Stones of Aran (65 page)

After the ceremony we met the works manager, who was still round-eyed from the experience of coming out from Galway in the
Naomh
É
inne
;
the old tub had stopped off Inis Meáin first, and the natives had rowed out to meet it in their currachs, “like savages!” he said, obviously wondering if the values of Brum could be imparted to such anthropophagi. Relationships between the management and the indigenes were not good from the
beginning
. Soon an advert appeared in the papers; a foreman was required, who must be a disciplinarian. Clearly, the missioners of the Black Country suspected that certain theological concepts, such as “8.30 sharp every weekday morning,” and especially “8.30 sharp even on the morning after a Sunday-night
céil
í
dance,” were not well developed here.

We also got to know a young worker sent across from the mother-factory, presumably as an example of what was required. Roy often called in at the Residence to reminisce about city life: the crunch of his Doc Marten boots as he walked down to the Bull Ring on a Saturday night; the roar of his motorbike when he was tormenting the bourgeoisie of the suburbs on a Sunday afternoon. We heard about his unrequited love for an island girl employed in the factory. She complained that the dance he performed in the Community Hall was too violent; but, as he tried to explain, it had to be violent because it was the Angel Dance. (Roy was a Hell’s Angel, or had cherubic aspirations to be one.) One Friday afternoon when she was working a press that stamped out small components one by one, Roy offered to help her finish off a rush-job. The machine was controlled by two buttons, one on either side, which had to be pressed simultaneously, thus
keeping
the operator’s hands out of harm’s way. Roy kindly showed her a method of speeding up production: he would press one of the buttons for her, while she positioned the blanks and pressed the other. Inevitably she nearly lost a finger, which blighted his chances for ever.

The proprietor of the business used to fly in occasionally with his teenage mistress and stay at a nearby guest-house. As it happened,
we never met them, although Roy told me, man to man, that it would be worth while strolling up to have a look at the girl. Soon the guest-house owner was getting sick with anxiety as unpaid bills mounted up. We wrote letters on his behalf, to no avail. I remember the anguish in his voice, trying on the telephone with his limited English to get through the practiced evasions of a
receptionist
in Birmingham, shouting at her, “Tell him to tell him I told him to tell him!” Aer Árann were in a stronger position to get their dues; once when some factory executives were waiting in the plane for take-off, the pilot ordered them out, and left them stranded. It was only about a year before the bubble burst. No more than about twenty-two had been employed, and suddenly they were told to take a week’s holidays. Anxious renegotiations of terms took place between Gaeltarra and the management, but finally Gaeltarra had to move very quickly to prevent them shipping out machinery bought with the taxpayers’ money. Dara’s prophecy was fulfilled exactly. There was scarcely a word about the collapse in the papers. We wondered how much cultural damage had been done by the barbarian invasion brought down upon Aran by the official protectors of its well-being, but in the event, the island remained philosophical about its proven insufficiency to modern times.

An Irish company, Telectron Ltd., soon took over the factory, with similar fanfares, for the assembly of telecommunications gear. I never knew much about the factory’s internal dramas after that, but I believe it served the community well, to the tune of twenty to thirty reasonable jobs, until the interminable recession of the late ’eighties ground down the parent company and left only a tiny rump of it under local management in Aran. In its steady years it even enhanced the valley of the Seven Churches, for its gleaming paint and glasswork eclipsed the slovenly grey shed. Whenever I cycled by, hands were raised to wave behind the big plate-glass windows, and there were faces, difficult to put a name to among the reflections of old Aran’s cloudy stones and lichenous skies, but smiling.

Three hundred and fifty-four feet is no great height, but in
attaining
to it on westernmost part of its tripartite plateau, Aran seems to gather itself up as if to crane over the horizon. Beyond the Seven Churches the road begins to negotiate the scarps obliquely, one by one, and at the top of each rise a boreen turns off to the left, to scale the hillside directly. The first little
carcair
is by the modern chapel of Sts. Patrick and Enda, two hundred yards
beyond
the last old cottages of Eoghanacht village. The boreen that goes off round the west gable of the chapel and up the face of the hill is Ród na Creige Móire, the road of the big crag, and the big crag itself is the rim of the terrace that provided the site of the chapel. This was one of the customary places for erecting small funerary cairns, and there were also two, perhaps more, of the bigger, inscribed, monuments on the crag, which were destroyed when the chapel was built in 1958. Two plaques from these have been set in the roadside walls; they are dated 1814 and 1811, and since the latter (together with the much more elaborate and
probably
imported Eochaill example already mentioned) is the earliest of them all, I transcribe it—

—not so much in honour of Thomas Coneely, but of his
mourners
, who perhaps initiated the custom, and whose creative act in so doing is, as mentioned in my earlier chapter on these monuments, one of the many aspects of Aran that thwart my understanding.

Tucked into the farther corner of the third field uphill from the chapel is another frustrated line of enquiry. Colie Mhicilín, conducting me up the boreen once, pointed out a spring well
there, a seepage from between two layers of rock where the ground steps up a few feet at the back of the field, that collects in a
water-worn
channel and fills a beautiful natural basin. In a cleft beside it, and among the water-weeds of the pool, is a collection of small things left there by the clients of this well, which perhaps is not quite a holy one: a big whelk-shell for supping the water from, scallop-shells, a broken comb, rusty horseshoe nails, shards of pottery, a clay pipe-stem, buttons and coins (of which the most recent was dated 1974). It is called Bullán na Caillí, the rock-bowl of the old woman, a name which connects it with a
bean feasa
or woman of knowledge, a herbalist, a hag, a witch—the range of meanings of the word
cailleach
reflecting the perception that an old woman is always something more than just an old woman. In the middle of the last century there was a herb-woman living quarter of a mile or so farther west; this is how an old man spoke of her to Ruairí Ó hEithir when he was researching Aran folk medicine in the 1970s:

One of her specialties was a cure for wind: she would inflate a sheep’s or pig’s bladder and let the air out slowly as she passed it over the sufferer’s stomach, and the pain would disappear. She also had an inexhaustible supply of turf in her loft, until one day her father disobeyed her by going up to fetch turf from it himself, and found the room empty. (Perhaps it was not just herbs she brought home from her midnight prowlings.) Ruairí Ó hEithir suggests that she is likely to have been the practitioner of
disease-transference
Nathaniel Colgan heard about when he was
botanizing
in Aran in 1892. However Colie could not, or perhaps did not want to, tell me anything about the well beyond its name, and could not confirm its connection with Máirín a’ Chaiptín. Also,
while he had heard of diseases being transferred to donkeys, and seemed to believe in that as a possibility, he would not allow that they might have been transferred to other human beings. I was left slightly irked by the refusal of all these hints to cohere into the story of this well.

In fact Colie was rather evasive on the topic of magic, which naturally arose as we walked on. A few fields further up the hill we saw a scrap of blue plastic material fluttering from a cranny in a wall. He said that some people would leave a rag like that in the corner of a field to ward off ill-luck. But I could not get it clear from him whether that particular rag was there to scare birds or fairies, or indeed whether or not such things were still done. I felt that if I had had some training in folklore research I would have heard—what I wanted to hear, that magic’s writ still runs in Aran.

After climbing a scarp a quarter of a mile up from the road, and then another, Ród na Creige Móire suddenly sprouts four limbs, all elbows and knees, and then one or two more, with which it swarms over the brow of the hill and sprawls to its many ends, all a long way from anywhere; I remember how wearisome I found it, tramping out these rigmaroles one by one for my map. In a field full of brambles separated by another field full of
brambles
to the south-east of the first turn to the south of the first branch to the east of this aporia, are very indistinct remains of a stone hut called Clochán an Airgid, which houses the same vague tale of buried treasure as the Clochán an Airgid I described south of Mainistir. (I have to admit to myself that I sometimes found Aran boring and repetititious.) And half a mile up the second branch to the south off the westernmost branch, where the boreen stops for the space of a few fields and then starts again for no
apparent
reason, there are two
cloch
á
in
with roofs and windows, the details of which I will not trouble to record as they are largely the result of an outburst of creativity on the part of the Office of Public Works’ local employees in the 1960s.

And once again, beyond the nerve-ends of this boreen-system, now to be visited for the last time so far as this book is concerned,
is the unnerving landscape of Na Craga, the familiar mesh of countless stony fields, all clenched and gnashed together like the cogs and ratchets of an antique clock long ticked to a stop, its key lost. Sometimes the tense stillness is more than stone itself can bear; as when a stone lying in the thin grass hears me coming, holds its breath hoping I won’t see it, and at the very last moment as I am about to tread on it, snaps with anxiety and goes
panicking
off, a snipe, staggering up the sky, dodging imaginary
gunshots,
and flutters down as if exhausted into a distant field.

In retrospect now, I see these lonely quarters in high summer, with restless harebells reluctantly tethered against the breeze by their slim stalks, and all the other vegetation gone course and seedy: the knapweeds and hardheads, which after the purple thistle-like flowers have withered turn out their ruffs of silvery sepals that glint like mirrors; the scraggy devilsbit scabious and bartsia and yellow rattle. Down in the crevices, dewberry fruit, like blackberries but with just three or four big sachets of
sweetness;
the Araners call them
crúibíní,
trotters, from their shape. Aimlessly here and there about these light-scoured expanses goes the loosely fluttering grayling butterfly, that alights beside me as I sit on a rock, closes its wings to show the little eye-like roundels on the underside of the forewing for a moment, and then when no enemy has betrayed its presence by a move, covers them with the mottled grey hindwings and leans over, away from the sun, almost flat to the ground and looking so like a flake of
lichen-covered
limestone that it effectively disappears. Sometimes there are dozens of dark green fritillaries too: big, fast-flying butterflies, reddish-brown and black above, green and silver below, that dash from field to field with an impatient rattling of wings. On hot days these crags sizzle like frying-pans with insect life; grasshoppers spark to and fro, caterpillars ready to pupate have tantrums in their too-tight skins, the clover-heads are bowed under swooning clusters of six-spot burnet moths, rose chafer beetles like half-inch nuggets of green gold orbiting with the inertial fatalism of
asteroids
crash softly into purple beds of hemp agrimony. Everything
is burning with particularities:
I
fly like this,
I
jump like this,
I
eat this,
my
wings have six red spots on black, nothing else is like
me
! And of each of these tiny egos, there are millions of replicas. They fly up from disturbed bushes like the contents of a jewellery-shop fleeing a blaze; they swarm and pluck at me in their paroxysms of individuation: am I not going to mention them, the small copper butterfly I saw at Clochán an Airgid, the unspotted form of the six-spot burnet, the cinnabar moths, the sapphire-bright
common
blues? And they will never understand, and if they could understand would never accept, that my book can only achieve its end by relinquishing its all-inclusive aspirations.

All these identical fields of shaggy grass and herbs struggling up through shattered rock are fiercely individualistic too, if one makes the mistake of paying attention to them. Thousands of names must have been given to them over the centuries, most of them forgotten; I have only recorded a few dozen. By the two restored
clo
cháin
is one called Creigeán na Banríona, the queen’s
crag-cum
-field; Colie cannot tell me why. To the east of the end of the eastern branch of the boreen coming up south from Clochán an Airgid is Scrios Buaile na bhFeadóg, the open tract (this seems to be the local meaning of
scrios
in this context) of the pasture of the lapwings; and there are often lapwings on this plateau, or soaring above it, screeching and tumbling as if perpetually let down by the properties of air in their efforts to be free of the ground of Aran.

The one place-name that best stands for these uplands in my mind, or for the tensions I associate with them, is Creigeán an “Lookout.” This is the third field south of the final angle of the westernmost of the four branches of the boreen (I only specify this to convey the maddening intrication of place up here); it is close to the highest point of this end of the island, and is the first place one reaches, coming up from the village, from which the whole western sea-horizon is visible. Certain families used to keep a lookout posted here for sailing vessels inward bound for Galway, so that their menfolk could row out in their currachs to meet them and propose themselves as pilots through the rocks
and shoals of Galway Bay. (Jokes were made about these Aran pilots. For example: the Araner assures the captain of the ship that he knows every rock in the bay, and is taken on as pilot. Soon afterwards the ship shudders to a halt against a rock.
Captain
: “I thought you said you knew every rock in the bay?”
Araner
: “I do—and that’s one of them!”)

I too often looked out of Aran from these heights, and
sometimes,
especially latterly, with a sense of longing. I learned the name of Creigeán an “Lookout” not from Colie—it was almost outside his territory, being on the borders of Creig an Chéirín—but from an old man called Tomáisín Jamesie. Creig an Chéirin is divided into two quarters, Lios na dTrom (“the fort of the
elder-bushes
” is most probably the sense of this) and An Sliabh Mór, the big mountain, farther to the west. In broad terms the boundaries of these subdivisions run approximately Aran-north-south across the island, which is just under two miles wide here, but in detail they are extremely tortuous, and Tomáisín would trust nobody but himself to make sure I marked them down correctly on my map. I became obsessed with this problem, returning to the hunt for certainty again and again, struggling from field to field to field with Tomáisín, or by myself in accordance with notes taken down from his voluble directions, trying to identify a field-wall that was slightly thicker or more ivy-grown than the rest, or one that had no “gaps” in it and therefore separated two holdings and probably two quarters. Sometimes I felt that I was in caught in the knot of these obsolete and well-forgotten discriminations, so that, to lift my head from their tediously predictable and yet impenetrable dodges and tricks-of-the-loop, and look out at the distant great world, was almost an escape. Connemara in particular attracted me; at that period I was already mentally stretching a new, broader, canvas for myself there. Aran felt too small, though I knew I would never get to the bottom of it. Sometimes, on returning to the island after a short absence, I would cycle to one end of it and look out, and the next day cycle to the other end and look out, and wonder how to get through the next few months. Also, there was
something unsettling and illicit about the calm in which I lived here. Aran has had its famines and oppressions, even, on a small scale, its wars, but for a long time it has had only private troubles, and the great causes seem far away. I would read in the newspapers, several days late, about a world so full of horrors that my seclusion seemed to tempt fate; the sky when I looked out from Aran was rimmed with black, like blood under a bruised fingernail.

But if I had doubts about the worth of what I was doing,
seeing
myself against that horizon of deadly debate, Tomáisín did not, and was happy to accompany me on afternoons of rambling. Or did I delude myself? Was it merely that, as he told me once when I found him standing becalmed at the gate of his cottage, “
Níl
tada
le
deanamh
ag
seanfhear
” (there’s nothing for an old man to do)? In any case, my reading of the lines of his land gave him the gratification a palmist would have offered him: the
tribute
of attention, loading the worn traces of his everyday life with significance—and what that significance was, perhaps hardly mattered; it was in itself significant. So, when he could delight me by leading me through ever narrower
róidíní
to something worthy of being marked on a map, he was delighted with himself. Coming back from Boithrín an tSléibhe Mhóir, the main path running south across An Sliabh Mór, we took a crooked little shortcut into Lios na dTrom territory called Bóithrín Thobar na hEochraí, the boreen of the well of the fish-spawn (that at least seems to be the sense of the name), and when he reached the well itself Tomáisín, who was ahead of me, turned round with the air of a showman, and pointed out a ruin hardly bigger than a dog-kennel hidden in the bushes. Unfortunately he saw that I had guessed what it was before he opened his mouth, and his face dropped; I regretted that. It was an old
poitín
still, like those I had been shown hidden away in similarly discreet corners of Connemara. In fact this one had been built by a distiller from the Maigh Cuilinn area who settled in Aran just after the Napoleonic wars, Pádraig Ó Tuathail.
Poitín
is still made in Connemara—in thousands of gallons, at least until the recent stiffening of the law
against it—but not with the patient attention to quality of the old days. Ó Tuathail would have been a craftsman, selecting his barley-grain with care, steeping bagfuls of it in the well, then letting it sprout (perhaps burying the bags in a dunghill or a heap of turf-mould), drying it over a small kiln, grinding it with a hand-quern, soaking it in hot water and drawing off the “ale,” adding yeast and flour, and finally watching over the slow repeated
distillation
, the
singleáil
and the
dúbláil
—all this to be done without attracting the attentions of the police or the coastguards. On one occasion he failed to keep a good look-out, and the smoke of the still was seen from a naval vessel offshore; three or four men were put ashore in a row-boat, crept up the hill and surprised him at work. He was arrested and taken back to the ship. Fortunately one of the crew knew him, and after walking past him once or twice took an opportunity of whispering to him in that language the foreigner does not know, “
A
Phádraig,
cá
bhfuil
do
chuid
snámh?
” (“Patrick, where’s your swimming?”) Ó Tuathail took the hint, leapt overboard and swam for it; a couple of bullets were fired over his head, but he was let get away.