Stones of Aran (60 page)

Other finds—I saw some of them later on, in the house Claire and some colleagues were renting in Cill Mhuirbhigh—include fragments of coarse pottery, a pierced bead of blue glass about half an inch across and another a mere eighth of an inch across, a few quartz crystals, and a small round beach-pebble of limestone with white spots of fossil coral in it, such as can be picked up on the shore. Little items of bronze have been found too, such as
small rings and a neat pair of tweezers, and some bone pins about three inches long, one of them with a decorative moulded head, probably for fastening a cloak. Also, a pebble with a groove worn in it for sharpening pins, and pieces of clay moulds used for the casting of axes, knives, a spearhead, a sword, a pin and a bracelet. While most of the dates determined so far cluster around 800
BC
, the hut itself dates from about 1000
BC
. What is being revealed here is clearly a Late Bronze Age settlement. Perhaps the Aran Islanders of this ancient village—much more ancient than
anything
that had been expected—were concerned, not so much with defence or empire or the ultimate mysteries, as with farming and fishing and the latest fashion in bone pins. A few disturbed remains of human burials were found south of the hut and
elsewhere
on the site, and just north of the hut in a natural hollow of the rock was the tiny skeleton of an infant, perhaps stillborn; had it lived, it would have lived some time between 800 and 400
BC
. Below it, refuse such as animal bones and periwinkles yielded the earliest date of all, between 1500 and 1300
BC
—back at the
boundaries
of the Middle and Late Bronze Age.

One of the lines of stones interpreted as hut foundations runs in under the cashel wall, which it seems was not itself built up from bedrock but rests on the layer of detritus. Does that mean that generations of people live up here on the bald hilltop before the cashel was built? Perhaps there was an enclosing wall to this first settlement, but if anything of it remains, it is deeply buried within the cashel wall we see today. There is a low, linteled recess in the base of the north-western sector of the present wall, and when one crouches in this and looks to either side, about three feet in, a vertical joint in the masonry is visible which might
indicate
the face of the original wall. Also it is
reasonable to suppose that there was at least a slight wall along the cliff-top; the
archaeologists
have built a drystone wall just a few feet high there, and it has greatly decreased their discomforts.

Remarkable as they are, the discoveries made so far say little about the dates and nothing about the purposes of the central
cashel wall or the outer ramparts, and after three seasons of
excavation
the enigma of the
d
ú
n
has scarcely been broached. No houses or other structures of the same era as the cashel wall
survive
, and finds from later than the Bronze Age have been few. A finely carved comb of antler bone and a few other objects show that the
d
ú
n
was still in use in early Christian times, but what was going on there is still unknown. Since it overlays the Late Bronze Age deposits, the cashel wall, or at least its interior face, is of later date, presumably of the pagan or Early Christian Iron Age; a radio-carbon date of
AD
600–800 has been obtained from material in the recess in the wall. But that wall itself was not built in a day; it is a complex structure made of several thicknesses, each with its face of carefully positioned and fitted blocks and its filling of loosely heaped-in stone. There are more such faces than correspond to the three levels of the wall—parapet and two
terraces
—for one of them can be made out in the stones composing the floor of the upper terrace. The recess was perhaps a doorway at one stage of the wall's development; it looks as if the stones closing it were pushed in from the other side when another layer was being added to the outside of the wall. Thus the wall we see today may have been built up over a great period of time by
periodic
thickening and raising of an ancient core.

The relationships of the two outer ramparts to the central cashel are still to be elucidated. Claire took me up the steps and terraces to the north sector of the cashel wall, which is about eighteen feet high here, and we leaned over the parapet and looked down at an area that had been excavated just outside it. The second or middle rampart, coming round from the east, turns southwards as if to approach the inner one at this point, but changes its mind and continues to the west. It is a massive
construction
in itself, eleven feet high and terraced on its inner face, but its present indecisive course looks like the result of changes of plan. Newly exposed foundations of a stretch of wall crossing the stripped ground from the kink in the middle rampart to the foot of the main cashel wall immediately below us showed clearly that
at some period the middle rampart, or a predecessor of it, did indeed turn south here on a course that would have met that of the inner rampart. A deposit of kitchen-waste—bones and
sea-shells
—banked up along the east of these foundations continues under the inner rampart, which suggests that the foundations are earlier. Perhaps the middle rampart was partially demolished and re-aligned more than once. In fact all its eastern and northern length is underlain by an earlier wall, of which the newly
discovered
foundations mark a continuation. There is a recess in the north arc of this middle rampart as we see it today, which was evidently a gateway, and under it Claire's team have found the floor of an earlier, paved entrance with revetted sides, cut down into a shale-band of the hillside. It may be that this entrance and the wall later overlain by the middle rampart represent the first enclosure on this hilltop, a primitive Dún Aonghasa—but its date is not known. When the skeleton of an eleven-to thirteen-
year-old
was found buried in that early entrance close to its threshold, the archaeologists had high hopes of getting a radio-carbon date from it that would help fix that of the enclosure—but after some months the baffling answer that came back from the laboratory was:
AD
910! What could this mean? Either it was a Viking burial, perhaps of a youth who died on board a passing long-boat, or there were at that late date natives of this famously Christian island who were not using Christian burial grounds. In either case, it shows that the gateway was still open then, and regarded as of some otherworldly significance. As to the far flung,
eight-hundred-
yards-long outer rampart, it is as yet uninvestigated. Thus the scale and longevity of the site seem more than ample to accommodate all the purposes imputed to it by rival theories.

After Claire had returned to her work I lingered on the
ramparts
and watched the strange scene for a while, never before
having
seen such purposive activity in the
d
ú
n.
Visitors to Dún Aonghasa usually look as if being here is a null state between coming up the hill and going down again; fuddled with space, they seem to float around as in an aquarium filled out of the
vacancy beyond the cliff-edge. But now the concentration was palpable. Words were few and subdued; occasionally someone would scoop together a handful of dust—so it appeared—and take it across to another person, and they would put their heads together over it for a while, before returning each to their own square metre of ground. The mist welled up over the cliff,
thickened
, coiled a tentacle about a girl holding a surveyor's pole near the brink for a young man who was trying to petrify the flux with the theodolite's single eye. Claire stood motionless with a camera before a measuring-rod laid across a few stones as if on a
makeshift
altar; while I waited to hear the shutter fall, a fulmar came askance out of the grey, and was gone again. What was she
recording
, the measure of the stones, or the sacrament of measure itself? Everyone else was on their knees. Trowels rang on the rock like little bells. Dún Aonghasa, now, was a temple. The sacred rite of our times, the acquisition of fact, was being accomplished.

So the metric priests do not think this place was meant for the
worship
of storms? Their colleagues in the Cultural Studies Departments must have told them that the storms of Aran are merely signifiers in the ideological construction of the West as Other by a post-colonialist discourse, scarcely worth packing a raincoat against. They shall learn otherwise, for while they were bent on their work I have called one up. At this moment a premonitory bolt hurtles along the brink of the cliff: the peregrine falcon. Its stuttering scream says it has left a
kitty-wake
exploded into guts and feathers on the rock of perdition. The air in the dún twitches and wakes, crumples the sheet of mist into a ball and tosses it over the cliff. The sea is momentarily in sparkling form, a trillion sine-waving heliographs, but cumulus is raising fists along the southern horizon and darkness wells from the west. A haze slides over the sun, capturing it in a pallid ring decked to left and right 
with scraps of iridescence, the storm-dogs sailors fear. Now the sun is thinned to a wafer, sinking through layers of wrack, dissolving. A hollow thud rises through the rock-strata from a wave arching its back in the cavern beneath. As the first big raindrops skim across the ground, the archaeologists hastily pin down flapping plastic sheets with stones. The tourists are already scampering down the hillside, glancing over their shoulders at the sudden boiling of the bay below the dún, where wave after wave of waves assault the cliff, mad sap pers ramming home short-fused charges, blowing themselves up every time. I cling like a limpet to the parapet of the dún. The loose stones chatter like cold teeth, the chinks are whining in the wind. Inis Oírr, they say, would have been washed away once but for the limpet that held onto it; now it is up to me whether this island stands. The sea groans, shifts like the roof of a drunken cathedral, throws up staggering steeples, steeple-chasing weather-cocks, gargoyles spewing molten lead. The sea is drunk on itself, a welter of imagery. Space hurls itself at the island, block against block, cracking, split into cuboid voids and mathematico-rhetorical grykes, riven by geologico-ethical,
Asbian-Brigantian
disjunctions, every rift loaded with either/or. The wind whips away the biblio-biota of the cliff-face, the scrappy choughs, grande-dame gannets, ship-shape kittywakes, fulmars playing toy planes, the fox pendulating on its fern, James O’Flaherty’s ever-falling cattle. Shuffling of the sea-index follows: thirty types of seaweed fly overhead, a sea-hare, a sea-stallion, the middle cut of a basking shark with Tiger King trailing behind on a harpoon rope, a currach full of holy water, a dolphin overstuffed with metaphor. Now comes the rubbishing of the book of the interior, a tectonic revulsion against its slow sedimentary style. Pages of limestone peel away, the nautiloid springs from its rock screaming like an alarm clock, brachiopods whizz by like bullets. The island’s absurd fauna is scrapped, first the butterflies, the dingy skipper pursued by the Californian man-eater, then the one-handed blackbird, the Connemara cows with coughs, the Gort na gCapall cow with Sanskrit, a dog with some seal in it, an armigerous lizard, rabbits hand-in-hand with cats, a stallion hauling a lighthouse, all of them bundled away, knotted in rainbows 
and consigned to the abyss. Suddenly a rival mage appears on the cliff-top, Seáinín Bhile’s Frenchman, pretending to conduct the Apocalypse with St. Patrick’s staff I humour him, let him wave on Bolgios armed with his lightning sword, then blast him east to
Ball-inasloe
. The entire cast is dismissed! The Caper and his bride in their broken bed, Lhuyd wailing through the mist clutching his sprig of thrift, all the Victorian excursionists with coat-tails and sensible skirts reflexed, the French consul dancing a jig, the rector and the priest clutching each other’s windpipes (I bang those two heads to gether with especial glee), Dr. Stoney knocking in his coffin and his wife sucking poitín through the keyhole, Father Ferocious with his umbrella-stick, St. Colman with his flying saucers, Nell an Tower polishing the rocks with her witches’ broom, and her offspring gabbling the alphabet backwards, Micilín Sarah brandishing his
otter-spear
and thirteen-score razorbill legs at the raven’s widow. Off with you, nothing but a pack of marked cards! This storm is flying right round the world and Aran is only a crumb of bread flung out on the doorstep of European culture, not worth snapping at in passing. That these invertebrate walls should set themselves up against the palazzi of Venice! I curse this ramified cul-de-sac of an island that has wasted half the footsteps of my life. Let the empty dúns be thumped like drums, let them be tilted on their rims and sent bowling down the hills, flattening Aran’s fourteen ridiculous villages!

Patience, my hand. Patience, my mind. Patience, my heart. Your book will be finished yet.

Patiently, one by one, the stories of Aran are to be heard out.

A boreen leads on westwards from the old ball-alley at the end of Cill Mhuirbhigh village, serving a row of small fields lined up like books on a shelf in the lea of the scarp on the left. After it has
let one glance into about twenty of these plots, the track turns south, faces up to the cliff, and mounts it through a little pass. The land is very watery here, almost a turlough in fact, and there is a good spring at the foot of the way; hence the name of the track: Bóithrín Ghort Bheallach Uisce, the boreen of (the) way of water. This is ordinary water, limpid, plentiful, secular. There is holy water nearby too, but it is given sparingly and tastes of
stagnancy
. To find it one leaves the beaten track and climbs the
knobbly
shoulder on its right where it begins to rise up the scarp; a few stony angles and kicked-out toeholds among the heather-tussocks can be used to scramble up to the stile in the field-wall rimming the crag above. This crag is superb: not much interrupted by walls, with smooth clints the size of variously sized rooms separated by the invisible, negative, step-through walls of the grykes, which here are deep and wide enough to demand individual attention from the walker. It lies along a terrace a few dozen paces wide, tending north-westwards, between the sharp twenty-foot fall of the scarp now on the right, and the heathy hillside rising in smaller steps and steeps to the left. The holy well is about three hundred yards along the terrace, beyond the first field-wall to cross it. Bullán Mhaolodhair (anglicized on the OS map and
pronounced
more or less as Bullaunmalore) is its name, as recorded by John O’Donovan in 1839. He took Maolodhar to be a personal name, probably correctly, though nothing is
known of such a person. A
bull
á
n
is a hollow in a rock—it is the usual Aran word for a solution-hollow in a clint—and in fact this “well” is not a spring but a puddle of rainwater that has, with the help of
Nostoc,
excavated a shallow bed for itself. Some blocks of limestone have been arranged around three sides of it, and a slab laid across, to form a small, low, rough, canopy. A few old pennies lie in the ooze. The area is unfrequented, not on the way to anywhere, and what lore about the well survives is almost incomprehensibly garbled.

Yet when I first visited the
bullán,
one February day of
unexpected
spring sunshine, there was a bit of heather floating in it. Later, going down the boreen again, I met an elderly Hernon, Pat
Mhicilín, with his horse and a cartload of feed-beet. A tall, winterbitten man made out of a hank of sinews—he was the
anonymous
searod-gatherer in gloomy weather of my first volume, also the man who challenged me to match him with a spade when I found him digging potato-ridges one jubilating day by an
effervescent
tide—Pat Mhicilín was the village senior of old Cill Mhuirbhigh. But all he knew of the well was a vague story he had heard from King the blacksmith about a saint who got lost on the crag; people went searching for him, calling “A Mhíl, labhair!” (“Michael, speak!”), and he thought that “it stood to reason” therefore that the name of the well was Bullán Mhíl Labhair. As we discussed this unconvincing derivation, another elderly Pat Hernon, Pat Phaidi, came down the hill, wearing an old zinc washtub upside down on his head and hanging down his back like a huge cowl. The three of us had a long conversation; a few raindrops pinged off the tub now and again. Pat Phaidí looked very strange, his wizened face sunken to nothing in the tub
except
for his bright eyes intently addressing me. Behind his ears I could see twists of rag stuffed into the tub’s leaks; it had obviously long served as a cow-trough in some field above. He had heard that a leper once lived by the well and used to warn people off by saying “Mé lobhar,” “I, a leper”; hence its name, Bullán Mé Lob-har. Katie, Bobby Gill’s wife, would know the real story, he thought. Nobody visited the well now, he said, but in the old days people used to pray there. He had seen “a fine scissor” left beside it once. But all that was in the past. Sometimes, long ago, he used to kneel down there himself and say a prayer. Gradually edging nearer to the heart of the matter, he asked if I had noticed a
thráinín
in it today. I had, of course—the heather stalk. He looked pleased, and embarrassed. “Well, it was me that put that there, now!” he confessed. I was glad that I had registered the little sign, and that I had seen its significance emerge in this way, like a shy animal peering from its burrow. Looking back on that conversation, I think of
The
Colloquy
of
the
Ancients,
the medieval text that tells how St. Patrick, the newcomer, meets the last of the
followers of Fionn Mac Cumhall and takes down from their lips the place-lore of the Celtic Ireland his own culture will supersede. Both the Pat Hernons are gone now, as irrevocably as the last of the Fianna, and what I did not note down of their talk that day is irrecoverable.

This well saved a life a few months later. Happening by, I made my usual detour to it in response to its garbled stories, and in a little dip of the ground beyond it I saw a donkey standing very quietly. Its stillness made me look again as I turned to go; its forefeet were caught in a cleft, and to judge by the pile of droppings, it had been there some days. I tried to pull its legs up but I could only release one of its hooves. It was Sunday evening, and I thought as I hurried down to the village that it would be hard to persuade anyone to leave the television or postpone the pub for a mere donkey. However the first household I called at—Katie Gill’s—was thrown into commotion by the news, and I was closely questioned as to the colour, sex and size of this donkey, matters I had not well noted. Very soon no fewer than ten of us, with pickaxes and crowbars and a bucket of water, were
converging
on the scene. It did not take long for the men to prize off a layer of the crag and, carefully, so as not to panic it, lift the
animal
free without twisting its leg. It drank from the bucket, then wandered off. The evening was beautiful, very still, as
unprotesting
about what had been going on in it as the donkey itself.

On our way back to the village I gathered a few more homespun etymologies of Bullán Mhaolodhair. Katie’s version was well worth hearing. A blind man from Connemara had heard tell of the well, and came to Aran to see if he might be cured. Somehow he was left to find his own way to it across the crag, and while he was groping and stumbling, he heard a voice calling his name, “A Mhíl, a Mhíl!” He followed the sound, and found the well, and found he could see. But he saw nobody near; the well itself had called.

This to me sounds like truth—truth of the mythic sort, which is strictly pragmatic, truth one can use. For instance, since the
tale substitutes hearing for seeing, it proposes this well as a point from which to listen to the landscape, hushing the garrulous
faculty
of vision and letting the island recompose itself as music. The terrace of the well, in fact, is not only an elevation of the island’s inhabited northern aspect, but it swings back southwards around the hillside towards the heaped boulder-banks and hollow cliffs of the coast below Dún Aonghasa, and so is unusually open to both the human and the inhuman sides of Aran. If one waits by the well until the turbidity of the mind settles, then the
scratching
of a bramble stirred across the rock by the breeze gives one ground to stand on, and a raven tolling overhead rounds out a sky; the whine of a motor-scooter growing out of one distance and fading into the other traces the line of the road below, and draws with it the entire life history of the lee-side, while a
southerly
wind brings the muffled drumbeat of the ocean across from the caverns of Blind Sound. How appositely the name itself, Blind Sound, comes in!—as if to make the point that, to the making of a point, all other points are apposite. But my sense of this truth is both foundational and precarious. I have once or twice walked on this crag with my eyes closed, hoping that nobody was watching from the hillside above, which is invariably, apparently, deserted. (When I hinted to M that I had been walking Aran blind, she was rather alarmed and told me to keep my experiments for
literature
.) Aiming to get to the well from the field-wall fifty yards before it, I found that I could feel my way over the large crevices easily enough, but I always ended up on the sloping ground to the left, no doubt because of an unmasterable, visceral, awareness of the cliff to the right. The experiment clarified the nature of a step, though. As the foot descends through space, a surface exactly the size and shape of the foot-sole receives it; this support is the top of a column of inconceivable height that goes down and down,
narrower
and narrower, until it rests upon a point, a nothing, at the centre of the earth, and from that point opens up again in the opposite direction like the cone of futurity opening out of a
moment
, into the unsoundable.