Stones of Aran (37 page)

Although the Cill Éinne trawler-owners of today probably wish that the angel had cut deeper while he was at it, the results of these initial harbour-works of faith (as described in the mediaeval
Life
of
St.
Enda
)
are very striking at low water, when the sea-way between the level sheets of rock on either side is revealed to be marvellously straight and parallel-sided. Here the underlying
rectangularity
of Aran's rock-structure appears in the guise of miracle. The rising tide obscures all this, and there are five beacons (three fine old masonry beehives and two angular concrete replacements) to define the passage.

This is Aran's first port, Aircín, anglicized to Arkin, Arkyn, Ardkin etcetera, in old documents. Some islanders will tell you that Arkin must have been the Elizabethan settler who built the fort here, which indeed figures as Arkin's Castle in some naïve works on Aran including my own first and premature attempt at a map. But with the dawn of scholarship I had to consign this man Arkin, this notional sea-dog of Merrie England, to the depths of nonentity (“Arkin, art tha sleepin' thar below?”). For although the word has dropped out of Aran Irish,
aircín
is extremely common as a placename element on the Connemara coast where it means simply a place where the sea breaks into the land, a little natural harbour; in fact there is another place called Aircín in Aran too, on the east coast of An tOileán Iarthach.

The history of Aircín begins long before the Elizabethans, for even in the days of saints and angels there was a secular power in Aran, a warrior band occupying it as sword-land. They were of the Eóganachta, a Munster people whose record slowly crystallizes into history out of legend in the early Middle Ages. They rose to control Cashel and the kingship of the province, and by the fifth century had conquered what is now Clare from the rulers of Connacht, and installed there a vassal people later to be known as the Dal gCais. One group of the Eóganachta held Aran at some early period and have left their name upon the western third of the island, Eóghanacht. By the tenth century the Eóganachta were in decline and the Dal gCais began to replace them. Their leader
Brian Bóromha (the famous Brian Boru of nationalistic legend) became first the king of Munster, and then in 1002 the High King of Ireland. For the next hundred years his descendants, the Uí Briain or O'Briens, were powerful contestants of the
high-kingship
, and have dominated the history of Clare ever since. A sept of the Uí Briain held the Aran Islands by the thirteenth
century
; they were known as the Clann Thaidhg, the descendents of Tadhg, who himself was the son of a Munster king and the
great-great
-grandson of Brian Bóromha. Tadhg's own (great-?)
grandson
, Diarmaid Mór, Lord of the Aran Islands, had a stronghold at Tromra on the Clare coast, from whence his ships controlled the approaches to Galway Bay, so that the merchants of the rising town of Galway used to pay him a tribute of twelve tuns of wine a year for keeping these vital waterways free of pirates. The “
portolan
” charts of the Irish coast made and used by Italians at this period show Aran but not Galway, and it is possible that Aircín was then the depot at which foreign traders would discharge their goods, which the O'Briens would convey to the town in their boats.

Galway had been founded in the thirteenth century by
Norman
settlers, the de Burgos, but its destinies later separated from theirs. In 1333 the de Burgos cast off their allegiance to the English Crown, adopted Gaelic ways, and seized the province of
Connacht
. Galway's ties with trade kept it loyal to England and in
enmity
with the surrounding territories of the Burkes (as the de Burgos now called themselves). Aran followed Galway in this, no doubt because it was a link in the chain of trade, and when, as an exception to their settled policy due to some discontent with trade legislations, the Galway merchants briefly joined the rebels in 1388, Aran was implicated too. One of the Galway burgesses who refused to join the rebels went to England and together with some Bristol merchants petitioned the king for permission to mount an expedition against the Aran Islands, which, they claimed, “always lie full of galleys to ensnare, capture and plunder our liege English.” However, both town and islands returned to their allegiance
before the Bristol ships got under way, and nothing came of the scheme.

Presumably the main O'Brien harbour in Aran was at Aircín, but if anything remains of their stronghold it is untraceably buried in the foundations of later fortifications. Nevertheless one can reasonably assume that it included a tower-house similar to their many surviving “castles” in Clare; that is, three or four large rooms one above another, linked by a spiral staircase in a corner, having slit windows and probably a thatched gable roof. There is an O'Brien tower-house which is thought to date from the
fourteenth
century in Inis Oírr, built within the walls of a Celtic
hill-fort
perhaps a thousand years older. In Árainn itself, in the townland of Eoghanacht, there are low ruinous traces of what was evidently a square building the size of a tower-house, known as An Seanchaisleán, the old castle, which some old folk of the
neighbourhood
tell me was called Caisleán Uí Bhriain.

From the end of the fourteenth century to the middle of the sixteenth century successive royal charters had given Galway
increasing
freedom from the interference of the Burkes, and
confirmed
it as a bastion of English influence amid seas of Irishry. One of the provisions of the charter of 1545 was that the Corporation should control the port of Galway and the seaway from thence to Aran. Exemption from tolls for all ships entering this way made Galway, now at the peak of its prosperity, virtually a free port. The Clann Thaidhg O'Briens of Aran were no longer such important allies. Perhaps symptomatically of their decline, the
Annals
of
the
Four
Masters
give us this, the first written record of the placename Aircín, in connection with a deed of treachery and murder, for the year 1565:

These events seem to presage the end of the O'Briens in Aran. Perhaps it is an amplified and distorted echo of the same story that one hears in an Aran tradition of a battle near Port Mhuirbhigh in which the O'Briens are said to have slaughtered each other almost to extinction at a place later to be called Fearann na gCeann, the quarter of the heads, from the number of skulls found in its soil. Whatever the details of these divisions among the O'Briens, there were other interests ready to take
advantage
of them, and the Clann Thaidhg was not to hold Aran for much longer.

In the intensely complex and dynamic politics of the
Elizabethan
age there were three powers, apart from the O'Briens, concerned with the islands: Galway city, the O'Flahertys of Connemara, and the Crown itself. Galway, like other and greater Renaissance cities, was a mercantile oligarchy, and its councils were dominated by the fourteen families later to be known as the Tribes of Galway, among whom the Lynches were pre-eminent. Wealth rather than the sword was Galway's weapon. While the Clann Thaidhg was a sea-power Galway could buy its protection with tuns of wine, and when the Clann Thaidhg fell on hard times Galway could accommodate it with mortgages. By 1575 the Clann was trying to ransom Aran back from James Lynch
FitzAmbrose to whom their leader Murchadh had mortgaged it. They came to town on this business, claiming ancient rights of hospitality, and Galway had to pass a by-law limiting these rights:

One gets the impression, despite their promises of support, that the Galway notables found the Clann Thaidhg somewhat
antiquated
at this date. Within a couple of generations those
notables
would have profited well out of lending money on the security of Aran to the troubled clansmen. It had been agreed within the clan that whatever its chief could ransom back would be his and his heirs forever, but that if the Clann Thaidhg died out the islands would be the Lynches'. Later this was amended to make the Galway Commons and Corporation their heirs in the event of the extinction of the clan. However, the intervention of the O'Flahertys at this juncture made the question academic.

Centuries earlier the O'Flahertys had been lords of lands east of Lough Corrib. Then the Norman de Burgos had driven them westwards into the fastnesses of Connemara, where they had
continued
to rule according to the old Gaelic ways, which were
anathema
to both the modern citizens of Galway and the statesmen of England. To the Galway merchants the O'Flahertys were a wild tribe of pirates preying on their trading vessels, and legend has it that they wrote up over the city's west gate the prayer “From the ferocious O'Flahertys, O Lord deliver us.” English statecraft aimed at neutralizing the O'Flahertys and other chieftains (whether Gaels or Normans gone Gaelic like the Burkes) by
displays
of force and by the bribery of titles. Every now and then a Lord Deputy would come as dangerously far west as Galway and require the chieftains of Connacht to come in and “submit,” and sometimes various chieftains found it prudent to do so and then went back to their mountains and carried on as before. Submission and the acquisition of a spurious title which could be
repudiated
when convenient, a spell of alliance with or rebellion against the English forces, were all so many tactical options in their interminable feuds, for Ireland, as a cause, had yet to be invented. In 1569 Queen Elizabeth had recognized a Murchadh na dTua, Murrough of the battleaxes, as head of the O'Flahertys in place of Dónal Crón, the legitimate chief under Gaelic law, which opened another round of cousinly murders. Murchadh must have seized the Aran Islands soon after this, as it is recorded that the Lynches held the castles of Aircín, Inis Meáin and Inis Oírr from him in 1574. Aran tradition is rather precise, where book-history is vague, about this ousting of the O'Briens by the O'Flahertys. Murchadh and the main body of his followers are said to have landed at Port Mhuirbhigh and driven the O'Briens eastwards, while a smaller party came ashore near Mainistir or Cill Rónáin and attacked them in the rear. The O'Briens were routed and fled to the rocks above Cill Éinne where all but one of them, who
escaped
by boat or hid in a cave, were slaughtered. Their corpses were buried by the shore half-a-mile east of Aircín; the place is
called Poll na Marbh, the hole of the dead, and bones are still turned up there.

In 1581 an “Inquisition” or enquiry into ownership was held on the subject of Aran, and came to the conclusion that the islands belonged neither to the O'Briens nor the O'Flahertys but to the Queen. A veneer of legality was given to this decision by the
argument
that the islands had been monastic lands and were therefore confiscate, the monasteries having been dissolved. So when in the following year Murchadh “submitted” and was granted all his other lands under English law, the Queen was able to give him the “fee-farm” of Aran too. However, three months later she took it back and granted the islands to a Robert Harrison. This is the first English name to appear in the history of Aran's ownership, and the most significant condition of his and subsequent leases was that a force of twenty English foot-soldiers was to be maintained at Aircín. At this time of course England was engaged in the
religious
, political and military conflicts through which Europe was being reshaped, and in the grand strategies of Protestant England against Catholic Spain, Ireland and therefore Galway, and
therefore
Aran, were factors of a certain weight, and even the last was too important to be left any longer in the hands of such creatures of another age as the O'Flahertys. Perhaps the Elizabethan castle was begun at this time, but Harrison can hardly have done much towards it as within two years he had forfeited the lease through failure to pay the rent, and in 1584 the islands were granted to a more considerable personage, Sir Thomas Lestrange, who was one of the commissioners of Connaught under Sir Richard Bingham, and had distinguished himself by a valiant defence of the castle at Loughrea against the Burkes a few years earlier.