Stones of Aran (29 page)

It begins again, complaint of wave against rock, rock against wave, as soon as one leaves the arms of the bay. The next two miles of coast are the same as other miles of coast; its generalities—the low rock-terraces with chipped edges, the blocks flung askew on them, the clefts licked smooth in them—may be taken as read. But this is one of our habitual walks, home being just half a mile away up there on the skyline, and so its asperities have acquired the ease of familiarity. Here, in this angle between two tons of stone, Oscar killed his first rabbit, more by luck than skill, and to his own amazement, while we two convertite vegetarians hesitated
between
outrage and applause. (I commemorated the deed with a microscopic portrait of the dog at this point on my first map of Aran, which intrigued those visitors who noticed it.) Here, where the terrace stands just high enough above the breakers to carry a patchy veneer of soil and scattered clumps of the more spray-proof vegetation, we come in spring to pick sea-beet, the aboriginal from which the tame garden spinach has been cultivated; its thick juicy leaves add a primitive savour to our peaceable diet. This is a good place to look out for driftwood too, for the general eastward set of the currents brings floating goods inshore from the main here. Once we lugged home a four-foot baulk to be cut up for
firewood
, which instead became a peculiarly grim, salty,
spider-haunted
, fungus-prone ornament-stand in a corner of the living room.

This shore is known as Poll na Loinge, inlet of the ship, and the name applies in particular to a deep and narrow creek cutting into the terrace, where bodies and cargo from a wrecked sailing vessel
came ashore long ago. The drowned men are buried under
flagstones
almost indistinguishable from the rest of the limestone pavement a hundred and fifty yards up and on the west side of the boreen that comes down to the coast road nearby, and the cargo, which was tobacco, was carried secretly across the island and
hidden
from coastguards in a cave called Poll an Tobac, a third of the way down the dizzy cliff just east of Dún Aonghasa. The inlet of Poll na Loinge marks the end of Cill Mhuirbhigh shore and the beginning of Fearann an Choirce (or Oatquarter) shore. The
terrace
that constitutes the coastline rises slowly as one goes on, and after another quarter of a mile the little cliff turns and runs inland, eastward, while the shore continues north-eastwards on a lower level. The cliff face at the turn is called Balla na Sáibhéarachta, the wall of the sawing. The blacksmith of Oatquarter still has the great two-man saw, a five-foot blade set in a rectangular frame of wood with a crossbar handle at either end, with which his
ancestors
used to saw up driftwood spars for rafters. The old men of Oatquarter, he tells me, used to sit in the shelter of the field wall at Balla na Sáibhéarachta, peering out round the corner now and again to see if the tide was bringing in anything interesting,
smoking
their pipes the while and telling stories, “as happy as the King of England.” Once when his grandfather and others were sawing up timbers near Bun Gabhla the coastguards came looking for them, for wrack was Crown property. The men hid the big saw and managed to get away, but King, the blacksmith, left his
dividers
behind, which the guards found and traced back to him. However, since he was such a respectable character, he was given a sort of unofficial licence to gather and cut up timbers thereafter. Perhaps that was one of the factors in the peace of mind of those Oatquarter elders enjoying their pipes while waiting for what the sea might send; chronology is vague here.

Chronology fades away like tobacco smoke from the next tale, although it is one which is told in the most matter-of-fact way. A man walking by Poll na Loinge one day found a coin in a
bullán
or rock-pool. The next morning he found another one in the same
bullán,
and the following morning a third. Then he told someone about it, and after that there were no more coins. So much I heard from a lady of Eochaill. An Oatquarter man whom I questioned about it was able to give me further details: the first coin was a half-crown, the second five shillings, and the third ten shillings (“Triple!” he added in an explanatory tone, throwing me back into puzzlement just as I was congratulating myself on having got the figures on this otherworldly transaction). He also said that the person who was told about it was probably the priest. Priests of course have always protected their retail monopoly of
supernatural
benefits by maligning even the pettiest rival outlets; the coins probably found their way into the Church’s pocket and the poor peasant was told to have no further dealings with the Devil; and in the face of such distrust and greed the charitable Earth ceased from alms-giving. No, of course I must not impose my own
anti-clerical
and pagan interpretations on the incident. Nor will I join folklorists by filing it under an International Folktale Type
number
. Listened to in the way it is told by Araners (demanding
neither
belief nor disbelief) it sounds like any other instance of the happy-go-lucky beneficence of this particular shore. A man found a coin in a
bullán.
The next day he found another. And the next day, a third. Then he told someone else, and after that he found no more. What could be more natural than that?

Concerning more toilsome ways of gaining an income, these Oatquarter shores had certain advantages and disadvantages. Beyond the point where the cliffs retreat inland, the shore is of broad stony shallows backed by a shinglebank. The shallows
provide
plenty of blackweed, good for manuring the potato-fields but not so good for making kelp. The redweed of deeper waters is not cast conveniently ashore here, for the coastline is so
straight that the currents sweep it past to be caught by a great hook of land a mile farther east, on the territory of the next village, Corrúch. Since Oatquarter had no redweed shore of its own it had the right of gathering redweed on Corrúch shore throughout the winter and spring up to the 1st of May. The weed was brought back to
the shinglebank, which was the ideal place for stacking it to dry and for making kelp, being high and airy, firm underfoot and free from sand. This is An Duirling Bhán, the white rock-bank. (The word
duirling
applies to the storm beaches of all kinds around Aran’s shores, from fine pebble-banks to the rough boulder-stacks along the Atlantic clifftops, and here as elsewhere the whiteness is the work of the sea, rolling the pebbles up and down the outer face of the bank and keeping them well polished.) As “The White Shore” this shinglebank is the setting of Tom O’Flaherty’s
childhood
reminiscence
The
Kelp
Burners
,
which tells of the night he was allowed to stay up and help tend the fire of an Oatquarter kelper:

The shiny pebbles of the White Shore occupy only two or three hundred yards of the coastline, and the rest of Oatquarter’s
allotted
portion is made up of long bare steps upon which the waves prostrate themselves before the usual ranks of boulders. The few features of this shore are revealed only at low tide, including the one from which it is named Scailp Fhada, a “long cleft,” running parallel to the shoreline a quarter of a mile beyond the end of the shinglebank. At the eastern end of this cleft is a big rock-basin called Poll na Mná Móire, the pool of the big woman; who she
was is unknown. A third of a mile farther on is a small rock that stands out like a jetty into the deeper water below low tide, Carraig Ghiolla. The man whose habit of fishing from it was so persistent as to leave his name on it, Giolla Ó Direáin, was called Gilbert in English and has been commemorated under that name too, for the island’s most luxurious guesthouse, Gilbert Cottage (
recte
Gilbert’s Cottage—the error was mine, in painting its sign), which stands in ungainly prominence among the houses half a mile off up the hillside, has grown as if by cellular fission, piling extension upon extension, from the two little rooms of his home of eighty years ago.

Another quarter of a mile along the coast two deep coves side by side, Poll Shíle Mór and Poll Shíle Beag (
Síle
being the Irish original of the name Sheila, and
mór
and
beag
meaning
respectively
“big” and “little”), mark the end of Oatquarter’s shore. The larger of these (very small) inlets was a usefully secluded harbour for the smuggling ashore of barrels of
poitín
from Connemara. Redweed collects in it too, and the giant pitchfork, the
crúca
,
was used to lift it out; one can still just make out where steps have been hacked in the wave-washed rock around its rim to ease the way for, perhaps, the otherwise unrecorded Síle, among the anonymous generations of basket-carriers. This is
the last of Oatquarter’s inadequate little catchments for redweed, and the fact that so much of it goes drifting by to Corrúch’s more
fortunate
shore has always rankled. One oldtimer grumbles to me about the uselessness of the Congested Districts Board (defunct over sixty years ago) who he thinks should have dynamited the shore here into a more retentive configuration. As it is, Oatquarter’s has been a shore of scanty and hard-earned profits for individual workers, whereas, as we shall see, Corrúch’s lent itself, if only briefly, to large-scale enterprise and the factory system.

The ruins that loom up as one approaches Port Chorrúch, rather tremendous among the humbly criss-crossing field-walls on the mild slopes coming down the road by the sea, represent an outpost of Victorian industrialism, established here with great ruthlessness only to fail within five years. The roof and rear wall have long vanished, together with the tops of the three tall
window-spaces
, so that its façade alternates blank oblongs of stone and sky. The sort of architectural gaze, at once exploitative and paternal, that subdued the milling valleys of the north of England, here, in the 1860s, oversaw the labours of peasants in wide
seaweed-fields
.

It is no accident that one of the earliest attempts to mechanize the kelp industry was sited just here, for its topography makes this Aran’s most favoured weed-shore. Immediately over the road from the factory ruins is the beginnings of an immense shinglebank that swings out in a westward-facing concave, as high, level and evenly curved as an esplanade, along the flank of a headland. Every scrap of redweed brought along by tide and current is caught by this bay, and after a storm the shingle slope is plastered three feet deep with it. The deposit piles up, settles and rots throughout autumn and winter, and even today cartloads of this rich, dense
bainc
are fetched away in spring for manuring the potato-fields. The sheltered back-slope of the shingle is ribbed with the low walls across which searods are still hung to dry, though in amounts that decrease year by year. The top of the shinglebank makes a track out to the far side of the bay where the
blackweed-shallows
run back westwards for hundreds of yards; one sometimes sees
boys far out on this
cora
leading donkeys, stumbling and splashing, laden with baskets of
carraigín.

Seaweed-gathering of any sort is not a priority nowadays, and one rarely sees
anyone at work out in Port Chorrúch except on the sort of day when the still expanses of the bay give a dreamy
slowness
to the movements of the few isolated figures. At the time of
the iodine-boom, however, there must have been lines of
shore-workers
trudging up the shingle with weed to feed the machinery of the factory, whatever the weather. The price they got, it is
remembered
, was a penny a basket, or a shilling a
bord
,
the load
carried
on the straddle and side-baskets of a horse. Their paymaster was the land-agent Thomas H. Thompson, who plays his part of villain in Aran history with such gusto. He and two other
gentlemen
, Sir James Drombraine of Monkstown and Richard Young of Dublin, had founded the Irish Iodine and Marine Salts
Manufacturing
Company Limited in 1863. By ’65 they had a factory in operation in Galway and were building here at Corrúch. An
article
in the
Galway
Vindicator
,
dated the 6th of May, 1866,
summarizes
the nature of the business:

By the following year Sir James Drombraine could claim that Marine Salts was the third largest iodine manufactury in the United Kingdom. The prime necessity was for copious supplies of seaweed for the Corrúch works, and of kelp burnt by the islanders in their individual kilns. Aran was producing around 500 tons of
kelp a year and there was keen competition to buy it. Previous to the foundation of Marine Salts, Aran kelp had been bought by agents operating in Connemara on behalf of a Glasgow firm. The Scotsmen were offering £7 to £8 a ton, but this, according to Thompson, was an artificial price, an attempt to crush his
company
. As agent to the landlords, he had the answer: henceforth the tenantry would sell their kelp only to him, and at his price of £4 to £5 depending on quality, or face eviction. The landlords’ rights in seaweed, he claimed, were absolute—though later on he had to admit that the landlords (the fastidiously remote Miss Digby of Landenstown, and the Countess of Howth) knew nothing of his Marine Salts company. This monopoly attracted a lot of criticism in the
Galway
Vindicator
,
which denounced it and others of Thompson’s abuses as “serfdom.” In reply Thompson defended the monopoly as a protection for Galway industry and claimed that the Aran men were now getting a better price than the
Connemara
men. Nevertheless in 1869 the
Vindicator
reported that a man called Milane from The Seven Churches (i.e. Eoghanacht) had been served with notice to quit, for bringing his kelp across to Connemara to get a better price.

There were also complaints of unfair weighing methods. Thompson was not only the sole judge of the quality, by which the price per ton was fixed, but also of what constituted a ton. A
defensive
letter to the paper from the company states that the
standard
was 22½ cwt (rather than the usual 20 cwt), but a rejoinder from the island’s curate, the Reverend Corbett, puts the
Thompsonian
ton at from thirty to forty cwt; further, the bailiff had
announced
after Mass one Sunday that “All will make kelp, or …” The curate goes on to threaten to bring this monopoly to the
attention
of the Government. Next we read of a public meeting (in September of 1869) at which 273 kelp-burners signed an address to Mr. James O’Flaherty of Kilmurvey House, refuting the curate’s letter. The Reverend Corbett returns to the attack: no such
meeting
took place, and the address is a forgery; he challenges Thompson and O’Flaherty to produce twenty of the signatories,
or to take him to court. We learn that two of the bailiffs had taken down the names of a crowd of people attending a funeral in Inis Meáin, and that the rest of the signatures had been obtained by O’Flaherty from people who did not know what they were
signing
; also, that O’Flaherty’s interest in the business was that the kelp was carried to Galway in his boats alone.

By 1870 the Corrúch factory had already ceased operations; perhaps the patent process was not a success, or perhaps, as an Oatquarter man tells me (for the tittle-tattle of village against
village
outlasts industries), “Them Corrúch people put stones in the seaweed to give it weight, and the coggles of the machinery got broken.” However, Marine Salts continued to buy kelp, and the monopoly was enforced until 1872 when Thompson permitted the islanders to sell to whom they liked, provided they paid him “
royalties
” out of their gain. At this time he was offering a price of £5 a ton, but the islanders insisted on selling to the Scottish firm’s agent, Mr. Hazell (whose kelp-store is still to be seen at Cashel in Connemara), who was offering £7 plus freight plus 10s. “
expenses
.” Thompson’s royalty was levied on the raw weed itself at a rate of 5 to 10s. a ton (or £1 19s on two tons according to another account), and since it took five tons or more of weed to make a ton of kelp this effectively reimposed the monopoly. Thompson was adamant that “On behalf of the owners I have a right to every bit of seaweed that comes ashore and can do what I like with it and charge what I like on it.” However, kelp prices were soon to fall disastrously and Marine Salts went out of business in 1877.

Those were dreadful times, in which not only the kelp but all other means of livelihood failed—the fisheries, the oats, the pigs, the potatoes—and Thompson’s royalties became a minor item in the litany of his abuses (all of which will be gone into in their place), as events spiralled down towards the Land War and the
vicious
settling of accounts of ’81. The question was exhumed in subsequent court hearings before the Land Court in ’84, and even raised in the House of Commons, after which Thomson had the effrontery to claim in a letter he wrote to
The
Freeman’s Journal 
“to
put the record straight,” that the tenants had paid royalties for many years and had never complained “until now, when all the rights of the landlord are being invaded.” In fact, he explains, Marine Salts had been set up partly to offer competition and so keep prices up, for the good of all concerned.

And that is the last word I have found, on the company and its philanthropic activities. Should one require a monument to this out-of-the-way episode of the Industrial Revolution, there
remains
only a grassy plot sheltered by a tall façade from the winds off the sea, in which the men of Corrúch keep their currachs. For the rest of its stones one might look about the walls of the old
cottages
on the hillside above.

And now we will let the sea wash the taste of those foul times out of the bay’s mouth.