Stones of Aran (20 page)
Authors: Tim Robinson
After a glass of “mountain dew punch” O’Donovan went to bed hungry and got a few hours fitful, feverish sleep; then after breakfast he set off for Dún Aonghasa. Wakeman describes O’Donovan’s ecstasy there:
A smart walk brought us in sight of the object of our day’s pilgrimage; and I shall never forget O’Donovan’s burst of enthusiasm when the old palace fortress of the days of Queen Maeve first met our view. He literally shouted with delight, and, after launching his umbrella a marvellous height into the air, threw himself on the ground, and shouted again and again.
They spent the day examining the fort, and walked back to the inn; O’Donovan later wrote that “I never felt so fatigued by any journey, having all day walked about on the solid rock.” The next day they visited Cill Éinne, and were disappointed to find the churches they had read about in Colgan nearly all destroyed. O’Donovan’s settled determination, during field-work, was to keep clear of the gentry; as he said of the Connemara landlords, “Any information they could afford me, would not be worth a pinch of salt. All a waste of time!” But at Cromwell’s fort he bumped into Martin O’Malley of the Hill Farm, “who told us that this fort had been built on the site of the castle of Arkin for the purpose of defending the Dutch fishermen to whom the
English
Government in the reign of William III sold the fisheries on the western coasts of Ireland. I did not feel inclined to believe this to be a fact.” On the other hand he was always anxious to search out the aborigines, as he called them, in whatever locality he was investigating, in order to hear their pronunciation of place-names and collect their folklore. The name of Dún Aonghasa itself was, he found, “now forgotten by all the inhabitants except one old man of the name of Wiggins dwelling at Killeany. He, though not of the primitive Irish race, but of a colony planted here by Cromwell, remembers that the old people were accustomed to call it Dun Innees, which is the true Irish pronunciation according to the Connaught accent. All the other inhabitants style it Dun mor, and in English the Big Fort.” Thus the crucial link with the Celtic past was preserved only by a descendent of the English garrison, an irony that probably appealed to O’Donovan’s humour.
O’Donovan spent just six days in this whirlwind rush from site to site throughout the three islands. Then, leaving Wakeman to sketch all the remains they had identified, he set off in a hired boat for Galway. His description of the voyage, during which they were blown nearly to Casla Bay, tossed for half an hour with the sails down through a fierce squall, and only reached Black Head by seven in the evening after countless tackings, slips in and out of colloquial Irish and even incorporates a parody of the Four Masters’ account of the shipwreck of a famous
stiúrasmann
or navigator of the O’Malleys off Aran in 1560; then:
I got into the forecastle of the boat to avoid the dashing of the waves which annoyed me not being able to bear much wet, but there I got quite sick from the smoak and the water dashing down the scuttle-hole which served for a chimney. When the storm had subsided a little, the sailors reefed and hoisted the sails again and found to their great satisfaction that during the squall the wind had veered about a little to the S. west at seeing which the Stiúrasmann cried out in Irish all is right now, thank God, we shall get to Galway now in a few half hours. In this, however, he was disappointed, for we did not reach Galway till 10 o’clock.
There O’Donovan settled down in Hardiman’s library to write up Aran, and over three weeks produced two hundred and forty pages, including lengthy transcriptions and translations from Roderic O’Flaherty, the
Life
of
St.
Enda,
and other sources. (We nowadays can hardly comprehend the physical labour involved in scholarship before the invention of typewriters and photocopiers.) He begins his “lucubrations” with a line from the medieval poem in which Colm Cille bids farewell to Aran on leaving for Iona, “Ceileabhradh uaim-se d’Árainn,” and he ends them with some impromptu doggerel based on the same poem. I copy this
curiosity
(with an English version kindly done for me by Dr. Máirín Ní Dhonnchadha), as it has not been published before. The pun on
árainn,
meaning “kidney” (in certain sayings it is a seat of the affections, like the heart) is untranslatable. Nor can I explain the reference to “
Áine
álainn
,”
lovely Ann; perhaps there is some
tender
secret here, though it is scarcely conceivable that O’Donovan’s breakneck progress through the islands left time for romance.
Ceileabhradh | A farewell from me to Aran |
’se | And to that which goes through my kidney |
Scaramhuin | To bid farewell to you, oh love of my bosom, |
Uair | For it is you alone I adore. |
| | |
A | Love of my heart and my kidney, |
A | Whom I abandoned in the isle of Aran |
Soraidh | A blessing from me to you each Monday |
Uair | For it is you alone I adore. |
| | |
Go | May they come to you each Saturday, |
De | From Heaven to you in Aran |
Aingil | Great angels singing music |
Ad’ | Bestowing blessings on you, lovely Áine. |
Finally, O’Donovan made a pilgrimage to the ruins of the
house at Park, a few miles west of the city, where Roderic O’
Flaherty
had spent his last years in studious penury, having failed to regain the lands of which his father had been robbed by the Cromwellians. O’Donovan was deeply indebted to O’Flaherty’s
Chorographical
Description
of
West
or
H-Iar
Connaught,
which was written at Park in 1684, apparently in connection with Sir William Petty’s “Down Survey,” a cartographical summation of changes in land-ownership during the Cromwellian interregnum and the Restoration. But Roderic used to be better known as the author of a chronology of Irish history,
Ogygia:
seu
Rerum
Hiber
nicarum
Chronologia,
published in Latin in 1685; its mysterious title alludes to the fact that:
Ireland is justly called Ogygia,
i.e.,
very antient, according to Plutarch, for the Irish date their history from the first oeras of the world: so that in
comparison
with them, the antiquity of all other countries is modern, and
almost
in its infancy!
In his day the penniless O’Flaherty was regarded as inheritor of this antiquity compared to which all others are in their
infancy
, and it was as an awe-struck disciple that O’Donovan came to the tomb of the scholar he calls “the Ogygian”:
I never felt so much moved, as when I sat on the little hill … a low rock covered with mossy sward, commanding a panoramic view of the sea, the three islands of Aran and of a considerable extent of the northern coast of the Co. of Clare, on which the historian is said to have spent a great part of his time in the summer season, studying and enjoying the beauty of the prospect before him….
How genuine O’Donovan’s emotion sounds, after the
vapourings
of his predecessors! And he must have felt he had earned the right to share the Ogygian’s view of the Aran Islands from that hillock.
A web of cultural nationalism was being spun in those middle
decades of the last century; Aran was involved from the start. The career of Samuel Ferguson—a Belfast Protestant, in his early days a supporter of Young Ireland, called to the Dublin bar in 1838, a poet and re-teller of old Irish legends, author of a scholarly work on ogham inscriptions, centre of the most entertaining and
cultured
circle of like-myriad-minded men and women, later Sir Samuel, and President of the Royal Irish Academy—draws
together
many of its threads. In 1852 he visited the three Arans, and found that:
The people themselves, so fine-natured, genial, and intelligent, are more worthy of regard than all their monuments from the fifth century
downwards
…. They are a handsome, courteous, and amiable people. Whatever may be said of the advantages of a mixture of races, I cannot discern
anything
save what makes in favour of these people of the pure ancient stock, when I compare them to the mixed populations of districts on the
mainland
. The most refined gentleman might live among them in familiar
intercourse
, and never be offended by a gross or sordid sentiment…. To see the careful way in which the most has been made of every spot available for the growth of produce, might correct the impression so generally entertained and so studiously encouraged, that the native Irish are a thriftless people. Here, where they are left to themselves, notwithstanding the natural
sterility
of their islands, they are certainly a very superior population—
physically
, morally, and even economically—to those of many of the mixed and planted districts.
A few years later, in 1857, Ferguson and his wife were of the company on that pinnacle of antiquarian passion for Aran I
described
in
Pilgrimage,
the banquet in Dún Aonghasa. On that glorious occasion, it is clear from the official chronicle of the
excursion
, every detail of Aran was bathed in the light of
enthusiasm
. The seventy Members and Associates of the Ethnological Section of the British Association, led by William Wilde of the Royal Irish Academy, had sailed out from Galway on the steam yacht
Vestal
on the previous day, when “the Excursionists were in
the best spirits; and it was evident that a keen anticipation of something of more than ordinary interest had been excited in the breast of all.” Coming ashore at Cill Éinne, they found the
inhabitants
of the village, in their picturesque costumes, had crowded to the shore to see them.
Mr. Wilde’s duties as cicerone now commenced, and piping all hands with a small whistle…. he explained in a few words the origin and character of the old walls of Arkin; and, observing that they were only a Saxon, and comparatively modern innovation, he sprang over a neighbouring wall, and away went the whole bevy of ethnologists, old and young, learned doctors, reverend divines, eloquent men of law, profound science scholars, artists, naturalists, enthusiastic archaeologists, and all, over innumerable walls … surmounting every obstacle, and anon clambering up the sides of the rocky hill, to the utter amazement of the poor natives, who looked like people who had passively abandoned their island to invaders.
The only shadow on this summer’s day of archaeological bliss was the degenerating condition of the monuments; Dr. Petrie
remembered
that the round tower in Cill Éinne had been much higher at the time of his earlier visit, and Mr. Wilde found the stone huts in Dún Dúchathair greatly delapidated since he first saw them ten years previously. On the way from that
dún
to Cill Rónáin they paused at a square, flat-roofed
clochán
while Mr. Wilde addressed them upon the structure and formation of such early buildings; an islander “afforded the foundation of a
facetious
story” by saying he had built it himself as a donkey-shed a year before, but fortunately the Ordnance Survey map made in 1837 and 1838 was on hand to prove the man lied. In general it seems the natives were not treating their heritage with sufficient respect, and a principal theme of the speeches at the banquet next day was the damage being done to the ruins by lads hunting
rabbits
. Nevertheless, as the
Vestal
left Cill Rónáin, firing a last
salute
, the excursionists felt that Mr. Wilde’s stated objective, “to render Aran an object of attraction, and an opposition shop to
Iona,” had been “crowned with a glorious success.” Petrie and some of his eminent colleagues stayed on in Aran, in an ecstasy of enthusiasm, as he later described to a correspondent:
How happily those days were spent you may easily imagine, when I tell you that I had for my companions, my beloved friends, Dr. Stokes, and his son; Frederick Burton, the painter; Samuel Ferguson, the poet and antiquary; and lastly, Eugene Curry, the Irish Shannachee!… The weather was
glorious
; and we scarcely left a church, or grave, or cloghan, a Saint, or a Dun of a Firbolg, in the three islands unvisited or unexamined.
Before long the islands were in a perpetual state of being
investigated
. A natural-historical expedition followed a similar course in 1864; two professors, Melville and Cleland, from Queen’s
College
, Galway, and George Kinahan of the Geological Survey, chartered the Galway Bay steamer
Pilot,
and shepherded a group of students around the island, “shooting and studying some of the rarer wildfowl,” and viewing the antiquities. Once again Dun Aonghasa was the culmination of their visit:
