the kiln to “draw the wind” to the right quarter. The
two long walls of the kiln were termed
balla
na gaoithe,
the wall of the wind, and
balla
an
deataigh,
the wall of the smoke. A strong wind could cool the exposed wall of the kiln to such a degree that the weed on that side would not burn properly, and a little gap would appear between the interior of the wind-wall and the rising column of smoke; at this sign a currach would be brought up to shelter the wall and weed heaped over it to make a wind-break.

Towards mid-afternoon the kiln would be thoroughly raked by six or eight men facing each other in pairs across the kiln and working their
rácaí
to and fro in opposite directions. (One or two rusty specimens of these
rácaí
still lie around the almost defunct island smithy in which they were made; they were iron rods just over a yard long, sometimes fitted with a wooden handle and bent round at the top into a small loop.) When the whole kilnful had been stirred thoroughly until it all ran together into a molten glow, feeding of the fire would be continued. In the middle of the next night the raking would be repeated, and the fire allowed to die down. Flat stones would be placed on the hot mass (round ones would have sunk into it) to cover and compress it. Finally, it would be protected from the rain with a layer of bracken or dry weed, and left to cool. It would be mid-morning by the time the exhausted men went home.

Sometimes it took a night, a day and a night to burn a large kiln. Tom O’Flaherty recalls witnessing the two nights of toil as a child:

And the following evening:

Tragically, much of this titanic effort was later found to be
unnecessary
. The Congested Districts Board around 1912 was
experimenting
with a less demanding regime of burning which produced a loose ash rather than a clinker. For a long time the buyers
resisted
the idea on the grounds that ash would be more vulnerable to the weather in transport, and would have to be emptied out of its bags to test for adulteration. The kelp-burners too were reluctant to accept that the muscle and wisdom of generations had been
misdirected
. However, in time both sides were persuaded that there was no point in fusing the kelp into solidity. Twenty-eight years after witnessing the scenes described above, Tom O’Flaherty
returned
to the same shore and spoke with the new generation of kelpers:

Such, then, was the riot and licence of the Kelp Age’s
decadence
; one can hear the note of disapproval. But in the old,
classical
times to which my informants’ memories return, solidity was still accounted a virtue. The kiln would be left to cool for three or four days, and then the stones of one side of it would be pulled away and the block of kelp broken up into handleable bits two or three feet across. One way of doing this was to lever up the slab with crowbars, place a round stone under it where it was desired to crack it, put a handful of straw on top of the slab and give it a sharp blow with another stone on the straw, so that it fractured neatly. The pieces would be piled up and covered from the rain with bracken until they could be carried to Cill Rónáin by cart or to Connemara by boat. The steep-sided creek of An Uaimh Mhór, just north of Teach an Smáil, was one of the dozens of natural
harbours
from which hookers took kelp across to a firm in Cill Chiaráin, the predecessor of today’s alginate works.

But before he would buy, the agent would test the kelp for iodine content. He would crumble together two or three little pieces taken from different parts of the lot, put a pinch of the powder into a test-tube and do something mysterious with a drop of sulphuric acid; the islanders would take it as a hopeful sign if when the treated sample was flung out on the ground they saw a smoke of iodine vapour arising from it. Then after a calculation the agent would announce his verdict, acceptance or rejection, good price or bad. By all accounts this could scarcely be called the moment of truth. As Synge wrote in his compassionate account of Connemara, of 1905:

Similar memories are still bitter in the islands. As one old man told me, “If you weren’t great with the buyer you wouldn’t get the price—and then the best thing you could do was leave your kelp on the quay and the next day ask someone else to pretend it was his and get a fair price for you.”

On the other hand adulteration of the kelp was a practice almost as old as the industry, and one on which the kelpers were
repeatedly lectured. The Annual Report of the Congested
Districts
Board for 1914, for instance, states:

Sometimes, I have been told, a special batch of kelp would be made from
coirleach,
which is rich in iodine but laborious to
harvest
, in the hope that the agent would take his sample out of this portion of the load. And on the other hand I was once surprised to learn from my oracle of the shore that
ruánach,
the fleshless thongweed, was favoured for kelp: “There’s great weight in
ruá
nach
!”
he said, and when I reminded him that he had previously told me there was little iodine in it he replied, “That’s true—but then you’d try to have the
ruánach
in a part of the kelp that wouldn’t be tested!”

Having thought so intensely about the old shore-days in the
writing
of these seaweed-sequences of my book, I went back to that coast and walked it once again, from An Gleannachán to Port Sheánla, to see if the images I had drawn from the past and tried to impose on that refractory background had any permanency. But the vivid sea-fowl distracted me from the hunt for enhanced imaginings; I wished I had brought binoculars and bird-book; I saw nothing but the passing show of the present. Later I read an
anecdote recorded by Elizabeth Rivers, an English artist who lived here for a time in the Thirties, which suggested a particular
interpretation
of my fruitless search. An old shore-worker is talking:

Now of course those just or unjust shares of the shore are all forgotten and for mile after mile it is the ungrudged portion of such solitaries as love it disinterestedly; nevertheless to search there for its past by the broad daylight of the present, hoping for more than something vaguely seen and heard against the glimmer and plash of the night sea, is perhaps to want more than one’s just,
or even possible, share in life. But, not granting the objective
existence
of ghosts, I require all the more precision in their
identification
. The verbal material I have used in my attempt to recall the old shore-life is unspecific, for instance, about the dress of the labourers; perhaps I should turn to old photographs to impress
visual
details on my memory before returning to the shore.

The Araner, his gear and garb, have been catching the camera’s eye for a century. This eye sometimes has had a rude scientific stare, sometimes a look of love. There are photographs by the ethnographers Haddon and Browne who came here to measure skulls in the 1890s, showing three islanders ranged by height, in profile and full-face views; the symmetry and order of the framing exacerbates every oddity and lopsidedness of the framed. Whereas another islander of that same generation, in one of the
photographs
Synge made, no doubt as a step in his mysterious
transmutation
of the Aran Islands into
The
Aran
Islands,
looks at his strange friend behind the camera with exactly the expression of puzzled affection the poet’s face must often have worn—a fine instance of the total reversal the hands of a serious photographer
unknowingly
induce in the optics of the camera. Then there are untruthful moments concocted for the blink of the truthful eye: in T. H. Mason’s
The
Islands
of
Ireland,
of 1936, we are offered photographic evidence of a patriarchally bearded Araner seated at a spinning-wheel before his cottage door. The son of the sitter, now himself elderly, has told me how angry he was, a child, on seeing a stranger photographing “something that doesn’t be, a man at a spinning-wheel.” Finally (to complete this cursory
quartering
of the photographic archives), there are the little showers of anonymous and amateur snaps that turn up lodged here and there like autumn leaves in unexpected crannies, such as the packet marked only “1934” which “came into the hands of”
The
Irish
Times
recently, containing images (the upturned faces of Inis Meáin boatmen holding their currachs against the waves while waiting for goods to be thrown down to them from the steamer,
the empty seaward gaze of loiterers on the wall above Cill Rónáin harbour) of ragged, haggard endurance and resignation, from a harsh season.

From such sources, by ignoring so much of what they have to say and by interpreting the rest with the aid of contemporary
writings
, one could compile a manual of identification of old-
Aran-out
-of-door, as follows:

Primed with these distinguishing marks, then, I could set out once again (for instance from the trace of the old kiln described above, and thence south-east to Port Sheánla, so as to finish with this stretch of coast and conclude these conjurations of the shore’s past, before turning to other matters), in the hope of identifying the ghost of Kelp Age Man and Kelp Age Woman.

But even as I picture myself doing so, some of those “other matters” (as if the phrase referred to mental solids, liquids and gases), denser than any spirits distilled from old photographs, claim my vision: memories deriving from my most recent, my first, my every visit to this place. Offshore, opposite the fragments of kiln, is a square, flat-topped rock called Table Rock on the Admiralty charts, and in Irish An Corradán (a diminutive,
probably
, from
corr,
point or angle, and merely expressing the fact that it is a little projection of the coast). On it ten or twenty big dark long-necked birds stand motionless except for an occasional
stabbing
quarrel or a yawning stretch of the wings, for hour after hour, every day. They are green cormorants, or shags, a little smaller than the cormorants themselves. The field-guides to birds list the distinguishing features of the two species:

I wonder if the Irish name for the cormorant,
broigheall,
derives
from
bráidgheall,
white-throated. I wonder why Aran at least
sees the shag as female, for here it is known as the
cailleach
dhubh,
the black hag. Running my mind rapidly along the whole
northern
coast I see that there are just three such parliaments of shags, one here on An Corradán, one three miles to the east below a cliff called An Caipín, the little cap, and one on a rock named from the species, Carraig na gCailleach, another three miles beyond the last. Their sessions have no doubt seen the kelp industry come and go, indifferently. How intensely their angular outlines are
imprinted
on the loose grey distances seawards! My afterimages of the human generations of the shore, fading into the dimness of old photographs, have no comparable claim on the retina. Can the act of writing hold such disparate materials in coexistence?

Making my way (in thought) along the awkward rock-banks towards Port Sheánla, I can at least work out the answer to the question sometimes put to me by myself and others as to whether or no there will be photographs in my book—old photographs, as if it were a field-guide to revenants, new ones, my own perhaps, as exemptions from the task of description? Photographs and text stand in such different dimensions of the attention, demand
attention
of such different dimensions, that, for instance a
photograph
resists quotation, adoption into a verbal context by cutting and commentary, more resolutely than does another text. In
particular
it is only through description and not by physical inclusion that those troubling likenesses of bygone kelpers can people this described shore of mine. The persistency, recurrency and
interpenetration
of images in a composed book (and with the word “composed” goes the implication that these considerations need not trouble a guide-book, for example) are to be as modulable as those of themes in music. The page of photographs standing out among pages of print would preserve certain images from the time-flow of writing, of reading—and nothing, living or dead, can be allowed that exemption within the covers of this book. A
photograph
, then, would disrupt the book as much as an actual
sample
of Aran stone enclosed between its pages.

To explain to myself what this means for the life-expectancy of
ghosts, for example, I stop in passing to look at Port Sheánla. This theatre for potential apparitions, a slight concavity of the
coastline
, a little stage of sand and at low tide some flat seaweed-shiny rocks, can be oppressively set in drizzling walls of fog, or lit with transformation-scenes of crystalline dazzle. The first time I visited the spot with M, in early spring sunshine, I overwhelmed her by saying with an all-inclusive and impulsive gesture, “This is
Paradise
!”—for the dancing shallows and freshly rinsed sandflats were alive with little waders, and I (Adam with a newly acquired
field-guide
to shorebirds) was looking forward to naming them: streaky brown dunlins, plump pearly sanderlings, turnstones with
harlequin
backs and wings, ringed plovers in black white and
chocolate
, so many nimble fistfuls of distinctive features. And then an old man, tall and wiry, with a fierce bony jaw, hailed us from the nearby field where he was digging long parallel ridges to plant his potatoes in. “No Englishman can match me with the spade!” he cried, brandishing it about his head, whereupon I hopped over the wall, seized the spade and threw together a yard or two of ridge, not as precisely level-topped and bevel-edged as his own work but creditable enough to surprise him, not knowing that a neighbour had been coaching me in this island art.

These memories of our first wide-eyed appropriation of this
little
world, and the counter-claims each new find here still makes on me after a decade of careful looking, interrupt my ghost-hunt, reveal its artificiality. Ghosts are to be created, not found. In so far as my writing can catch them against the same light as it does the stones and stories of my own experience, the old people of the shore revisit it. And when on rounding a headland of this mental march other sights of powerful associations come into view, these ghosts are laid, with the laying aside of this attempt at a
resurrection
that never for a moment troubled the nothingness of the dead.