Stones of Aran (62 page)

In this nest Máirtín’s mother brought up four children by
herself.
Her first husband was Labhras Phatch Sheáin, one of the currachmen whose drowning so perturbed the sea-caverns, as I
recounted in “Tides of the Other World” in my first volume. They had only been married a few months at the time. Then she spent three years in America, and returned to marry Seán Ó Direáin, who was a sick man for years and died when Máirtín, their eldest child, was only six or seven. A certain memory of this pitiful father was evidently for Máirtín one of those wounds that weep life long:

Since the sixteen-acre farm could not support them all, and Máirtín had no hand for farmwork anyway, he left the island for a job in the Galway post office before his eighteenth birthday. In the city he joined the Gaelic League and acted in the Taibhd-hearc, the newly founded Irish-language theatre. In 1937 he moved to Dublin, and worked in the Civil Service until his retirement. Many of his poems express the loneliness and frustration of exile from his people and their language, and his disgust with the Ireland that had succeeded to the vision of its founders. Thus, the poem “Mothú Feirge” (feeling of anger) from his 1962 collection,
Ár
Ré
Dhearóil
(our wretched era):

While his ancestors, he felt, had pitted themselves against the reality of bare rock and won from it lasting testimony to their existence—
“Thóg
an
fear
seo
teach
/
Is
an
fear
úd
/
Claí
n
ó
fál
…” (This man built a house / And that man / A wall or a fence …)—our rootless generation would have a mean and unreal memorial:

But Ó Direáin’s was not just the reproachful and embittered spokesman of a discarded past, or the elegist of the elemental simplicities and ancient pieties of Aran; he also represented a new growth, and one which has flourished since. As an Irish-language poet of the generation he inspired has written, “In place of the metres and rhythms of folksong, he set the free verse of today dancing by the hearth of Irish—and it is a testimony to his
importance
as pioneer and his poetical genius that he was the first major poet to do so.” This was publicly recognized; in 1977 he received an honorary degree from the National University of Ireland, and President Ó Dálaigh presented him with the Ossian Prize, an international award funded by the Freiherr von Stein Foundation of Hamburg for work in a traditional or minority culture. Several other honours followed before his death in 1988. Even his own people had begun to be persuaded of his stature by then, though some of them still look on it with the same
contemptuous
incomprehension as their parents showed towards his earliest magical appropriations of their village. I translate literally:

In one of his later poems Ó Direáin puzzles over the
ontological
status of his Aran. He recalls Bishop Berkeley’s theory that “to be” is nothing more than “to be perceived” and that outside the contents of our minds nothing exists. Dean Swift once reproved the Bishop for his fantastic speculation by refusing to open the door to him—for why should he open an idea to an idea? Dr. Johnson’s plain-man’s contempt for the theory was reported by Boswell: “I shall never forget the alacrity with which Johnson answered, striking his foot with mighty force against a large stone,
until he rebounded from it, ‘I refute it thus!’” Ó Direáin, born and bred on a rock, was predisposed to the common-sense view too:

This doubt, according to Mac Síomáin and Sealy, the editors of his
Selected
Poems,
amounted to a weakening of Ó Direáin’s governing myth (which, I take it, is the abiding integrity of the old Aran, as opposed to “our wretched era”), and his subsequent work rarely matched the resonance of the earlier “island poems.” These commentators interpret Ó Direáin’s rather cryptic late poem, “Neamhionraic Gach Beo” (faithless is every living thing), which I looked into in Kilmurvey House, as an expression of “deep and growing dissatisfaction with his creative work.” If I understand it, the poem says that life is perpetually seduced by the present moment and is therefore a betrayal of the past, and that only lifeless objects,
“cloch,
carraig
is
trá
/
I 
lár
na
hoíche
fuaire”
(stone, rock and strand / in the cold midnight), stay true:

How would I comfort his shade, if I met him haunting this
changed island? All the old fellows he celebrated in his early
poems
, in their neat bawneens and trousers of homespun tweed, all the old ladies in their red petticoats and Galway shawls, are gone; so, even, are his sister Máire and the other dwellers under thatch of Sruthán I have mentioned. Stone and the cold of midnight will indeed outlast those and all other generations. But his own death has freed his poetry from the perspective in which he, and
perhaps
we, could see it as in decline. There are new generations of children in Sruthán, and they learn it at school. Even admitting the terrible possibility of the death of his language, Ó Direáin’s version of Aran will be re-worded again and again throughout whatever future we have, which even if it lasts as long as stone is unlikely ever to forgo the solace of the western myth he so
perfectly
expressed….

And if he rejects all this as mere whistling in the dark, I would take him down the twisty lane to the little field below the old house, and set him to search through the grass and the holes in the walls until he had reassembled those once-impassioned pebbles of his childhood games, which, it occurred to me once in passing the spot, must still be lying there; and together we would contemplate the mysterious essence of stones, which is not their constancy—they were his, they are mine, and will be another’s—but their ability to absorb all the words we write on them into the darkness of their cores.

The fourth and last of Aran’s townlands is Eoghanacht; the
anglicized
form Onaght gives a good approximation to the
pronunciation
. Its boundary runs from Port Chonnla on the north coast, following the Aran-north line of the glen that holds the stream of Sruthán village and nicks each successive step of the scarp-slope of the island; then it continues the same line across the plateau to
the cliff-coast not far west of Dún Aonghasa. The boreen that follows the boundary up from Sruthán, with zigzagging
divergencies
to help in mounting the scarps, must have been widened and improved around the end of the last century when Henry Robinson of Roundstone was the land-agent, for the steepest part of it is known as Carcair Robinson. Dún Eoghanachta, the last of Aran’s great cashels, sits on the terrace of the hillside half a mile above the main road, and to visit it one climbs the
carcair
and then takes a smaller path scrambling through the fields along the slope to the west for a few hundred yards. John O’Donovan laid it down that the ancient name of this
dún
has been lost, and that it is now merely named from the townland; but of course the opposite is likely to be the case, if this was the original hub of settlement in the western lobe of the island. In any case a wealth of time-lore is invested in the
dún
by the name of the Eoghanacht, as will
appear,
which compensates for its present bare and unengaging look of being some purely functional thing that has lost its function.

Before entering, however, I will diverge from the approach to the
dún,
and look at certain obscure remains almost in its shadow, one minor step of the slope down from it to the north-east. Among brambles and bracken and a spider-web of field-walls are some hummocks and ridges of half-buried stone, which an archaeological team under Dr. John Waddell of University College Galway, in 1973, tentatively deciphered as collapsed clocháns, the foundations of a little chapel, and part of a surrounding cashel wall. The most interesting feature of this very decayed monastic settlement is a triangular flagstone standing up among other
broken
flags that lean and lie around it, the remains of a sort of
reliquary.
Such “slab-shrines,” tent-like shelters about a yard high made of two rectangular flags leaning together with triangular flags closing either end, were not uncommon in the west of
Ireland,
and two almost complete ones can be seen at Teampall Chrónáin in the Burren. The possible chapel wall is ten paces to the north of the shrine, and about nine paces long. The site is marked “Kilcholan” on the OS maps, and O’Donovan took
down its name as Cill Chomhla or Cill Chonan. He heard that it was regarded as the grave of a saint. I talked to the old lady who owned those fields, Grannie Hernon in Cill Mhuirbhigh, and her pronunciation of the name would agree with O’Donovan’s first version. She also told me that there is a pot of gold buried there, guarded by a black cat which she often saw when milking the cow. And once, when some men were about to disturb the old stones in order to mend the wall between her land and
Concannon
’s to the west of it, they stopped when a voice said to them,
“Éistigí!
Éistig
í
!”
(Listen! Listen!). I could not have expressed the essential more succinctly myself.

Dún Eoghanachta seems to dominate the sky above these ground-hugging monkish remains, for its rampart comes close to the break of the slope and stands twenty feet high at that point. A little west of Cill Chomhla, near another boreen passing up the hill from Eoghanacht village, is a large grassy hummock in which, according to the owner of the land, the Fir Bolg are said to have buried their tools after completing the fort. (In fact this hummock seems to be a settlement site, or a
fulacht fia,
a
cooking site, perhaps of the Bronze Age.) He had heard this from Micilín Ó hIarnáin, the father of Colie Mhicilín, whose short stories of Aran life I mentioned in my first volume. Colie himself was the nearest to a
seanchaí,
a custodian of traditional lore, that we had in Eoghanacht—at least, his Sruthán neighbour Máire Pheige Cuaig used to refer to him as “him that has all the talk”—and he held that the settled belief of the old generations was that the forts were built by the Danes. Colie told me about the Danes in the course of a long walk up the boreen from Eoghanacht onto the high plateau to the south. In a field a little beyond the point where the boreen gives up and leaves one to clamber over wall after wall towards the Atlantic cliffs, we looked at the traces of some very wide ridges. We agreed that flax had probably been grown in them, but Colie said that such ridges used to be “put down to” the Danes, who it seems were secretive about their skills. They had some sort of manure; what it was, nobody knew, but it was
supposed
to be
i
gceann
an
iomaire,
in the head of the ridge, and it saved them going down to the beach for seaweed. He had a story about it, which after some pressing I got out of him, though only as a deprecating aside about “foolish beliefs.” When the Danes were dying out and there was only one man and his son left of them, the Aran people were anxious to learn the secret of this manure, so they captured the man and the boy and threatened to put them to death if they would not tell it. The Dane eventually promised to tell, on condition that they first kill his son so that he would not hear him betraying the secret. So they killed the boy, and then the Dane said, “You may do what you want with me now, for I will never tell the secret.”

I had read of a similar folktale, widespread in Ireland, in which the Danes’ secret is the recipe for making beer from heather;
evidently
Aran’s preoccupations differed from those of the mainland. This Aran version was new to me, however, and I asked Colie why he had never told it to me before. “I thought you wouldn’t be interested in that old rubbish,” he replied.

Dún Eoghanachta has not been examined in detail since Westropp’s day, and the dating-methods of modern archaeology have not been applied to it, but from its general appearance the cashel as we see it now is probably of the Early Christian
centuries
. It consists of a single massive ring-wall, most of it over
sixteen
feet high, except to the east, where the entrance is rather broken-down. It would take about a hundred and twenty good paces to walk round it. As it did not need to be buttressed like the other cashels when the Board of Works restored it in 1884, it has retained its original simplicity; it can even appear rather dull in its severity. The wall has a slight “batter” or inward inclination, and vertical joints running up the entire height of it show that it was constructed in a number of lengths, perhaps each the work of a separate team. Many of the stones in it are three or four feet long. The total thickness of the wall is about sixteen feet, and, like the principal ramparts of the other cashels, it consists of three separately faced layers; the innermost layer is only brought up to
a height of four to six feet and forms a terrace around the interior, but the outer two have been finished off (perhaps in the
restoration
) to a common height, and the distinction between them is obscured. O’Donovan in 1839 made out that the doorway
originally
had been only three foot four inches wide, but its height and other characteristics could no longer be determined; Westropp in 1910 noted that it had been rebuilt and was about six feet wide. The interior space or garth is a very nearly circular plot of nibbled-down grass about ninety feet across. Apart from the low
foundations
of three straight-walled huts against the inside of the rampart, the garth is bare and flat; it seems to lay itself out for pacing to and fro. At five points of the circumference, steep ladder-flights of steps lead up to the terrace, and three of them, according to Westropp, were continued to the top of the parapet by diverging pairs of smaller stairs set sideways into the wall. One of these pairs is still quite clear, but the others are very delapidated. Otherwise the general appearance of the interior is of Board-of-Works
efficiency
, tidy, disappointing.

If in average daylight the
dún
seems to regard the past with a bored and disabused eye, one should revisit when wisps of mist are blowing through it, as I saw them once, a cantering procession of the near-invisible. Or one should attend to its name, which is one of those that says
“Éistigí!
Éistigí!”
Here is a thread of the Eoghanacht story, teased out of a tangle of myths:

Not long before history began, when Conn of the Hundred Battles, ancestor of the Connachtmen, was King of Ireland, a rival hero, Eoghan Mór, seized power in Munster. Eoghan means “good conception,” and he was to give rise to the dominant sept of early medieval Munster, named after him the Eoghanacht. He was also highly regarded in mythological retrospect by Leinster, which believed that during his fosterage by a Leinster king he had helped to build a fort, by throwing into position a great stone no one else could shift. The builder of the fort was Nuadhu,
ancestor-god
of the Leinstermen, and by this deed Eoghan earned another of his several magical names: Mugh Nuadhat, the servant of
Nuadhu. Thus Eoghan represents the entire southern half of Ireland, immemorially embattled against the north.

When Conn brought his forces against Eoghan at the battle of Carn Buidhe (near the present Kenmare), Eoghan would have been killed but for the magic of Éadaoin, a famous beauty of the otherworld, who made rocks appear as soldiers in the eyes of Conn’s army, spirited Eoghan and his men away to her seven ships, tended their wounds, and allowed them to sail off to Spain. The princess of Spain fell in love with Eoghan, and gave him a cloak of the skin of a wondrous salmon she had caught; hence his third magical name, Eoghan Taidhleach, from his bright
(taid-
hleach)
cloak. He married the princess, and when after nine years he became homesick, he brought her back to Ireland with a fleet and an army supplied by her father. There he united the southern provinces against Conn once again.

After many battles Conn had to agree to divide Ireland with Eoghan. The boundary ran from the head of Galway Bay to
Dublin
Bay, the north being Leath Choinn or Conn’s half, and the south Leath Mhogha or Mugh’s half, and the boundary itself
being
the glacial gravel-ridges of the Eiscir Riada, that provided a winding route across the central boglands. But they fell out again over the division of Dublin Bay; Conn attacked and routed Eoghan’s army, Eoghan and Conn wounded each other, and
finally
Eoghan was speared to death by Conn’s warriors. However, his son Ailill Ólom secured the territorial rights of the Eoghanacht, by mating with (raping, according to a hostile version circulated by the Connacht interest) the goddess Áine, tutelary deity of Cnoc Áine in the middle of the fertile plains of Munster.

The dawn-light of history shows an Eoghanacht dynasty ruling from the great rock fortress of Cashel, and establishing its collaterals and its subject-peoples throughout Munster. They expanded north-westwards to Galway Bay, ousting the Connachta from that region with the aid of their vassals the Dal gCais,
suppressing
the indigenes of Ninuss, which seems to have comprised Corcomroe, the Burren, and the Aran Islands, and establishing
in their place a branch of the sept, the Eoghanacht Ninussa. This probably happened in the fifth century, for it is reflected in the legend of St. Enda’s being granted Aran by the king whom St. Patrick himself had converted at Cashel, Oengus mac Nadfroích. Eventually the Eoghanacht lines were to be supplanted by the Dal gCais, from whom Brian Borumha, and so the O’Briens, descended; but in its prime the Munster of the Eoghanachta was probably the most advanced and peaceable part of Ireland,
cultivating
the beginnings of writing in Irish, trading goods and ideas with Aquitaine and Gaul.

Of the seven Eoghanacht septs, the least known to history is the Eoghanacht Ninussa. They had evidently lost their territory to the Corcu Modruad, the aboriginals of Corcomroe, by 1016, when the latter’s king was killed by the Conmaicne (presumably those of Connemara) in the Battle of Aran, in the bay below Mainistir. References to the Eoghanacht Ninussa in the annals and genealogies for the intervening four hundred years are very sparse, and the name of Dún Eoghanachta is one of the few memorials of their reign. Another is
The
Voyage
of Maol Dúin,
one of the great
immrama
or voyage-tales, which after long oral
evolution
was written down in the ninth century by Aed Finn, chief sage of Ireland, “for the elation of the mind and for the people of Ireland after him.”

Aran knows nothing of Maol Dúin or indeed of the Eoghanacht, but this fantastic story may even be rooted in Aran, for the hero’s father, Aillil Ochair Ágha, is described as a warrior of Árainn. I leap to the conclusion that he lived in Dún Eoghanachta. Maol Dúin’s mother was a nun; again it is
intuitively
obvious to me that she lived in one of the huts of Cill Chomhla, in the shadow of Ailill’s ramparts. Ailill had died
before
the child was born, and he was given to a queen of some other realm and reared in company with her three sons. Maol Dúin excelled them in all things, so that they became jealous and teased him with his ignorance of his parentage; this drove him to discover that his father had been killed by men of a Leinster sept.
A druid in Corcomroe advised him to build a boat and go with a crew of exactly seventeen men to seek revenge. His three foster-brothers insisted on joining the crew, and he accepted them
reluctantly.
They arrived off an island where they overheard a man boasting that he was the slayer of Ailill, but because the druid’s council had been violated, a storm erupted just as they were about to land, and swept them out to sea.