Stones of Aran (15 page)

On my way back I paused to look at the turlough again. A meaningless marshy spot with a few spires of purple loosestrife, between a tumbled, overgrown wall and the path climbing the scarp like a little staircase of worn treads. Watching it, watching nothing happen there, I had an intense premonition that I would never see this place again. I, who do not believe in ghosts even for an instant, heard the footfalls of my own ghost in my tired heart that afternoon. Time has told the falsity of this presentiment; I have revisited the spot and hope to do so again (if only to prove something). But I returned rather shaken from my walk and mental detour, to the task of transcribing epitaphs in order to publish them in a book, with my name on the front and my brief biography on the back asking posterity to wrap me in its shadows.

An Screigín is the name of the scraggy western end of Cill Éinne territory where the villagers had their holdings, in the days when
the Hill Farm monopolized the better land to the east; the name conveys nothing but stoniness. It is served by a wide, rough side-road, Bóthar an Screigín, which branches off the main road at the top of the “big slope,” An Charcair Mhór, and makes a wide turn to the west and then the south, almost to the brink of the Atlantic cliffs. In summer a few tourists walk along it or even try to cycle, following the directions of a finger-post to the promontory fort of Dún Dúchathair, which is not far from its termination. Apart from this road An Screigín is an almost trackless tangle of
field-walls.
I remember, before my map of the island was published, seeing a knot of bemused Japanese there, who hailed me plaintively but politely across several intervening walls: “We would like to see something, if there is anything to be seen!” That what was to be seen was exactly this grudging parcelling-out of barrenness, was more than I could explain; I put them back on the way to the grand spectacle of the fort. In other seasons only a few farmers visiting their cattle use the road. I was leaning over the roadside wall talking to a man in a potato-field once, when a stoat which must have been interrupted in the kill by my approach scampered up the road and, when we did not move, applied itself to the neck of a rabbit I had not noticed, lying about ten yards away. Occasionally one sees a pair of goats, miserably shackled together by the necks to restrict their wanderings, dragging each other hither and thither. This is not generous land.

The road for most of its length keeps within a hundred yards or so of the top of an arc of low cliffs forming the edge of An Screigín. This rim is even barer than the rest of the quarter; it is divided by walls into a number of areas that one would call fields if they had grass in them but are in fact sheeted with rock; only in the occasional hollow or the fissures between the broad level clints are there some rough tangly herbs. In Aran-English such a barren enclosure is called a “creig,” from the Irish
creig
; I have here and there translated this in place-names as “crag.” Immediately below the scarp are some enviably green meadows belonging to the Cill Rónáin people, and a sheet of fresh water which appears
after rainy weather, five or six acres of it, and disappears again. Here the low land around the bay to the north gathers itself into a valley, and then contracts further into a ravine that almost notches through to the south coast, where the islanders prophecy the ocean will break in one day and divide the island. An open tract of bare pavement on the rim of An Screigín provides a natural esplanade for gulls to strut and preen on after splashing for eels in the turlough below; it is called Creig na bhFaoileán, the crag of the gulls. If they are particularly clamorous there in the evening, it is a sign that there will be rain within three days, I am told. (Some island forecasters provide themselves with an even more generous margin of error than these three days, by adding, “… or if it doesn’t rain here, it will somewhere else.”) This creig has some fine sheets of unblemished rock, and one of these blanks bears a memorial to a young Galway fisherman, T.B. Barrett, lost at sea in 1966. A fishing-instructor, Captain Woolley, punched it out, with shipshape decorations of reef-knots and of two hands holding a heart, the “Claddagh ring” emblem of Galway’s ancient fishing quarter. The inscription tells us that his dead comrade was “a fine seaman, a better friend.” The older generation of Aran skippers, who learned their craft from Captain Woolley, remember him sitting out here for days, tapping this measured judgement into place.

An Turlach Mór, the big seasonal lake on the Cill Rónáin land, is such rich and complex terrain, and in such absolute contrast to the crags above it, that it is best approached on its own terms, as it were, after having returned to the main road and gone a little further north around the curve of the bay towards Cill Rónáin village. Here another side-road sets off westward through fields in which a few bungalows have been built over the last few years, making the area almost a suburb of the island capital. This is Bóthar an “Phump”—the English word being subjected to Irish grammatical rule—from the old drinking-water pump at its beginning. It is
also known as the Committee Road (with the stress on the last syllable of the long word), because it was originally
a famine-relief work of the 1880s carried out under the auspices of a local charitable committee (the misdeeds of which I shall be investigating later on), and I am told that the reason the walls defining it on either side are lower than the norm is that they were built by women. Much further west it becomes Bóthar na gCrag, the road of the crags, and climbs over the central heights of the island to Gort na gCapall. But the turning to the turlough is only a quarter of a mile down it from the main road. This grassy track (the third on the left), Róidín an Turlaigh, is a primrose way in early spring, and in May the scent of hawthorn blossom makes it as sweet as an old ballad. It also affords me an occasion of pedantry, that sentimental attachment to little things. The genitive form in this toponym, Róidín an Turlaigh, shows that the final syllable of
turlach
is not, as the OED states and as the anglicization “turlough” implies, the word
loch
(genitive
locha),
a lake or lough, but is in fact a mere postfix of place; thus
turlach,
from
tur,
dry, could be explicated as “a place that dries up.”

Turloughs (except for one example recently discovered in England) are only known from the limestone karst areas of western Ireland, which is why the Hiberno-English term has been adopted into the polyglot jargon of geology. They form in enclosed depressions and are filled and emptied not by streams but from below, through openings in their beds which act alternately as springs and swallow-holes, as the general level of ground-water held in the fissures of the limestone rises or falls. In Aran the joints in the limestone have been opened by solution only down to a depth of twenty or thirty feet, below which they are tight, with the result that the water contained in them is draped like a mantle over the island’s core of unfissured rock. The thickness of this mantle varies in average with the seasons, and fluctuates with every shower of rain, and wherever and whenever it rises above ground-level in the bottom of a hollow, a marsh or pond or lake appears. In An Turlach Mór, this hydrology works like a dream: one day you see cattle grazing in a meadow; the next, when you pass, water lies there like a drawn blade.

The repeated comings and goings of a turlough make its vegetation very different, in organization if not in species-lists, from that of a normal marsh or lakeshore. Praeger’s classic study of the turloughs of the Gort lowlands and the east of the Burren describes the stratified arrangement of their flora, from the rare “turlough violet” found in the deeper parts of the basin and which spends most of the year underwater, to the bushes around the rim which can take a certain frequency of flooding, and the mosses further up that need an occasional watering but less than what would kill off the bushes. In a large bowl-shaped turlough such as the one that gives its name to the village of Turlough in the Burren, the upper and lower limits of the range of each species are visibly graspable contour lines, but An Turlach Mór has a very flat bottom and is bounded by sharply rising scarps, and so one has to discover its zonation by treading to and fro across the quaggy sward and parting the wattled stems and branches of shrubs climbing through each other up to its rocky rims.

If the turlough is at its fullest, the boreen to it runs straight into the waters; if the level is low, the path opens out into a soft water-meadow intersected by meandering channels, from which often a hundred gulls will rise on your approach. During long dry spells the water shrinks back into a few muddy hollows; I once found P.J. Mullen with his ear to one of these, listening to a peculiar snorting which, he said, was eels gasping for breath. A few mearing-stones mark the division of this lush grazing between seven Cill Rónáin farmers. The field-wall along the northern side of the turlough is clad in a blackish moss; Praeger gives me its lovely name,
Cinclidotus
fontinaloides,
and notes that it is diagnostic of turlough conditions, marking the level of a certain low frequency of flooding. Along the foot of the low cliffs forming the eastern and western rims of the turlough, are groves of purple loosestrife and meadow-sweet, a lovely pairing characteristic of the West’s damp marginal places. On the valley floor, tall meadow buttercups occupy little hummocks that are slightly drier than the rest, which is densely carpeted with another buttercup, the
lesser spearwort, and wet tangles of bogbean, the tiny white marsh bedstraw, lady’s smock and marsh pennywort. The water speedwell roots in the muddy bottoms of little holes a foot or so below ground-level.

The cliffs converge towards the south, where the valley becomes a tapering glen rising to a cleft in the skyline not far short of the south coast. Honeysuckle and dog-roses clamber among the hawthorn, buckthorn, spindletree and hazel scrub on the cliff-faces, sheltering patches of sun-warmed rock decked with bloody cranesbill, wild valerian and tufted vetch. The ground rises very slightly southwards, and about four hundred yards up the valley a field-wall across it divides the main space of the turlough from a pasture pungently scented by watermint, where marsh orchids stretch up to the light through a dense carpet of silverweed. Then come a few little fields of drier grassland curving up at either side into brambly slopes, the home of countless rabbits; on one’s entry here, clouds of the every-summer’s-day butterflies—meadow-browns, walls, ringlets, large heaths, common blues—rise out of the bushes and pursue each other in mad whirls without distinction of size or colour. Beyond, the narrowing glen is densely thicketed and the cliffs are taller, with herons’ nests in their heavy canopies of ivy.

The difficulty of experiencing such a place, rich in vivid and fascinating detail, is that it demands a list-making, note-taking sort of consciousness (and I have mentioned only a few names of the more striking plants, leaving out the sedges, horsetails, water-weeds and dozens of flowers of more covert beauty and obscure individuation that the botanist will be searching for among them), so that the crucial moment at which it becomes one place may be crowded out of recollection; in fact the clamorous, colourful, press of sense-data can be so close-packed as to stifle that moment in the seed. It has been important to me, therefore, to linger in such places until their fragments reform into a whole like a reflection in a disturbed pool: here at the turlough, to lie in the lap of one of those last fields, the sun in
my lap like a warm
puppy, until the anxious herons that have flown up to perch on the lip of the terrace above forget about me and drift back one by one to their nests and young. Sometimes it is then possible for the quietened mind to smooth out such scrappy notes, and fit them together into the page from which they were torn. Those butterflies, though, that a whim of the breeze takes from one field to another or away across the crags: I am not the most firmly located of humans, but that absolute place-freedom perturbs me, to a degree I find difficult to understand. And when I see butterfly-behaviour that contradicts the stereotype, I am obscurely reassured: a dappled pair of wall butterflies at rest, facing one another, antennae touching, in deep mutual communion, one of them slightly vibrating its wings; or a big dark red admiral that suns itself on a stone, then darts off in a jagged circuit of the whole turlough, and returns to exactly the same spot, again and again. Sunning myself in such a field, by degrees I locate and concentrate myself; the herons even stop raising their periscope heads out of their nests to eye me; there is such a place as “here.” And then the “here” blurs, and flows, and yawns: I am in An Turlach Mór, Árainn, Ireland, Europe, the World (as one used to continue, with childish profundity), the Solar System, the Galaxy, the Universe, the …

One also has to wake out of the topographical drowse sooner or later, and its after-effect is to make the choice of direction almost impossibly arbitrary. There is a tempting little path branching south from the end of Róidín an Turlaigh. Just three feet wide between waist-high walls, and full of deep grass and arching brambles one has to lift aside individually, it has the air of leading to a secret. After about fifty paces it reaches the foot of a cliff; the steps it takes to the top are not obvious at first glance, but a little casting around finds them out. They seem to propose that, if you knew where you were going, this would be a useful shortcut. Above is a flat crag, plinth to a hillside rising like a shallow ruined ziggurat beyond. And here at my feet is written “… a good seaman, 
a better friend.” Repetition, circularity, error!—this is An Screigín again, from another angle.

However, having misled myself this far, I might as well cross the crag, climb the wall into Bóthar an Screigín, and follow it southwards, uphill, and then scramble across the head of the ravine south of the turlough. Here, with shocking suddenness, one is at the brink, and the vastness of the ocean rushes to one’s feet. Only a crack in the ground, a long step, separates the land from the top of a hundred-foot high rock-stack, An Aill Bhriste, the broken cliff, still leaning in arrested collapse as it was when I wrote about it ten years ago. Evidently the same major joints running across the island that guided the formation of the ravine also define this projecting buttress of the cliffs. Nearby to the west must be Poll Talún, the hole in the ground that opens like a skylight into the roof of a huge undercutting of the cliff, giving a dizzy vertical view of breakers a hundred feet below. In
Pilgrim
age
I gave the legend of the fox that had its lair on a ledge of this cavern’s roof, which it reached by swinging by its jaws from a fern growing in the hole. Now I would like to revisit the place and add a few details to the story. According to an old Cois Fharraige story-teller recorded in the 1920s, this fox was brought across from Connemara. Some boatmen who were loading turf at Barr Roisín in Ros an Mhíl saw the fox lying on a wall, apparently dead, and they threw it in on the turf, intending to show it to any Aran fishermen they might meet—sheer malevolence, this, for it is
unlucky to see a fox when going fishing; an old curse says: