Stones of Aran (11 page)

Gort na gCapall is the only one of Árainn’s fourteen villages, and indeed of the twenty-six villages in the three islands, not to have land reaching to the north coast; Fearann an Choirce, north of it, is the only one not to have an outlet to the south, while all the rest have a strip of territory from sea to sea. Nevertheless, Gort na gCapall is no exception to the rule that the villages stand in the lee of the escarpment out of which the island chain is formed, for here the ridge-line makes a loop to the south that brings it to the Atlantic coast, and although the village is within quarter of a mile of the ocean it is at least partially sheltered by the slight rise of land on its south. Its landing-place, however, in the bay to the south-west of the village, is open to the stormiest quarters, as the
immense storm beach that fills the lap of the bay shows. It is a dangerous landfall; no sand or shingle mediates between the ocean swell and the naked angles of the shore. The little concrete slip built in 1956 was never of much use as the engineers, contrary to local advice, sited it by a vertical rock face against which a currach could easily be thrown by a wave.

A century ago, I am told, there used to be about fourteen
currachs
here. Nowadays the men of Gort na gCapall are either
farmers
who supplement their income by taking tourists about the island in their pony-traps in summer, or trawlermen working out of Cill Rónáin, and it is over a decade since a currach was launched in this bay. The currachs used to be kept propped upside-down on little piles of stones on the wide expanse of flat rock behind the storm beach called Creig na gCurachaí, the crag of the currachs, and here they were regularly re-coated with tar, which left each currach’s resting-place outlined on the smooth rock in black, and this curious after-image of the vanished fleet still persists.

The bay is called Port Bhéal an Dúin, literally the port of the fort’s mouth; the fort is Dún Aonghasa, three-quarters of a mile to the west, and the word
béal
is often used for an opening or bay of the sea. The storm beach wrapped around the bay completely hides it from view as one approaches it along the path from the village, and to reach the landing-place one has to clamber over great battlements of wedged and tilted blocks onto the sea-washed terraces without. Every feature of the bay has its name, though many of them are almost forgotten, now that a detailed
knowledge
of its accesses and obstacles is no longer a matter of survival to the boatmen. It is divided into two halves by a promontory called An Charraigín Gharbh, the little rough rock; the western half, too full of rocks to bring a currach into, is for some reason called Poll an Mhaide Lofa, the bay of the rotten stick, and the slip is in the eastern half, Béal an Phoirt, the mouth of the port. In its approaches is a rock over which rises An Mhaidhm Bheag, the little breaker, which according to a Gort na gCapall man who wrote me an account of bringing in a currach there, dominates the
passage “like a Hydra.” If the sea was at all rough it took a
four-man
crew to bring in the currach sufficiently quickly, during the brief lull of three or four smaller waves that would follow
immediately
after three big breakers had been counted on An Mhaidhm Bheag.

On the east of the bay a wide rock-terrace almost as rectangular as a pier slants gently down into the sea; this is Na Leacracha Sleamhna, the slippery flags, and a sunken rock off it is An Bád Fada, the long boat. The shape of this terrace is due to the
parallelism
of the joints of the limestone; its western edge has been formed along a major joint, and it is divided from the next terrace to the east by another joint that has been enlarged into a deep channel, An Scailp Mór, the big cleft, which was once well known for the valuable spars and other wrack left in it by the falling tide.

The terrace beyond the cleft continues under the cliffs for a few hundred yards back as far as Poll Uí Néadáin (Ó Néadáin’s cave, if my informant’s interpretation of the sound of the name is
correct
). This terrace has a domestic name, Leic an Níocháin, the flagstone of the washing, for it has the “mamillated surface”
already
seen on corresponding terraces farther east, and its
beautifully
rounded rock-pools were used by the village women for washing clothes in. A similar shore-name is associated with several other villages in the three islands. Synge, in his book on Aran, notes that this practice of washing clothes in sea water was the cause of much rheumatism as the salt left in the material made the clothes perpetually damp. However, there are no flows of fresh
water
big enough for such washing and it would have been a heavy labour to collect enough bucketsful from the little springs,
especially
in dry weather. Nowadays of course the housewives of Gort na gCapall have hot and cold water on tap, and Leic an Níocháin is visited only by a few discerning summer sunbathers, for the pleasure of its polished knolls of warm stone and exquisite green aquaria in which tiny translucent creatures hover and dart. It is a secluded and delectable spot—over which an entire cliff face has recently leaned forward, tearing open a crevasse a yard wide and
thirty yards long in the land above, and threatens soon to add its ruins to the scattering of thousand-ton dice previous cliff-falls have flung down upon the inviting resort, as if to say, these
severities
are of the soul of Aran, and the odds against it tolerating
languorous
ease for long are heavy.

If as an artist I wanted to find a sculptural form for my intuition of the Aran landscape, I would not think in terms of circles. Aran’s circles of stone, the great inland cashels and lesser ring-forts, the ancient hunchback huts, Long’s evanescent inscriptions, can be read as fearful withdrawals from these bare spaces or as egocentric stances within them, habits of thought born elsewhere and merely sojourning here, not deeply rooted in the specificity of Aran. In other landscapes the rounded might be equated with the natural and the right angle with the human contribution. Here, though, it is as if the ground itself brings forth right angles. Because of the limestone’s natural partings along its vertical fissures and
horizontal
stratifications, the oblong and the cuboid are the first-fruits of the rock. These are the forms that coerce one’s footsteps in this terrain, and hence have directed the evolution of the chief human stratum of the landscape, the mosaic of fields and the paths that side-step between them. These too are the forms that come to hand in picking up a loose stone to build a wall—and so the
field-patterns
rhyme with the patterns of the stones in their walls. On the largest scale the rectilinear skylines and stepped flanks of Aran remember their origins in the nature of the rock.

A block, then, would best embody the essence of Aran’s
land-forms
—or, since I am dealing in abstractions and have undergone the metamorphoses of contemporary art, the absence of a block, a rectangular void to stand for all blocks. And since the sea is the most decisive sculptor among the various erosive agents that
disengage Aran’s form from its substance, let this void be filled by water, reversing the relationship of sea and island. Site it on one of the great stages of rock below the cliffs; do it on a prodigious scale, a spectacle rather than a gallery-piece; let the ocean dance in it, and the cliffs above step back in wide balconies to accommodate the thousands who will come to marvel at this kinetic-conceptualist, megalominimalist, unrepeatable and ever-repeated, sublime and absurd show of the Atlantic’s extraction of Aran’s square root!

What I have imagined, exists. An exactly rectangular block over a hundred feet long has somehow been excerpted from the floor of a bay in the cliffs, a few hundred yards west of Port Bhéal an Dúin, and the sea fills the void from below. This is Poll na bPéist, the hole of the worms, or The Worm-Hole as it is called for English-speaking visitors; the word
péist
, like the English “worm” in its older acceptances, covers everything from sea-monsters to the grubs that pullulate in rotten seaweed, and nobody knows what sort of creeping thing was originally in question here. It is impossible to see how deep the hole is, and I do not know if the missing block lies in fragments in a sea-cave below or whether it was blasted upwards by the surges and washed of the terrace. On a calm day and at low tide one can reach the spot by following the lowest level of the shore under cliffs that rise westwards from Port Bhéal an Dúin. The rock underfoot here is inhabited by countless purple sea-urchins, each of which has excavated a hole an inch or two deep for itself, and the population is so dense that the
rock-surface
is reduced to a layer of fantastically fretted, brittle spikes. The gap between the line of surf and the foot of the cliff narrows as one goes westwards; sometimes a seal raises its head from the waves close by to watch as one negotiates the shrinking passage. Then the cliff turns at right angles inland, and on following it one finds oneself on the stage of a natural theatre, with the oblong abyss at one’s feet. On such days the water in it is usually still and dark, sunken into itself, leaving the sheer sides too deep to climb. It measures about thirty-six by thirteen slippery paces, and looks like a grim and sinister swimming-pool, the work of some morose
civil engineer. However, despite its dank walls and impenetrable depths, the idea of swimming in it is not quite out of the
question
. Members of a sub-aqua club from Belfast have explored it, and swum out to the open sea through the cave below. And once I met an amiable fantasist here who told me how he had swum in it by moonlight with a beautiful girl forty years ago; it was, he said, one of those holiday affairs: he never even asked her name, and they never met again….

If, while one has been peering into the dark waters or
exchanging
amorous reminiscences with strangers, the tide has crept in and cut off retreat at the outer angle of the bay, one’s best chance is to scramble up the rock-wall, deeply canopied in places and
perfectly
sheer in others, that shadows the broad pavements around the pool; a climb of sixteen or twenty feet brings one onto a wide terrace, above which another forty feet of rock completes the height of the cliff. This intermediate level is immediately
recognizable
from its amœboid rock-pools as the “mamillated surface,” and here it is very evident that it once underlay a clay band, for erosion of the softer material has opened up a horizontal slot all along the base of the cliff above it, four to eight feet high and in places up to forty feet in depth; one can walk into this dripping cellarage, with its wavy floor and low, fossil-studded flat ceiling, and see that its rear wall is of clay, all glistening in the dark with seeping ground-water.

At high tide or in stormy weather these terraces are out of the question, and to see Poll na bPéist one has to struggle along the spray-blown clifftops and hold onto stones of the boulder beach up there to avoid being hurled over by the violent gusts. On such days the gladiatorial display in the arena below features primaeval chaos pitted against fundamental geometry. Each breaker floods the lower terrace and pours in torrents of froth down the sides of the shaft to meet the turbulence bursting up into it from below; the water’s surface comes roaring up between the polished walls, alive with the snaking trains of bubbles that perhaps suggested the name of the place, swills its excess over the brink into the fleeing
wreckage of the wave now retreating from the terrace, then sags and falls back with dizzying speed into the spray-clouded depths of the vault. Throughout the tumult the rock itself conducts a
rigorous
demonstration of its own theorem, like a deaf mathematics lecturer oblivious of his rowdy students; through the pelting
spit-balls
of foam one can see that, for instance, the eastern wall of the hole lies in exactly the same plane as the east-facing wall of the
upper
terrace just to seaward of it, both having been determined by the same joint, which is visible as a finely drawn line crossing the rock-floor between them.

One of the most curious features of this, Aran’s most striking natural curiosity, is that there is no legend attached to it. The writer Tom O’Flaherty pointed this out fifty years ago, and if there had been any traditional tale about the place he would certainly have known it, as a native of Gort na gCapall. He adds that it is time someone invented a story, but I am not sure that I agree. These encircling, overhanging terraces cruelly intent upon the
entrance
to the tomb or dungeon below suggest frightful rites; Ariosto has an episode of a maiden sacrificed to a sea-monster on the coast of Ireland, and one could toy with the idea that it
happened
here. But since it seems that even the most voluble of folk traditions has been left speechless by the place, perhaps it is fitting that this void, this abstract exemplification of Aran’s elements, should remain an emptiness without an explanation.

On fine Saturdays and Sundays in summer a line of slow-moving coloured dots slants across the hillside west of Cill Mhuirbhigh—tourists climbing the path from the village to the famous
prehistoric
fort of Dún Aonghasa. For many of them this is the culmination of their visit to Aran. The intentions of thousands of their predecessors have prepared a way for them that channels
their own intentions, in a self-perpetuating process. The jarveys who wait with their pony-traps at the quay in Cill Rónáin for the steamer from Galway assume that every day-tripper will wish to visit the Dún, and indeed tend to override any hesitations on the matter. Amenities well sited on the road from Cill Rónáin to Cill Mhuirbhigh prosper, while those elsewhere fade. Many visitors find the path up to the Dún too steep and rough for enjoyment, but every spring a little more work is done on it, and improved stiles, whitewashed arrows and fingerposts make it ever less likely that anyone will stray from the groove. The ancient and remote fort is a cog of a world-wide machine, hauling up a chain of
expectations
almost as predictably as a ski-lift.

The “development” of this touristic resource has not been pressed very far as yet, but the convenient and profitable process within the constraints of which most visitors approach the Dún must already be a diminisher of potential experience. Often the steamer's time-table permits only a cursory scramble about the ponderous walls, while the bare space they enclose, as the nominal object of the day's journeying, must be unfulfilling. The hasty frontal assault wins as little from the place, although it now lies open and undefended, as it would have done two thousand years ago when the walls were manned and the gateway closed with a thick wooden door. Like a great personage long inured to the
public
eye, the old fort guards its privacy by a bland vacancy of
expression
; it gives one the impression not only that one has seen nothing but that there is nothing to be seen.

Of course there are ways of penetrating time's defences which a daytrip precludes. One can take a hint from the distant glimpse of the fort's lofty profile against the clouds, and recall all the dreams that have been dreamed about it, or one can tread its ground step by step laden with the doubts and disagreements of the
archaeologists
. This book commits me to both these approaches, and to the attempt to fuse them into some more adequate awareness of what it is like to be in Dún Aonghasa—but still I often look around the place, baffled and a little despondent, and feel that the citadel
might after all fall more readily before the casual glance of a tourist.