Stones of Aran (34 page)

Each one of these homes, the bungalows rather recently
scattered
like a handful of dice over the green fields around Loch an Chara, the cottages and two-storied houses clustered on the rise to the south-west, has its own continuing history, and since this is an introspective community dependent upon its own doings for
dramatic
entertainment, we know all these histories, or think we do. But to avoid gossiping about the neighbours, or, even worse,
generalizing
about them, I will approach the subject of Cill Rónáin and its pocketful of fortunes obliquely, by way of the fine shingle beach that lies on the left of the road (on the right are the broad fields in which the races are held) from Loch an Chara to the first buildings of the harbour.

This shingle beach is Trá na bhFrancach or Frenchmen’s Strand, from the drowned sailors washed ashore here when a French sloop was wrecked off the island, nobody knows how long ago. They are buried in a field by the shore road and on the north of a sideroad running inland from it called Bóithrín na Leachtaí, the boreen of the cairns, from the little heaps of stone that mark their graves. Frenchmen’s Strand makes a perfect, shallowly concave curve of a quarter mile of coast; its profile is an elegant shallow concave too, emerging from the waves and sweeping up to the sea-wall. Its stones have been graded by size, from small boulders at the
northern
end to tiny pebbles where it stops against a rocky point at the south, for the tendency of the waves that strike southwards along this shore is always to shift smaller stones farther than bigger ones. Theoretically, stones endlessly rattled together will be ground into perfect ellipsoids, but this mathematical destiny is constantly
forestalled
by chance breakages, leaving oddly shaped bits to the
further
workings of the sea. So one can imagine a family tree, stemming from any one boulder, of pebbles scattered along the beach at various stages of their randomly interrupted journey, with its recurrent aspirations to roundedness and (in theory, and were it not for the headland that puts a stop to the pattern and
process of the shore) to pinhead size and then ultimate
dissolution
. Since much of the limestone outcrop from which this
shingle
originated has branches of fossilized corals running through it, many of the pebbles have round white spots on their surfaces, and towards the southern end of the shore look more and more like dice half melted by the fury of the game.

On passing the rocky end-stop of Frenchmen’s Strand the road leaves these allegorical mutterings of surf on stones and makes a turn to the west, by an old storehouse for nets which now holds the hundreds of bicycles hired out to tourists by the great-
grandsons
of Johnny Mullen. (On the day that I wrote this, the 2nd of September 1983, as I heard later, their father P.J., brought up by Pat Mullen in the spirit of his novel
Hero
Breed
,
died in his house back near the lake, after many months of constant and courageous wrestling with an invisible, tireless opponent, Parkinson’s Disease. Two generations of visitors to whom he was boatman and oracle will remember this difficult and rewarding man.) From this point, whence the pier runs out to the left and the road continues around the sandy shore of the harbour bay, one sees Cill Rónáin whole for the first time, at least in its marine aspect, on the land sloping down to the waterfront opposite.

If one may read its architectural expression from this angle the sole vocation of the little town is to watch whatever, if anything, is going on in the harbour. Its most characteristic and intriguing
feature
is a narrow road rising steeply from the waterfront and
immediately
twisting out of sight between oddly angled gable-ends. Motionless figures lean over its curved retaining wall and survey the scene as if from an opera box; from a distance they are exactly the same people as appear in a photograph of this view taken at the turn of the century. On the right of this
carcair
(to use the local word for a steep way) is a flat-roofed, two-storied public house, Joseph McDonagh’s according to the faded gilt lettering across its grey frontage, although even his daughters had long retired from the business when we first came to Aran. Behind it and above the roofs of cottages it obscures appear the snowy walls and many
windows of the parish priest’s residence, relaxed and spreading in discreet triumphalism on the rise of the land, and behind that again the long slated roof of the nineteenth-century coastguard station. On the left at the foot of the
carcair
is an old stone-built kelp-store, now fitted with glass doors and intermittently
functioning
as a café. Then farther round the curve of the waterfront the rest of the town comes down boldly led by Bay View Guesthouse, newly extended and announcing itself in several European languages, to greet the tourists disembarked by the
motorboats
plying from Connemara at An tSean-chéibh, the old quay. Opposite the old quay itself, which ends the harbour perimeter, is a crafts shop, white-washed and bright with the coloured woven things hung across the walls of its little forecourt, that sells Aran sweaters, sheepskin rugs, pottery, postcards and (most importantly from the point of view of our survival) my map of Aran.

Attached to the crafts shop on the right is a more retiring
segment
of the row of old two-storied buildings, that gives little
impression
of being inhabited but was once the Atlantic Hotel, landfall for all visitors to the islands in the period of their literary rediscovery. Here in 1898 J. M. Synge wrote the words “I am in Aranmor, sitting over a turf fire, listening to a murmur of Gaelic that is rising from a little public-house under my room,” so
beginning
the account of his quietly imperious courtship of the islands. It was Yeats who, he claimed, had first turned Synge in the
direction
of Aran when they met in Paris in 1896, but in fact Synge had a prior connection with the islands as his uncle had been the Protestant minister here in the 1850s. An old man had spotted the family look on Synge’s first arrival: “I was standing under the
pier-wall
mending nets,” he said, “when you came off the steamer, and I said to myself in that moment, if there is a man of the name of Synge left walking the world, it is that man yonder will be he.”

Synge only stayed a fortnight in Cill Rónáin before going on to Inis Meáin, which was to be his spiritual summer home for the next few years; Cill Rónáin, he felt, “has been so much changed
by the fishing industry, developed there by the C.D. Board, that it has now very little to distinguish it from any other fishing village on the west coast of Ireland.” The man who oversaw this change in Cill Rónáin from magical penury to mundane profitability has his memorial nearby, the handsome high cross overlooking the harbour from the top of an irregular plot of ground reaches up from the old quay between the grey and defunct hotel and the gleaming guesthouse. He was Father Michael O’Donohue, parish priest of Aran from 1881 to 1892, and he is said to have sent a
momentous
telegram to Dublin Castle in 1886:

—an act which, if not so miraculously or electrically causative of the C.D. Board’s intervention as oral history would have it, is the perfect emblem of his dedicated representation of his flock in the face of governmental delay and the agents rapacity.

The cross itself, of a single block of limestone ten feet tall, carved in a sturdy Victorian-Celtic style with a rational allowance of the irrational, the panels of the front being filled with plaited snakes and those on the back left blank, is the work of James Pearse of Dublin (stonecarver, socialist, and father of the hero of 1916), and it is remembered that old men used to remember him enjoying a pint in the pub here after his long hours of work on the cross, and urging the fishermen to form themselves into a
co-operative
to defend themselves against the outside buyers who would otherwise surely rob them. The stepped plinth of the cross and the worn grassy plot below it (what would a Mediterranean fishing village make out of this inconsequential triangle loitering down to the quayside between oddly disposed and pleasingly
various
buildings?) are the visitors’ favoured resting-places from which to observe the business of the harbour, as opposed to the
carcair
which, with its row of faces as impassive and weatherbeaten as the gargoyles of a cathedral’s eaves, declares itself quite forbiddingly as the Aran-man’s preserve.

Somehow one returns to this
carcair
as the most abiding
feature
of Cill Rónáin’s harbour-watching face. It is noticeable that very few of the newly arrived coming round from the pier turn up this way; it has the appearance of leading too abruptly into more private parts of the town, and instinctively they wander on to make their way up into the centre of things through the ambling, holidaying space around the cross. But in winter that space is a mere wind-gap to be hurried across, while the
carcair
has gable walls and corners one can peer round while waiting for the steamer or the trawlers to berth, whether or not their coming is of any personal relevance. Its full name is Carcair Joe Andy, from the erstwhile owner of the pub beside it; but in Pat Mullen’s
Hero
Breed
,
which is set in the end of the last century, when a stick-fight breaks out on the quay, men come running from “Andy John’s Hill” to watch it, and this Andy (son of John) would have been the father of Joe Andy. Several Aran placenames go through a
genealogy
of their own in this way, lagging slightly on that of some notable family of the vicinity. Nowadays the younger generation call the hill Carcair Katy Joe after the last of Joe’s daughters to withdraw from the scene.

The taciturn watchers on this hill, the chronically or
temporarily
idle (whether through force of character or feebleness of
circumstance
), seem still to be waiting for the next thing to happen after that stick-fight of Pat Mullen’s, but in the meantime they have made another appearance in literature, in one of the most likeable of books on Aran,
Úll
i
mBarr
an
Ghéagáin
by Risteard de Paor (
Apple
on
the
Treetop
by Richard Power in its later English version). He describes the “lives of quiet desperation” of
lucht
an
charcair
,
the hill-folk, of a generation ago with wry sympathy and perhaps some self-recognition. But he gives them one quiet laugh, to see them through the years:

The names of places have an explosive power, as any researcher of lost space-time knows. An old man leaning on the parapet of the
carcair
tells me that An tSean-chéibh, the old quay, used to be called Céibh na Móna, the quay of the turf—and unwittingly he has effected a mighty demolition. Three-quarters of the old quay has gone, leaving a stub scarcely bigger than the turf-quays of any of the other villages; Cill Rónáin has contracted into a cluster of cottages beside it; and of course since the name of the old quay implies the existence of the new one, whose three hundred yards of stone, steel and concrete constitute the eastern side of the
harbour
basin, that has evaporated too, and the view from the
carcair
is open right across Cill Éinne bay to Straw Island, which has
simultaneously
lost its little white lighthouse. A hooker from Connemara is sailing towards us across this sudden tide of space, and other tan sails are moving slowly against the golden-green sandhills of the farther side of the bay, heading for Cill Éinne.

Cill Éinne was the chief harbour of the islands from the days of the saints, if not before, down to the early nineteenth century. But its approaches are narrow and shallow at low water, and only
limited
developments were ever undertaken there. When the distresses of the mid-nineteenth century at last moved the government to put money into Irish fisheries, which had been left to rot in favour of their Scottish rivals since the Act of Union, the bay was
re-examined
, and it was concluded that a point just east of the old turf-quay of the hamlet of Cill Rónáin was the only place from which a pier could be put out into sufficiently deep water. So the decisions were taken that made this little recess of the bay into the islands’ principal harbour, summoned the coastguard station, the barracks, the shops and churches to take their places on the rise behind it, and left Cill Éinne to sink into the direst poverty.

If, trying to reconstitute the “new” pier stage by stage, one paces it out and pries into the now all-too-obvious disjunctions between the original part and the later extensions, a history of
decline
is revealed—and the older trawler owners overseeing the
repair
of nets or the repainting of boats there will gladly join with one in praising the past and decrying modern slackness. The first hundred and fifty yards of the pier are of blocks that the builders
of the pyramids would not have despised, three-and four-foot cuboids that fit together precisely, taken from a certain stratum of limestone of suitable thickness that outcrops on the other side of the bay, where they were split from the bedrock with lines of wedges, dressed with hammer and cold chisel, hauled to the shore and loaded by a hand-operated winch onto rafts to be floated across.

This great work of the year 1853, the definitive foundation of Cill Rónáins history, cost £2407, of which the landlord, the Reverend John Digby, contributed a third, under the provisions of an Act of 1846. Céibh Ganly it was called, after the master-builder Thomas Ganly who came to Aran to oversee both the pier and the Earragh lighthouse that was being built at the same time, and stayed to marry a widow with a bit of land in Mainistir, and
contributed
to the Aran stock a bold, genial and light-hearted strain which, as will appear, figures repeatedly and for the good in the
island
’s
subsequent history. Thomas Ganly himself is revered by those crusty trawler captains sitting on the stone bollards he
provided
and grumbling about their work-shy crews. Ganly was the man who knew how to make Aran lads work! To which it must be added that necessity was on his side, for his pier was a relief work of the years just after the Famine, and the titans who manhandled these blocks into position so neatly must often have been faint with hunger before they had earned their feed of Indian meal.

After Ganly’s cyclopean masonry and megalithic bollards come about thirty-six yards of concrete pier with iron bollards, the
extension
built by the Congested Districts Board in 1901–1902. The older trawler owners have a certain surly regard for the C.D.B. and for the works of “the British” in general, which, having lived through the bleak years after Independence, they like to contrast with the torpor of their successors. In fact the reign of the C.D.B. was comparatively energetic. By the time of its foundation in 1891, the local sailing fleet was smaller than it had been at the time of the Famine, having shrunk to just two boats of the sort called a
púcán,
a small version of the hooker. Bigger and safer boats were
needed especially for the winter herring season, and the C.D.B. was anxious to explore the possibilities of a spring mackerel
fishery
. In 1892 the Board offered bounties of £40 to fishermen from Arklow to bring their boats and work out of Aran for a season, so that the Aran men could learn from them. Pat Mullen saw the
response
:

A thrice-weekly steamer service had been inaugurated the previous year, which could carry the catch to Galway, and now a telegraph link was established to keep Aran in touch with its markets. The experiment was a success, and the next year the Arklow men came back without the persuasion of a bounty. Thanks to loans from the C.D.B. there were now five Aran vessels to join with them. For a few seasons thereafter the fishing industry prospered, and Cill Rónáin shop-and bar-keepers began to build themselves the two-storied, slate-roofed houses that hide the old thatched village from the harbour.

In 1900 the C.D.B. set up a boat-yard at Frenchmen’s Strand under a young craftsman from Frazerburg in Scotland, James Sim. It built boats of two designs imported into western waters by the Board, the Manx nobbie and the Scottish zulu, both double-ended, two-masted boats rather larger than the local, single-masted hookers. Sim oversaw the production of four nobbies and seven zulus before his early death in 1907. (His grave is in the Protestant churchyard; he died of T.B., I am told.) The yard did not reopen after his death, as it seems his boats had always been
more expensive than Scottish ones, because of the cost of
importing
wood. Hardly a trace of it now remains—just a long step-like foundation to the field-wall by the road, near the graves of the drowned Frenchmen, and a gap in the sea-wall opposite, through which the boats used to be launched.

The rapid growth of the fleet in the 1890s had made Céibh Ganly quite inadequate; not even a small hooker could come alongside it at low water, and as the water beyond the end of it was not much deeper, a C.D.B. report of 1893 had recommended that a new pier be built a little farther to the east. But when, eight years later, the Board set about improving the harbour, the inertia of what already exists decided them on extension rather than
replacement
—and to this day the pier is groping out farther and farther in search of depth for ever-larger boats. However, even as the pier was being extended the fishery entered a troubled phase; the weather was bad and the catch poor in 1902, in 1905 many boats were badly damaged in a storm, by 1908 competition from foreign steam drifters became overwhelming. Loans could not be repaid, and two Aran boats were confiscated.

Then came the years of war-time prosperity, when the foreign trawlers were absent and prices were high. The success story of the Aran Fisheries Co-operative Society has already been told,
apropos
of its birthplace in Cill Mhuirbhigh. The Cill Rónáin
fishermen
soon joined the Society as its prices were so much higher than those the outside buyers were offering. The best memorial of this period is the handsome pier-building of cut stone with which the C.D.B. had by then replaced an earlier single-storied row of stores on Ganly’s pier. This sensible and solid building, with its four arched double doorways into the storage areas for fishing gear, and its long raftered chamber for net-mending above them, is still in use and in good condition—or at least that part of it standing on the sound foundation of Ganly’s masonry, for the
farther
end of it is one the concrete of the C.D.B.’s extension, which has come adrift from the earlier stonework, so that the gable-end of the pier-building is cracked and sagging. There is a hatch in this
gable which belonged to a coffeeshop, something notably lacking on the pier today. In those days, the trawler-men tell me with awe, there were even flush toilets on the pier! (Now we have only a
urinal
, the stink of which appals the four winds that blow through it.) Another addition of that era is the “slip” at the base of the pier, now only used for corralling cattle awaiting shipment on the steamer; this was where the business of filleting and barrelling the spring mackerel catch was done. Girls from Scotland and Donegal came to do this work, passing on their skills to Aran women.

These flush days ended soon after the war. The Society went bust, and with the return of the English and Scottish steam drifters, and then the disruption of markets throughout the years of the “Troubles,” the Aran fisheries almost vanished yet again—though it was left to the Free State government to repossess the boats that could not be paid for, at least one of which lay rotting in Galway harbour for years.

After the Aran fleet had declined to a mere couple of boats by the end of the Twenties, the slow recovery towards today’s fleet of diesel-engined trawlers and half-deckers began. In the Fifties the pier responded by paddling out a bit farther to the south-west, and then turning at right-angles for a similar distance to the south-east. Now, while the C.D.B.’s concrete was inferior to Ganly’s stone, it did at least provide a sound surface for boats to moor against; but the contribution of the Irish Office of Public Works (and here the embittered Aran skipper will hold you with glittering eye and skinny hand while making you lean over the edge to examine its underpinnings) is carried on great drums made by planting circles of girders in the seabed and then filling them with concrete, and its frontage below is of narrow pillars with deep recesses of surging water between them, so that fenders cannot save the smaller boats from being bumped and scraped against the uprights and the continuous rim of the roadway above.

Even this contribution has been outgrown by the fleet now; at weekends the trawlers are moored five deep along it, and the latest acquisitions, the 83-foot
Colmcille
and the
Westward
Isle
which
arrived 
in 1982 (belated last-fruits of the boom of the early Seventies, before the oil crisis, when catches were good and markets high), cannot approach the pier except at high water. For this reason and because of the lack of other facilities many Aran boats are now working out of Ros a’ Mhíl and their owners are building themselves homes on the mainland, deserting the opulent bungalows that sprang up here in the fat years. And of course the steamers from Galway often have to moor in the bay until the rising tide lets them come in to the pier. I remember once arriving here in company with a crowd of tourists who lined the rail as the steamer neared the harbour; progress was halted a yard or two short of our destination, and the captain appeared on the bridge and in his customary polite whisper asked us all to walk across to the other rail, which manoeuvre somehow saved an inch of draught and let the boat sidle up to the pier.

So yet another extension is now (in 1983) in hand, to my eye at least the most unsatisfying of them all. For some time now dozens of concrete boxes, each as big as a small room, have been
complicating
the traffic-jam on the pierhead that greets the arrival of the steamers, and now these boxes are being lowered into the sea and filled with more concrete. An inelegant approach; one hopes that it will be the solution of our problems, but I have met none among the grumblers on the pier who believe so.