Stones of Aran (36 page)

From the blackthorn another length of mossy wall, like a low walkway skimming the oddly-shaped, interlocking plots of meadow, leads southwards to a stile into an enclosure which, were
it not distinguished by the ruined church within it, would be just another meadow full of wild-flowers. The roof of the church is gone, but the walls, built of large, rough blocks of grey limestone, stand raggedly to waist-height in places and over head-height in others, enclosing a space about nine paces long and four across. One stoops to enter, through the simplest possible Gothic
doorway
in the north wall, only two foot four inches wide, each side of the head of which is a single stone shaped to the curve. The window-opening in the east gable is a narrow lancet with an ogee’d head, in fifteenth-century style. Below it is a plain stone altar, and on its left a small projecting shelf or bracket carved from a single stone; window, altar and shelf relate as economically and consequentially as successive gestures in a familiar ceremony. In the north wall, near the altar, is a small, lintelled window. The west gable is badly gapped. Looking through it one sees
a tall standing-stone about a hundred yards away, and almost (but not exactly) in line with it another even taller pillar three hundred yards farther off; the horizon profile of Dún Aonghusa on the heights far beyond is again almost but not quite on the same significant-looking bearing.

Behind the church the land rises in two close-set steps of two or three feet each, so that the next meadow to the south is at
head-height
, and a considerable spring fills a rectangular basin at the foot of the little scarp. This is Tobar an Cheathrair Álainn, the Well of the Four Beauties, the official and renowned one, into which visitors throw coins; only the people of the nearest villages know of the other little wells. The rite of the
turas
here involve walking around this well and the church alternately, saying the rosary. The
leaba
or “bed” of the four beauties adjoins the chapel; it is a low-walled compartment built against the east gable, floored with what look like five gravestones. The islanders regard this as the burial-place of the four saints, and up to a few decades ago men used to sleep in it to obtain a blessing before going on a journey or in thanks for recovery from illness; the blacksmith of Fearann an Choirce tells me that he and his brothers Patrick and Colman
(“Tiger”) King used to sleep here now and again, not for any particular reason but, as it were, as a general spiritual
prophylactic
. But when O’Donovan visited in 1839 he was told that four flat stones side by side in a field just east of the nearer pillar-stone mark the saints’ graves. These stones are still there, and they look like early Christian graves, but nowadays they are not associated with the four beauties. Micilín Sarah, alchemist and antiquary, did a bit of “rooting” there once, and found, according to one
account
, nothing, and according to another, the bones of a
seven-foot
-tall German teacher from the monastery of the four beauties! The pillar stone itself is a single “flag” of limestone, about nine feet high and two across. The farther one, which because of the number of intervening field walls is more easily visited from a
róidín
in Fearann an Choirce than from the church, is even more impressive, being over eleven feet high. They are called Na Spéicí, the spikes, and there is a tradition that the mighty men of old who set them up used to play hurley between them; however, their near-alignment with the church makes it likely that they had some Christian significance. O’Donovan, whose sense of humour was itself rather megalithic, wanted his assistant William Wakeman to inscribe one of them with a lengthy rigmarole in Old Irish and Latin exhorting one to pray for Seaghán Mac Emoind óig mic sen Emoind, Mic Uilliam, Mic Chonchobhair, Mic Emoind Uí Donnabháin—that is, O’Donovan himself. Wakeman excused himself from the task because of the
continuous
rain during his visit, but in his sketch of the eastern
pillar-stone
accompanying the Ordnance Survey Letters, part of this phantom inscription can be seen.

In O’Donnell’s
Life
of
St.
Colm
Cille
an instance of miraculous knowledge is recounted:

The location of this tomb is not stated, but an island tradition puts it a few paces west of the church of the four beauties, where there are some stones that look like the foundations of a small building. Seán Gillan, the last of the story-tellers of Aran, gave me a very circumstantial account of its discovery, which perhaps owes something to the reports of Micilín Sarah’s archaeology. If I understood his Fearann an Choirce Irish correctly, it seems that so many monks came to St. Enda’s monastery that they were starving, for whenever one of them celebrated Mass they all had to fast for twenty-four hours. So, to give them “fair play,” Enda set out with them to find a new site for a monastery, and they came to this spot at Corrúch. Enda’s only reservation about the place was this grave close by, for he didn’t know whether a pagan or a Catholic was buried in it. But Colm Cille told him that it was
indeed a Catholic, in fact a priest, and that he was seven feet tall and had been there for 350 years, and that he was so-and-so the Abbot of Jerusalem. “How would you know that?” asked Enda, “I’m older than you and I don’t know that!” “Well if you don’t believe me,” said Colm, “write to the Pope and ask him the name of the Abbot of Jerusalem 350 years ago, and you’ll see that I’m right.” So they wrote, and a year later they got a reply, and Colm Cille was proved right.

No angelic witness here, just common-sense second sight, and the sort of postal service you’d expect in an out-of-the way corner of Christendom. In fact the legendary associations of this place, which in the Middle Ages were evidently widespread, have long folded in their wings and nestled down in comfort. Fursu’s
feverish
vision, in which the world appears below him as a dark valley between two fires, and Brendan’s wanderings on fantastic oceans, both have come to earth in this mild hollow, landlocked away from too much sea or sky. Pilgrims no longer walk from Sligo for the water of the Well of the Four Beauties, nor is it carried by itinerant holy men through the glens of Wicklow as in
Synge’s play. Similarly the various sorts of beauty associated with this site have settled over the centuries into something native and villagey; instead of the beauty of the lustful female that the medieval
misogynists
feared as the snares of Hell, or the beauty of the saint that both reveals his purity to the world and provokes danger to his soul, we have old blind Martin, Synge’s guide and creation, thinking more than he should about the young girls. Nowadays, the monks long gone, the world is as much at home in the church as is
the church in the world; the sun and rain bring out the
wild-flowers
within the shelter of its walls perhaps even earlier than those outside. The wrens creeping like mice in the crevices of the field-walls around it point out the domestic scale of the church and its surroundings; all that I have described, apart from the
far-off
pillar-stones, can be walked round in a few minutes. Beauty has gathered like moss, quietly subsuming the ruins of exorbitant spirituality and extravagant legend.

And yet the quietude of this beauty gives it an edge of
poignancy
; one holds one’s breath for its life. I wrote that there are wild-flowers within the walls; that is no longer so, and the interior is floored in crunchy gravel. The Office of Public Works has taken the site into its well-meaning but clumsy hands, and placed a cattle-grid before the door, so that one can no longer enter
without
a clatter. Previously, I suppose, the cattle were kept out by a few twigs of thorn, or if they did get in they kept the grass from growing too rank, and nobody minded the mess. But that will not do, now that hundreds of visitors come to see what they have read of in Synge, in my own maps, in countless touristic handouts. Whenever I think of revisiting the church, I fear to find a tarmacadamed path driven through the little fields, and the stiles replaced by iron gates, for the rough little old ways I have
described
will not bear the traffic of today. We are too many; what is to be done? This quarter-acre of stones is as vulnerable as a
porcelain
cup left out on the road. Beauty flirts recklessly with
destruction
; even a book like this can only risk an attempt at beauty because it can be wrapped away like a cup in the ruggy stuff of fact and learned reference. But the book is perhaps the only
sanctuary
. All I can do is to point out what is there, and in so doing preserve an image of it.

Gráinne, the daughter of King Cormac Mac Art, was to marry Fionn Mac Cumhaill, chief of the king's warrior-band, the
Fianna
. But during the feast celebrating her arrival at Tara she set her eyes on one of Fionn's followers. “Who is that sweet-voiced, freckled man with the berry-black curls and the glowing cheeks sitting next to Oisín?” she said to her neighbour at the table. “That is Diarmaid ua Duibhne, the greatest lover of women in the whole world,” she was told. So Gráinne filled a drinking-cup
and had her handmaiden pass it to Fionn and others of the
heroes
, and a deep sleep fell on them. Then she went and sat
between
Oisín and Diarmaid, and said, “I wonder that Fionn, old enough to be my father, should ask a woman like me to be his wife; it would be fitter for me to get a man of my own sort.” “Don't say that, Gráinne,” said Oisín; “If Fionn heard you he wouldn't have you, nor would he let anyone else have you.” “Would you be my protector, Oisín?” asked Gráinne. Oisín
answered
, “I would not. A woman who would lie with Fionn, I wouldn't bother with.” “Would you be my protector, Diarmaid?” asked Grainne. “I would not,” answered Diarmaid; “I would have nothing to do with a woman who would lie with Fionn and
Oisín
.” “Well,” said she, “I put a
geis
(a magical obligation) on you, that unless you take me with you out of this house tonight before Fionn wakes, you will not be a true hero.” Then Gráinne went away, and Diarmaid said to Oisín, “What shall I do about this
geis
that's put on me?” “You are not responsible for the
geis
,”
said Oscar, “and I say you should follow Gráinne. But beware of Fionn's anger.”

So Diarmaid parted with his comrades, and many tears were shed. To Gráinne he said, “Ours is a bad journey. It would be
better
for you to be with Fionn than with me, and I do not know where in Ireland I will take you.” “I will not part from you until death parts me from you,” said she. “Well, walk on then,” he
answered
.

They stole Gráinne's father's chariot and two horses, and fled to Athlone on the Shannon; there they left the chariot in the ford and a horse on either bank, and they walked a mile westwards in the current, and stepped ashore on the Connacht side. That night Diarmaid felled the heart of an oak-wood and built a rampart with seven doors out of the timber, and made a bed of reeds for Gráinne in the middle, and watched over her as she slept. But Fionn's trackers soon found them, and his warriors surrounded their fort. Diarmaid came out in sight of them and kissed Gráinne
three times to make Fionn jealous. Then Diarmaid's foster-father, the god Aonghas, came with the speed of the wind from Newgrange, and carried Gráinne to safety in his cloak, but
Diarmaid
remained to face his destiny. He went from door to door of the fort, asking who was outside. At each door one of his old comrades named himself and promised that Diarmaid would not be harmed if he came out that way, but because Diarmaid did not wish to draw Fionn's anger on any of them he did not come out until he found the door at which Fionn was waiting to kill him. That door he opened, and pole-vaulted on his spear over the heads of Fionn and his men, and put his shield on his back and ran to where Gráinne was hidden. And Gráinne's heart nearly leapt out of her mouth with joy when she saw him.

The next morning Aonghas advised Diarmaid how to avoid capture. “Do not climb into any tree with a single trunk or go into any cave with a single entrance or land on any island with a single harbour. Wherever you cook, do not eat there. Wherever you eat, do not sleep there. And wherever you lie down at night, do not be there in the morning.” In that manner the lovers
travelled
all over Ireland, pursued by Fionn, and eventually they came to Aran. There, as at all their resting-places, they made a bed out of huge slabs of stone; Diarmaid carrried the two side-stones
under
his oxters, and Gráinne brought up the cap-stone in her apron. And Gráinne watched over Diarmaid as he slept:

Before dawn they were on the move again, hunted on towards the rest of their story: long wanderings and many escapes, Fionn's eventual resignation to his loss, the birth of their children,
Diarmaid's
death when Fionn delayed in bringing him a healing drink of water, and Gráinne's eventual marriage with Fionn, at which
the Fianna mocked them both and she hung her head in shame. The spirit of the warrior band was broken by this adventure.
Oisín
went off with his own love to the Land of Youth, and when he returned he found that the Fianna were extinct and a dwarfish race had inherited the earth. He met St. Patrick and told him all the deeds of his lost companions. That is how we know of the Hunting of Diarmaid and Gráinne.

In fact the legend does not state that the runaways came to Aran, but on the shoulder of the plateau above Corrúch is an ancient compilation of stone called Leaba Dhiarmada is Ghráinne, the Bed of Diarmaid and Gráinne. There are hundreds of such “beds” in Ireland; some are just curious formations of boulders thrown together by nature, but most, like this one, are the ruins of
megalithic
tombs. The story that seemed to account for these enigmatic structures is still well known, and some Araners have not
relinquished
belief in Diarmaid and Gráinne; one old man wanted me to tell him how they travelled to the island. (The folksy details of how the gigantic couple collected huge slabs of stone to make their beds, that I have inserted into the medieval tale, I heard from a farmer in the Burren who had such a tomb on his land.)

Fionn, Diarmaid, Gráinne and the rest were all Celtic deities once, until rawly Christianized monks fresh out of the woods of paganism recast their myths as hero-tales, and they acquired the ambiguous passions and distressed loyalties that make them not much more or less incomprehensible than ourselves. Compared to such storm-driven wraiths, the solid beings who built tombs like the one above Corrúch are difficult to grasp. But the flown chrysalis of Stone-Age humanity is here on the hilltop; we can at least look into it, and speculate.

The easiest ascent to the tomb is by the boreen running up past the Church of the Four Beauties. The slope of fields above the church is known as Na Clocháin from the ruined stone huts there; I had better glance at them in passing as I shall not return this way. On the west of the path is Clochán an Phúca, the hut of
the púca, which used to be a mass of fallen stone, confused but with potential, until in the 'seventies the Office of Public Works set its local employees, unsupervized, to tidying it up, which they did with a will. The “linders” or beam-like stones that had formed its roof were too heavy to lift out, so they sledge-hammered them; traces of a partition-wall dividing its interior into two rooms (a rather unusual feature recorded in a plan made for the Ordnance Survey in 1840) were swept away, and all the bits and pieces
arranged
neatly around the perimeter, making the exterior walls an impressive eight feet thick instead of about three. One field away to the north-west of this
clochán
is a roofless rectangular ruin which has also been eviscerated by its conservators. Two chunks of carved stone lying on one of its walls can be fitted together to make the top of a Gothic window with two small trefoil-headed lights, which suggested to John Goulden that this building was perhaps Cill na Manach, the “lost church of Aran” so many
antiquarians
have tried to locate. On the other side of the track and above a further little scarp of the hillside is some utterly
confounded
structure; it looks as if a small roundish field has been filled wall-high with stones. A local man who did some “rooting” here tells me he saw plastered masonry and windows with lintels down among the wreckage. Fr. Killeen thought this was “a dun destroyed in an act of war,” but the Rev. Kilbride regarded it as “a
coenobium
of a colony of monks.” Indeed these and a few other even obscurer ruins of the area may well have been associated with the ecclesiastical settlement below.

A few dozen yards beyond the point at which the boreen levels out onto the plateau of Na Craga there is a narrow turning to the west, a
róidín
running between high ivy-clad walls, of which those on the right are supposed to be part of “a cashel of about sixty feet in diameter” recorded by Kilbride in the 1860s—but I cannot make out anything of it now. This tiny twisty way is called Bóithrín an Dúin Bhig, the boreen of the little fort, not from this
dún
but from another quite substantial one on the north-west shoulder of the plateau, a few hundred yards farther on. But
before
one comes to that, the jutting uprights of the megalithic tomb appear against the sky, on a knoll in a field to the right. One's first impression is of something empty, skull-like, staring westwards.

On nearer approach, it looks like a small flat-roofed hut built out of rectangular slabs of limestone—the sort of slabs that are to be had in plenty here, as a glance around the half-barren field confirms. Four slabs set on edge make two side-walls three to four feet high, another slab closes the eastern end, the roof is of three slabs laid across, the western end is open. Along the south side and close to it, five pillar-like stones up to five feet high form an outer wall. I notice that nearly all the main slabs have a
distinctive
veneer of another mineral on one face—chert, perhaps; I
forgot
to bring home a sample—indicating that they were all levered out of the same stratum, which an exploration of the immediate neighbourhood would probably identify. The opening is three foot four inches high and four foot six wide; one could creep into it and lie down, for the compartment is about eight feet long. At the other end it is only two foot six high and two foot nine wide. Originally the entrance would have been closed with another flagstone and the whole thing buried in a cairn of stones and earth; in fact there are traces of a mound on the south of the tomb. One feels that the open, larger, end is the front. Thus the tomb looks westwards across lowlands and three far-separated villages, to the opposite hillside and Dún Aonghasa.

There has never been an archaeological investigation of this tomb, though its structure was carefully recorded in the 1960s by Dr. Ruaidhrí de Valera and Seán Ó Nualláin and it figures as no. 21 in Vol. III of their monumental
Survey
of
the
Megalithic
Tombs
of
Ireland.
Indeed it is possible that excavation would reveal little or nothing about the people who built it or their reasons for doing so. J.T. O'Flaherty in the 1830s would have identified this
table-like
construction as a Druidical altar; the Rev. Kilbride in the 1860s saw it as what he called a
ligeatreabh
or “pillar-house.” In calling it a tomb I am already assimilating it to concepts that have
been evolved out of generations of consideration of hundreds of similar structures elsewhere in Ireland and further afield. To
approach
these particular stones with understanding one has first to step back, through generalization and classification.

In the first volume of their great work de Valera and Ó
Nualláin
proposed a division of Irish megalithic tombs into four
categories
, which have proved sturdy enough to withstand some recent battering. Passage Graves, of which the vast tumulus of
Newgrange
in the Boyne valley is the best-known example, consist of a passage leading into a burial chamber, the whole usually buried in a round mound. Portal Dolmens are the dolmens of romantic Ireland, with a single chamber formed of a cap-stone—sometimes a huge boulder—perched on three or more uprights, of which the front pair, the portals, are the tallest. Court Cairns have one or more suites or “galleries” each of two or more chambers, covered by a long cairn and entered from one or more open courtyards defined by upright stones. And the Wedge-shaped Gallery Graves have one main chamber, sometimes with a small portico or
anti-chamber
and a small closed rear chamber, and usually decreasing in height and width from front to rear. Nowadays archaeologists refer to these classes as passage, portal, court, and wedge tombs.