Stones of Aran (61 page)

The road that turns north from the end of Cill Mhuirbhigh meets the main road at a junction called Na Ceithre Ród, the Four Roads. The fourth of the four is just a boreen leading down to the shoreline from which the various Hernons bring up their
seaweed
, or used to, at any rate. Two hundred yards down this boreen a still narrower track leads off to the west, picking its way between low field-walls and hawthorn thickets until it comes in sight of the rounded back of an ancient stone hut, as lichen-grey and ferny as any other hump of the stony ground, which is kept like a bull on its own in a little field entered by a narrow stile.

This is the largest and best-preserved of Aran's “beehive huts.” Its name is Clochán na Carraige, the
clochán
of the rock; but since An Charraig (the rock), in its anglicized form “Carrig,” is used in some nineteenth-century sources for Sruthán, the next village west from Cill Mhuirbhigh, I take it that the hut is named from the area it stands in. Its basis is rectangular, about nineteen feet long by seven and a half wide, but the corners are
progressively
rounded off, starting a couple of feet above ground-level, to give the body of the chamber an oval plan, from which both the ends and the sides converge inwards, the stones in each course over-sailing the ones below on the inside, until the space to be closed is reduced to a long two-foot wide slit and topped off with a row of eight flagstones. The outside height is about eight feet. This corbelled construction is very stable for a circular or short oval building, since each layer is self-wedging like the stones in an arch, but it leads to a design weakness in the sides of a longer building, and this
clochán
noticeably bulges inwards on the west. Its walls are very thick, however, and the stones were carefully laid with a slight slant towards the outside, so that it is still stable, and only a few drops of rain or coins of sunlight can slip into the interior.

The two doorways are opposite each other in the side-walls, as in a traditional cottage. One enters almost crawling, under long,
heavy lintels, for the openings are only about three feet high; and then, straightening up inside, one feels tall, and one's head is in a shadow-zone of upside-down light. At the south end there is a little opening which probably served both as window and
chimney
. Looked at from outside, these dwarfish doorways and
cyclops
window, and the hunched masonry that seems to lift itself grudgingly and effortfully from the ground, give the hut a look of immeasurable agedness. How old in fact is it? Probably medieval rather than early Christian, but it is hard to say. The only
archaeological
find made in it was of some whale-vertebrae which had probably been embedded in the stonework, a mysterious but unilluminating detail. The building method is one that predates Christianity, and when, for churches and the better class of
dwellings
, it was replaced by vertical, mortared walls, it persisted in humbler circumstances, housing the poor, then sheltering
domestic
animals. In fact just two fields to the north of Clochán na Carraige is a little
poirín,
probably built for raising goat-kids in, oval, roughly corbelled, with a lintelled doorway, the whole just two feet high, and recognizably of the seed and breed of the old grey bull slumbering nearby.

Máirtín Ó Direáin, tutelary seer of Sruthán, asks on our
behalf
the question we know beforehand will not be answered:

Ó Direáin imagines a penitent, an exile from the community,
driven out by hot-tempered Enda, living here without even a pet bird on his shoulder. But,

In fact the building is rather too grand for a hermit's cell; it was obviously built by people of means. It does not smell of the rising damp of guilt or loneliness either. I see a good fire before the door, a row of razorbills on a spit, children playing “I'm the King of the Castle” on the roof, and inside, a pile of nets and traps and otter-spears at one end and a glorious mating going on at the other, four bare legs in a maelstrom of dry bracken.

However, if this was, or could become, a seat of eremitic
contemplation,
then there is enough of mystery around to engage it for eternity. Leaving aside the perfect far-off dovetailing of
Con-nemara
and the sky, and the twinkling profundities of the sea just half a dozen fields away, there is, for instance, a stand of
Aquilegia
or columbine on the limestone-flagged field one crosses to reach the stile before the
clochán.
The only places I have seen this plant in Aran, apart from obvious garden-escapes, are here, on a crag by the roadside to the north, and in the little glen of the donkey near Bullán Mhaolodhair. The mystery (for me, at least) is not its odd distribution, or even the botanical puzzle of whether this plant of fens and woodland is native to Aran, but this: why does the
sudden
sight of it as one approaches across the rough mosaic of stone and short-cropped grass—hardly even a sight, so little is there to stop the eye, only the slightest screening of what is beyond by half-a-dozen tall slender stems, the few unemphatic grey-green leaves and indeterminately blue-to-pinkish blossoms being lost at a distance—make my heart catch itself back, as from a brink? What do they look like, these stems? Like the edges of things, perhaps the edges of panes of glass set in the air; or the edges of shadows of things, shadows seen sideways on. What are these
things, not recognizable from the edges of their shadows? I think the air will not spill its secrets any more readily than stone.

People used not to like walking the empty half mile between the Four Roads and the village of Sruthán after dark. Old Mícheál of Cill Mhuirbhigh, Máire’s husband, told me the story of a man coming home from shooting wild geese on Oíleán Dá Bhranóg one night, whose horse baulked at a certain spot halfway along that stretch of road. The man thought he saw a dark shape near a well by the roadside, and he took out a piece of
airgead
croise
(“cross-money,” Mícheál explained, a two-shilling coin with the cross on the back), held it over the muzzle of his shotgun and fired at the thing, which vanished on the spot. Then he galloped home as fast as he could, dropping his geese on the road. He sent his sister back to pick up the geese, and she saw nothing out of the way, but the next morning when folk going to Mass passed the spot they found the road full of ashes, or of stuff like jelly.
Curiously
enough, although Mícheál said he knew the man to whom this adventure had happened, and remembered seeing the gun hanging on the wall of his cottage, the well is called Tobar na Cúig Scilleacha, the well of the five shillings, which suggests that the story goes back to the time of the five-shilling or crown piece, which also had a cross on it.

Nowadays there is a bungalow on Creig an Tobair, the crag opposite the well—it was built for Mícheál and Máire’s retirement, though in the end Mícheál could not be persuaded to move in because of the area’s “sheeogy” reputation—but it is only used in summer, and so there is still an uninhabited gap between the house at the Four Roads, formerly a Hernon family’s and now a youth hostel, and the beginning of the long settlement the
knowledgeable
can subdivide into Sruthán, Eoghanacht and Creig an
Chéirín. While it is a perfectly pleasant and by Aran standards unremarkable length of road, one does feel that this is the
beginning
of An Ceann Thiar, the western headland, which is quieter than the rest of the island and a little detached from it. The hostel virtually marks the limit of the tourist itinerary, which seems over recent years to have consolidated and standardized itself around the pubs of Cill Rónáin and the excursion to Dún Aonghasa. There was a little shop in Sruthán and a bigger one in Creig an Chéirín until the late ’seventies, but now there are none; indeed there are no shops west of Cill Rónáin. This change reflects the fact that more households have cars nowadays and that there is a regular minibus service along the island; but I wonder if it also means an ebbing of life from the west.

Máirtín Ó Direáin’s poem on returning to his birthplace names other sounds he did not hear in the west that time: the reveler’s tipsy song, wild boasts about heroic ancestors, joyous shouts of the lads throwing the
cloch
neart,
the fifty-six-pound weight, on a Sunday afternoon. And he concludes:

But the title of the poem, “Árainn 1947,” one has to note, dates it. There has been much whistling, boasting and shouting heard since then in the west, and the villagers of Ó Direáin’s own
generation I used to know here as old folk were very lively. I remember a spry old lady I met on that road to Sruthán, carrying a heavy bag of rye; I gave her a hand with it, and when I thankfully set it down on her doorstep she blessed me, and added, “It might have killed me—but what harm!” Not everyone is as sure of the necessity of their own life-world as the poet, whose mirror-lined skull brings the reflections of formative years to a focus of
definitive
brightness.

The
sruthán
or stream from which the village is named seeps out of the foot of a glen coming down the hillside from the south, forms a little turlough, disappears under the road, and reappears in other springs and turloughs here and there down the slope to Port Chonnla on the north shore. Ó Direáin’s sister Máire, a friendly old lady I used to visit, told me that before the road was built up and surfaced the water used to flow across it; in fact, she said, a lot of little streams did so, with flowers growing along their banks, “and it was very nice—at least we thought it was very nice.” Most of the remaining thatched roofs are along a boreen following the intermittent stream downhill from the road, between overgrown sally-gardens and tiny broken-walled potato-plots. A curious plant scarcely known outside of Aran and west Connemara, the wild leek,
Allium
babingtonii,
grows here and there in the fringes of the village, and further down towards the shore there are little plots full of it.
Gáirleóg
is its local name, and its bulb tastes like a mild garlic. It often grows in what look like deliberate plantings; but Bríd Gillan is the only person I know of who uses it in cooking, and whether it is native, or a variety of the cultivated leek gone wild, is something botanists disagree on. It has a stem three or four feet high and as thin as a cigarette, topped in spring by a turban-shaped knob that later sheds its papery wrap to show a round mass of bulbils, from which little purplish flowers grow out on snaky stalks. Nodding out of neglected
corners
on its bowed or crooked stems, it accosts one like some
irreducibly
ascetic revenant from a monkish kitchen garden.

This original nucleus of the village straggling down from the
main road is very decayed. I remember one family who called me in to witness their squalor; the old woman by the fireside had to put up with the
braon
anuas,
the drip from the ceiling, because they did not want to mend the thatch lest the improvement spoil their chances of a council house. In another cottage I drank milk with goat-hairs in it, from a sticky cup, and queasily declined a slice from a fly-infested side of bacon (but then some of the best stories in this book came from that household). I once peered in at the window of a cottage left untouched since the occupant, an old bachelor, had been carried out dead. A huge thistle rooted in the rotten board of the sill inside filled the little window like a specimen in a display-case; behind it the shelves of the dresser faintly gleamed with dozens of the tall straight-sided
cream-coloured
jugs, often bearing nostalgic scenes of cottage life, that Araners used to buy from travelling salesmen, more for
decoration
than for use.

The village has stretched westwards along the road from this moribund cluster, as a few bungalows and council-built houses have been sited in the fields between the older cottages. The former teacher’s residence is recognizable, being of the standard
design
with central gable. Here lived Máirtín Ó Direáin’s old schoolmaster Joe Flanagan, who as Seosamh Ó Flannagain used to collect Aran folklore (including the tale of Aristotle and his wife) for the journal
Béaloideas,
and was drowned with two
others
when returning by currach from Roundstone after a
pilgrimage
to Croagh Patrick. Ó Direáin’s sister’s cottage, a quarter of a mile along, is a little below the level of the road; one looks down into its tiny front garden bordered with the big round stones her brother Tom had brought up from the shore and which she used to whitewash every year. Her kitchen, all lime-bright walls and brown-painted woodwork, was of the traditional design, with a tall ceiling space and an open staircase going up to a loft over the two small rooms to the east. The
seomra
to the west was high too, with no loft over it; it was comfortable and easy-going, unlike the “best room” apparently kept polished in gloomy anticipation of
the next wake in so many cottages; it relaxed by a hearth, and kept its things on shelves made out of orange-boxes painted brown, with another box to hide the gas-cylinder because Máire did not like the look of it when gas first came to the island. Here, the traditional meant the full of life. I used to call in during my mapping of the village; she was fascinated by the progress of the work, and wished Tom could see it—though if he had a couple of drinks in him, she told me, he would be sure to say “Ara, you have it all wrong!” She was an ample, soft, welcoming person;
remembering
her, I think of well-risen bread. In between stuffing a chicken and boiling potatoes and making tea for me and eating biscuits, she would bring me out to the little area at the back of the house, half flagged, half grassy, with hens and kittens and the interesting weeds she wanted me to see, the pair of us bobbing over them like hens: calamint, which her mother used to put in a bowl, though they never used it as mint; petty spurge, which a doctor had told her is the thing for curing warts (it does have a caustic sap); mugwort, one of those old-fashioned herbs for rough-
and-ready
medicine or magic, rather rare nowadays outside Aran, and groundsel, which she called chickenweed because they used to feed it to young chicks, who she said “craved for it.”

Máirtín, it seemed, used to return much less frequently to the island than Tom; in fact his poems and essays make it clear that the Aran he found on his visits did not match up to the one he had carried with him in his head from childhood. The original family home was a tiny cottage a hundred yards down a twisty path that links the western end of Sruthán (Sruthán Beag, little Sruthán, as it used to be called) to the foreshore at An
Gleannachán
. It had been empty for a long time, and Máire had the idea that M and I might move into it, but the thatch had caved in and the low walls looked as if they were digging themselves deeper into the earth and would shortly withdraw entirely from this world. This would have been Ó Direáin’s
“teach
caoch
ar
shúil
bhóthair,”
hollow house at road’s opening, in “Dán an Tí,” the
poem of the house. (The word-play is simple but untranslatable: the literal meaning of the phrase is “blind house by road’s eye”—the house he left to begin his life’s journey.) Each element of the house demands a hearing; for instance, the hearth: