Stones of Aran (40 page)

Another people held their revels just down the road. A green patch, thirty paces by twenty, three days’ grazing for Mícheál’s cow, has been walled off from the few hundred yards of rough ground between the schools and the former teacher’s residence. Its perimeter is thickly lined within by blackberry bushes which reduce its open area to that of a good-sized room—a ballroom, perhaps, for this is Móinín an Damhsa, the little meadow of the dancing. I used to wonder if it was the meadow itself which was
supposed by this name to dance, for its surface is just two or three smoothly swelling waves of grass and daisies. When Mícheál’s elder brother Patrick, who used to revisit the island occasionally, told me the meadow was so named because someone once saw fairies dancing in it, Mícheál looked displeased, and I half suspected Patrick of testing my credulity. But recently I came across the
following
, in
The
Fairy
Faith
in
Celtic
Countries
by Evans Wentz, published in 1911:

Evans Wentz was a young American anthropologist studying under the Celticist Sir John Rhys at Oxford. He brought to bear on “Old Patsy” and a hundred other “witnesses” in Ireland,
Scotland
, Wales and Brittany, a theory synthesized out of William James’s religious psychology, Yeats’s occultism, and the
investigations
of the Society for Psychical Research. His conclusion was
that, after Patsy’s and his compeers’ tales have been sifted of all “ethnological, anthropomorphic, naturalistic, or sociological influences on the Celtic mind,” there remains a residue of the veridical and unexplained, “the x or unknown quantity in the Fairy-Faith.” Fairies, it seems, are discarnate consciousnesses,
instances
of the common “protoplasmic background of all religions, philosophies, or systems of mystical thought yet evolved on this planet,” and that the Celtic Otherworld, like the classical Hades, is but the lower arc of the soul’s cyclical progress from birth to rebirth. All this is very wonderful, but to me not as wonderful as the fact that when, years after leaving Aran, I opened Evans Wentz’s crabbed tome for the first time, out jumped Móinín an Damhsa, my favourite blackberry spot, as from a pop-up book, complete with a pair of small tortoiseshell butterflies, the smell of a cow-pat, and the ringing of stone as Mícheál “knocks the gap” to let his pony in to graze.

Immediately beyond Móinín an Damhsa is the Residence, as it is still called. The little house is almost hidden by the walls of its garden, which have empty window-frames in them here and there. These are thick, double walls, eight to ten feet high in most places, and on the south-western, windward, side of the house, eighteen feet high; it is said that Moloney paid Joeen na gCloch thirty shillings for building them. A rusty old farmyard gate of tubular iron lets one look into the garden from the road. All around it, Moloney’s shrubs—laburnums and lilacs, a richly scented
Escallonia,
some evergreens I looked up once,
Griselinia littoralis, Pittosporum crassifolium
and
Pittosporum tenuifolium
—have grown up to the tops of the walls and been beveled off by the wind. The rest is a little hayfield now, with a few Jerusalem
anemones
and montbretias, relics from the former tenants’ gardening. At the farther end of the grass-invaded garden path a cypress, a contorted mass of thunder-dark green, leans across the faded primrose-yellow façade as if to tap on the door. There is a sash window on either side of the door and two small ones above it, drawn together under a central gable. The house is one of those
with a distinct face, in this case a simple and affectionate one like that of a domestic pet. I pause at the gate, my hand on the bolt. Residence. Domicile. Sanctuary. Termon. Temenos. Nemeton….

This is the last of the village proper; from here the road drops steeply down a scarp that marks an ancient mythological boundary between east and west, and the scatter of houses beyond are distinguished (by those who like distinctions) as the hamlet of Creig na Córach, the crag of the just division. But first there is more to be said about the fields of Fearann an Choirce, and then I must call in on some of the other houses, those inhabited by rain and nettles as well as those with people in them, before entering this Residence, that seems to stand like a
dún
against, or in
advance
of, a further degree of westernness.

Potatoes left uneaten in dark outhouses over winter open their eyes towards the spring, and put forth pallid tubes of growth. If these sprouting potatoes are then put into the earth they give rise to new plants, or rather clones of the old ones. But if this is
repeated
over two or three years the stock becomes less productive, as if an accumulating tiredness blurs the genetic message. So it is best to start afresh each year with seed-potatoes provided by the Department of Agriculture and obtained by them
ex
nihilo
in some way we in Aran have not thought of enquiring into. The first I knew of this yearly distribution of seed-potatoes was from printed notices that appeared overnight pinned to the doors of ruins by the roadside and other prominent places; one was tied to the orange-brown sphere of a big iron buoy rusting in the grass near the beach. I puzzled out the unfamiliar Irish of bureaucracy: each holding of not more than £15 rateable value is entitled to a hundredweight of oats or two hundredweight of seed-potatoes at a reduced price, preference being given to the smaller holdings.
The January wind soon tore down these annunciations, but the process of the year had been initiated.

Potato-planting in Aran is supposed to be completed before the cuckoo calls, and the man who doesn’t get his spuds in early enough is derided as a cuckoo-farmer. There is a logic in timing things thus, as a cold spring should delay both the start of
vegetable
growth and the migrations of birds, but it is a back-to-front logic since the bird gives its timekeeping cry after the event.
People
do not take the cuckoo as seriously nowadays as they used to. A story is told in Inis Oírr of a joker who saw his neighbour cutting up seed-potatoes in preparation for planting, climbed onto the walls of the cashel overlooking the village and imitated the cuckoo; the man thus convicted of laziness was so disgusted he abandoned his work and fed the potatoes to his hens. I
determined
that, before the cuckoo called, I would learn how to set a potato-garden, a skill as definitive of a true islandman as the
rowing
of a currach. Meeting an elderly man I knew having his horse shod at the forge, the first step in the process, I arranged to learn from him.

Towards the end of March, when the oriental carpets of
red-weed
that had lain under the winter rains in the fields selected to be this year’s potato-gardens had bleached and ravelled and
almost
melted into the ground, word came that the potatoes would be arriving on Saturday’s steamer. Séamaisín and I jolted along the three hilly miles to Cill Rónáin on his “common cart” to
collect
his quota. It was a mild, hazy day; columns of smoke were rising from bramble-patches being burned out of the corners of fields. The sophisticates of Cill Rónáin used to call people from the west of the island
“asailíní
an
Chinn
Thiar,”
little donkeys of the west end; Séamaisín was old enough to remember the gibe, and shy enough to be glad of my support on the crowded pier. But on his cart he was at ease and talkative, and as bent on
self-improvement
as I was. He was an odd-looking little fellow; all his features seemed to have been tucked into a cleft in the middle of his face, from which they peered out at me questioningly. What
was the right English for the
gráinneog
? (Hedgehogs are unknown in Aran.) Does it have ears? Does it hop about? Had I ever seen an animal like Dara Kenny said he’d found in a store last winter, with no legs, and two wings like parasols, and ears it could make bigger and smaller? He had heard I had a book with pictures of all the birds in it; did it have a picture of the peacock? I suddenly felt the silliness of a bird-book that didn’t illustrate the finest bird of all. Neither did it mention the saying he gave me, that the
peacock
would die of pride but for the two skinny legs under him. Nor could my plant-book have told me that there were male and female briars, the females being those that bend over like an arch and grow into the ground again, while my fish-book was ignorant of the fact that a horsehair that falls into a well will grow a little head and turn into an eel. Séamaisín would not hear of objections to this theory; tiny eels were found in springs up on the crags that no big eel could find its way to, and horsehairs were living things, so it “stood to reason.” It was clear that the potato season was
going
to be an induction into a medieval logic.

Down on the pier we joined the semicircular herd of men, each clutching a scrap of paper, around the pile of knobbly sacks which the agent was dispensing “on production of the
documentation
.” Vans, tractors, common carts and small donkey-carts were jumbled together trying to get as close by as possible. “Look at the great sack I carried!” gasped a plump fellow collapsed in the tail of a van. When Séamaisín got his two sacks he spelled out the brandname
UP-TO-DATE
printed on them, tapping each letter with his finger, as if he suspected he was being fobbed off with old potatoes. I pushed forward to help him carry them. He showed me how to hold the sack by grasping a potato inside each of its ears, and he was most particular about our style in heaving it up onto the cart: “Don’t swing now! Don’t swing now! Now—swing!” We sat on the sacks for the drive home. Passing Powell’s shop on our way out of town, he stopped to buy a pound of butter, leaving me holding the reins. He was a long time gone, but fortunately the horse’s natural inertia kept it where it stood.
Shopping
was difficult for a bashful man, he explained; he’d been standing back from the counter waiting for a heap of women to finish gossiping. On the cart again he recovered his standing. Plodding up the hill we overtook a donkey-cart that was making little progress; “The shafts are too low!” he shouted at its owner, who leaned against a wall and nodded wearily, speechless with drink. As we rattled down from Baile na Creige he pointed out the little field by the roadside, Buaile Phatsa, Patsy’s
milking-pasture
, in which he intended to plant the potatoes. Although it had been a pasture for some years it was, he explained, a
garraí
loirg
,
a garden in which potatoes had been grown before, as opposed to a
garraí
bán
,
fallow grassland never broken up for crops. The blackweed he had spread over the grass a few weeks earlier was satisfactorily “stuck to the ground,” he said, and we were to start the next fine day. I went home to consult Estyn Evans’
Irish
Folk
Ways
on spade-ridges or “lazy-beds.”

It seems that there is a boundless variety of ways to make a ridge, but in its simplest form,

And there is a multiple rationale to the process:

Clearly this was not all applicable to Aran’s few inches of droughty, stony, earth, which surely would have a logic all its own.

On the twenty-seventh of March Séamaisín and I started to set Buaile Phatsa. When I arrived he was stamping and peering about, bending down to interrogate the ground obliquely for the tracks of the old ridges. I gathered that although the field had been roughly flattened after the previous potato crop, it was important to have the new trenches where the old ridges had been, so that one was digging out the deeper and more compacted earth. Then he snapped a couple of hazel twigs off a bit of scrub in a corner, and pegged out a length of string where the first edge of the first ridge was to run. He inspected the withered scraps of blackweed littering the grass; since not all the salt had been washed out of it, he decided not to lay the potatoes on it straight away lest they get burned. I was set to find pebbles, which
Séamaisín
arranged in a row a couple of inches inside the string, as stand-ins for the potatoes, which would be stabbed into the ridges later on. When there were no more pebbles to hand he ran into the next field and came back crumbling a bit of dry cow-dung to complete the row. “Wasn’t that a good idea I had!” he said. He removed the string, took up his long-handled spade, and, guided by the row of pebbles, started to open the ground with the speed and ease of a chef filleting fish. The sods were not square as in Estyn Evans’ diagram, but triangular; as a sod was hinged by one of its sides over onto the row of pebbles, it left behind it a
complementary
triangle of grass with its point towards the ridge, which was then scooped up and dropped upside down onto the ridge beside its mate; the first sort, I learned, was the
scraith
bhoird
(edge-scraw), and the second the
scraith
láir
(middle-scraw).
Every
now and then a stone came up, and was flicked off the spade to the margin of the field. Séamaisín backed steadily the width of the field, a neat rectangular trench about ten inches wide
obediently
coming into existence under his stabbing and twisting blade, flanked by the first side of the ridge. Then he pegged out the string for the next trench, using a notch on his spade handle that marked off a distance of about four feet, to ensure that it would be parallel to the first. The notch was old; for many, many seasons it had kept new trenches in step with old ridges. The
handle
itself was grey, its varnish worn off long ago, and smooth, fed by the copious spittle with which Séamaisín lubricated his hands. The left-hand bottom corner of the blade was worn into a large quarter-circle, and before tackling the second trench he took the spade over to a granite boulder that sparkled in the wall, and sharpened it until its edge gleamed like a scimitar. A discussion of granite—had these useful boulders always been here? How long ago did they come? Were there people here then?—led us into the theme of earth-changes in general. Séamaisín had a theory that the ground moved up and down with the tides, causing the cracks in houses to widen. He had also heard that the earth itself moved, but he said that it was difficult to see how that could be. “If I come and make a mark on the ground there, and I come and look at it, it might be in the same place for twenty years!” The homophony of earth (
talamh
)
and Earth (
An
Domhan
)
does not obtain in Irish, and before I could deconstruct its false logic, Séamaisín was at work opening the second furrow, turning the sods back to complete the first ridge. The size of the sods was judged to a nicety so that each one fell pat into its place, butting up against one from the first trench to close in the grass like a neatly
carpentered
box-lid. Soon the whole ridge was complete. It stretched for twelve yards across the bright grass, as grand as the shadow of the campanile on the Piazza San Marco.

It was then my turn to sharpen my spade. I was to work back along the furrow Séamaisín had just finished, doubling its width by turning in sods for the first edge of the next ridge, while he constructed its farther edge by opening up a third furrow. This task of “turning in” is junior to that of “opening up,” the line of the trench having already been established, and is traditionally
the part of the learner. I played my role as beginner satisfactorily; the earth or Earth met my spade at the wrong angles, my
edgescraws
broke at the hinges, my middle-scraws were not congruent with the triangular spaces they were to be inverted into, stones stubbed bluntly against my keen blade. Séamaisín came round to look along the bit of ridge I had put together, and remarked
consolingly
that potatoes would probably grow just as well in a ridge as crooked as a ram’s horn; nevertheless, “If any stranger came by, now, I wouldn’t like them to see that!” Why then, I wondered, had we set to work in this roadside field, since it was a commonplace of our village that the men of certain other villages had nothing better to do than to stroll around criticizing other
people’s
potato ridges? I sucked the blister in the cleft between my thumb and first finger, and absorbed Séamaisín’s remarks on the importance of not letting the levered-over sod break, for if it does, weeds will grow out of the side of the ridge, and of making the central sods cover the space they are intended for, so that the blackbirds wouldn’t see bits of rotting seaweed poking out and destroy the ridge by pulling at them to get the maggots. When he had slapped the ridge into shape with the back of his spade we continued. On the next ridge I ran into a shallow place where the spade could not find its way between the stones; I felt like saying, “It can’t be done here; let’s skip this bit,” but I persevered,
remembering
a young teacher at the technical school who had left a hummock that was hardly more than a rock-outcrop in his
garden
unridged, and had been called upon by a deputation of villagers who insisted he finish the job and promised that the impossible bit would give the best of the crop. Gladly I watched the clouds gathering that would bring down a curtain of rain on the scene of toil.

A few days later the sun appeared again. I strolled up to see if Séamaisín was at work, and saw that he had completed the
garden
. Thirty-two ridges stood, proud, parallel, level-topped, above the knobbly rock of the trenches. I found Séamaisín in his bare kitchen, seated on a wooden chair with a bucket on another chair
facing him, cutting up seed-potatoes. The concrete-floored room was chill and the cracked cast-iron kitchen range full of dead ashes, while the back door was left open, in the Aran bachelor’s fashion, to let the wind keep him warm. He showed me how to cut the potatoes into bits each with one eye, to make them go further, and told me that when rats eat a potato in a ridge they leave the eye so that they will have potatoes in the future: “See! The Nature!” he exclaimed, with a wink at its roguery. He was in high spirits, looking forward to ridging a lea garden he owned down on the sandy land near the beach, exulting in his strength and skill: “When I’ve no drink taken for a fortnight,” he cried, “I could drive a spade through that floor!” As he worked he repeated a garbled scrap of verse, that never got beyond lines I came to know by heart: