Stones of Aran (14 page)

However, although it seems to be accepted that there was a god Bolgos or Bolgios, O’Rahilly’s wider theses about the nature and origins of the various Celtic immigrations have not found favour,
and nowadays the Fir Bolg are not expected to throw light upon such questions. There is no reason to think that the forts of Aran are the work of an embattled people, least of all one making its last stand, and contemporary ideas of how one layer of Celtic
culture
came to dominate over others are too complex to be
represented
by a story of an invasion. For the time being the Fir Bolg will have to wait until some new approach to the past gives an
unexpected
twist to the kaleidoscope and brings their curious name once more into prominence in the pattern of evidence.

Even the Aran man, who himself used to carry earth to make fields out of rocky flags, whose boats were, until the introduction of canvas, leather bags stretched over a framework, whose
monumental
breeches still amaze the visitor, and who therefore might be expected to show some filial reverence for the Fir Bolg,
attributes
the forts to “the Danes,” that is, the Norse raiders of the ninth and tenth centuries, as do country-folk all over Ireland. This theory seems to have been originated by the fifteenth-century Welsh historian Giraldus Cambrensis and popularized from the eighteenth century on by various writers, before Ireland began to reclaim her own prehistory; a confusion of the Tuatha Dé Danann with the Danes has probably helped its spread. In the only folktale I have heard in Aran about the Dún, from the best of our
surviving
story-tellers, its inhabitants are nameless cannibals preying on the islanders. The mother of a baby boy they had carried off
complained
to a blacksmith (who lived near the shore north of Fearann an Choirce), and he persuaded a girl he knew who worked as a servant in the Dún to make an impression of the key of its “hall door” in dough and smuggle it out to him. He made a key from this mould, and with it the islanders got into the Dún one night while its inhabitants were asleep and killed them all with spears or by throwing them over the cliff.

However, in County Clare I did hear a scrap of folklore that is perhaps a faint echo of the Firbolgian epic. A Ballyvaughan man told me that Dún Aonghasa and a certain fort high on the
shoulder
of Black Head were built by a king and given to his two sons,
because they were always fighting and he wanted to settle them with a sea between them. Now the name of this fort is anglicized as Caherdoon-fergus on the Ordnance Survey maps, but according to Westropp “Fergus” is an error for “Irgus,” who is stated in
Lebor
Gabála
to have settled at Black Head—and indeed the native Irish-speakers of Gleann Eidhneach or Gleninagh nearby do seem to me to call it, very correctly, Cathair Dhúin Irghuis. And of course Aonghas and Irgus were indeed brothers, two of the sons of Umor.

These fragments only confirm that the Fir Bolg, who
originated
in thunderclouds, are now lost in the ashes of cottage
firesides
and the dust of libraries. There is no access to the Dún’s actual past through its legend. And similarly, since those terraces below the cliffs from which the Dún is seen aloft in mythic
splendour
cannot be followed around Blind Sound, one has now to retrace one’s steps some distance to regain the clifftops, before
beginning
the steep approach by way of archaeology.

The three walls of Dún Aonghasa form irregular semicircles, one within another, to which the cliff's edge supplies diameters. The innermost is a massive cashel of unmortared stone blocks, open to the two hundred and seventy foot cliff at the very south-eastern corner of Aran's western plateau. The other two walls, of less
imposing
dry stonework, are not concentric with the inner cashel but enclose much more of the hillside to the east than of the plateau to the west. Thus the eastern sector of the outermost wall comes to the cliff no less than three hundred yards downhill
towards
Blind Sound, and as it is very dilapidated there one can
easily
step across it without realizing its connection with the distant parapets above.

Approaching the Dún from this angle along the rising coast, one notices that the eastern sector of each of its walls stands directly
above a slight sharpening of the slope and follows the almost straight line of a little scarp crossing the hillside from the north to the cliff edge. The outer wall encloses about eleven acres of rough grazing no different from the rest of the hillside, profusely set with the harsh blue jewels of the spring gentian in March or April, when the thin turf is still cowed by winter. Over much of its length this wall is about six feet thick and stands nowadays to a height of five feet. In its northern arc is a low entrance, lintelled with several seven-foot long blocks, which is loosely filled with stones, for this first line of defence (if that is what it was)
nowadays
functions as a field-wall. It appears that in any case it was an afterthought or was never intended to do more than protect cattle at night from the casual thief or wolf, for within it, before the next wall, is a band of stones set like spikes in the ground, which
obviously
begins the cashel's more formidable defences. This abattis or
chevaux-de-frise
is from thirty to eighty feet deep, and on the east it occupies the steeper slope immediately before the foot of the middle wall. The stones are three or four feet long, upright or slanting outwards, close-packed, and must have been much more of an obstacle than the thinner array before Dúchathair. The wall behind them is eight feet thick and eleven feet high, and for most of the way round it is terraced on the inside. At its northernmost point the terrace is interrupted by a gap within which is a blind entrance on the inside of the wall, measuring about four feet in height and width. There is also a break in the wall where the path from Cill Mhuirbhigh comes up, following a walled avenue where it passes through the abattis. The area enclosed measures about four hundred feet from east to west along the clifftop, and about three hundred feet from the cliff to the north. It is more level, but again the eastern sector of the high innermost wall rises from a steep little scarp which becomes in fact a vertical six-foot podium of rock where it approaches the cliff.

This final wall is impressively bulky; it bulges outwards in places and in spite of the weighty buttresses the restorers piled against it in the last century, bits of it occasionally avalanche
down, whereupon local men “build it up rough again, like the rest of it” according to instructions from the Board of Works. Many of its stones are scabbed with dark lumps of chert, a layer of which outcrops on the plateau here at a level corresponding exactly to the stratum noted farther east. The wall is nearly thirteen feet thick and eighteen feet high, and is pierced on the east by a
gateway
only about three and a half feet wide and just over five feet high under the outer lintel. The ground rises through the
thickness
of the wall here, and to compensate for this the ceiling of the entrance, of long stones set across it from side to side, rises in steps from outside to inside. The jambs of the door, which incline
inwards
slightly, are of the same coursed masonry as the rest of the wall. On either side of the doorway a continuous vertical joint runs up through the masonry, and other such joints occur at
intervals
around the wall, suggesting that each sector, and the gateway itself, was built by a separate work-force.

The space within the cashel is roughly a semicircle, open to the cliff edge and about one hundred and fifty feet across. The inside of the wall has two terraces each about four feet wide; these are linked by flights of steps, one on the north of the gateway going directly up the wall like a ladder, and another on the western arc that slants across the wall. At the foot of this stairway is a low
lintelled
recess about five feet deep forming a rectangular cell in the wall. The details of these terraces and steps may be misleading
because
by the time restoration was undertaken, in 1881, the interior had become very ruinous, and no attempt was made to mark where original work ends and speculative reconstruction starts. However, it is certain that the wall did consist of three thicknesses each separately faced, for Westropp saw the ramparts before their “destructive re-edification,” and noted where the fall of part of the outer layer had exposed the well-built face of an inner layer. Similar two-or three-layered walls occur in several major cashels in the Burren; it is a more stable method of construction than the normal one of a single thick wall with well-built inner and outer faces and an interior packed with a mass of smaller stones, which
tend to settle and cause the faces to bulge and even burst. Usually the inner layers are not carried up as high as the outer and form terraces such as one now sees in Dún Aonghasa, but according to Westropp the reconstruction in this case is incorrect, for the inner and outer layers were originally carried up higher than the middle one, which thus formed a sort of sunken walkway around at least part of the top of the wall.

The garth inside the cashel is of quite smooth and level ground except for one rectangular area by the cliff edge that stands a foot or two above the rest, the remains of a stratum that elsewhere has been removed and perhaps furnished blocks for the wall. The Aran people call this platform An Bord, the table. It is
inconceivable
that the garth was always as undefended against the assaults of the wind as it is now; at the very least there must have been a parapet along the edge of the cliff. O'Donovan was quite sure that the cashel was originally a complete oval and had been halved by recession of the cliff. However, I think cliff-fall of this magnitude over the comparatively short time of two thousand or so years since the building of the Dún would have left the sea below full of great blocks as it is elsewhere below the cliffs, but in fact it is fairly clear at this point. Others have held that not only the inner wall but all the defences were once closed perimeters, and indeed that the fort defended a land that stretched miles to the south; but while it is true that the cliffs have been cut back from a coastline farther south, that took place over a time-scale at least a thousand times longer than the history of Dún Aonghasa. And there are other cashels on cliffs, in situations where cliff-recession can be ruled out. In the Burren Lios Mac Síoda and Cathair Chomáin both stand on inland cliffs that form part of their defences. The latter is not unlike Dún Aonghasa, though it is rather smaller and very much more symmetrical; its outer two walls abut on the cliff as do those of Dún Aonghasa, but the ends of its inner wall turn inwards at the cliff edge and are continued along it as a slighter parapet, so that the area enclosed is almost a full circle. On Árainn itself there are the remains of a substantial though little-known
cashel just north of the village of Eochaill, which is a full circle
although
it comes within feet of a twenty-foot inland cliff.
However
, these various cases of forts on cliffs do not throw direct light on Dún Aonghasa. It is only commonsense that suggests that the garth cannot have gaped at the void as it does now; but then the vast scale and extreme situation of Dún Aonghasa should perhaps warn us that commonsense had little to do with its construction.

On the level land to the west the three walls of the Dún are much closer together, and around the north-west there is an extra detached sector, a fifty-yard length of single-terraced wall,
between
the middle and the outermost walls. This anomaly is rather puzzling. In Westropp's diagram it is shown as a loop attached to the middle wall at either end. However, it is not so attached,
except
by a modern field-wall, and as Westropp points out it was originally part of the middle wall itself. It looks as if there were at one time four walls around the Dún, and that for some obscure reason the two intermediate ones were partly demolished and the remaining lengths cobbled together to make one rather buckled and kinked perimeter. If we number the walls one to four
counting
outwards from the central garth, this is what the work
entailed
: the removal of the eastern sector of wall two, the removal of the western and northern sector of wall three, and the building of a new, slightly oblique northern sector to link up the loose ends, leaving the western sector of wall three unattached. As soon as it is pointed out, it is obvious that this is what has been done (though it is much more easily read off an aerial photograph than
recognized
while walking the site), for the inner limit of the abattis, that hugs the foot of the middle wall around its eastern sector,
diverges
slightly from it across the north and follows its old track to link up with the isolated remnants on the west. But why such a vast labour was undertaken, to produce such a botched job,
remains
incomprehensible.

Although it is one of the biggest and the most dramatically sited of the cashels of Ireland, most of the features of Dún
Aonghasa
—its multiple walls, their height and thickness, its abattis
and lintelled gateway, its terraces and steps, even its situation on a high sea-cliff—can be paralleled elsewhere, and it is foolish to speculate on its origins and purpose except in the context of the many hundreds of large stone or earth forts throughout Ireland, or indeed throughout all the former Celtic realms of Europe. That it is so huge is evidence of the self-confidence and stability of the community that built it, not of their fear of imminent overthrow. The siting of its walls seems to show some not very consistent care for tactical advantage; the abattis looks as if it were meant to be taken seriously; but there is no spring within the walls and so the Dún could not have held out against a long siege. This exclusion of wells, which is almost the rule with Irish cashels and those of other regions, was perhaps to avoid pollution of the water-supply. The other Aran cashels, and many of those elsewhere, have
foundations
of stone huts within the garth, but there is no trace of such here, and as the enclosure is of rock bearing only an inch or two of turf, it is unlikely that excavation would produce much
evidence
of living quarters, or of much else. The few finds that have been picked up here—flint arrowheads, a bronze fibula or brooch about two thousand years old—have no obvious relationship to the age or the purpose of these walls. It seems unlikely that anyone would choose such an exposed situation to live in except perhaps for brief periods when attack threatened, or for ceremonial
purposes
. But this is not Tara or Cruachain or Cashel, a natural centre for a wide province, famous in legend and history as a seat of kings and a meeting-place of a people; nothing is recorded of it save for its nominal connection with the perhaps fictitious
adventures
of the Fir Bolg.

In general the raths and cashels of Ireland are thought to date from the Early Historical period, with a few going back as far as the Iron Age, and others dating perhaps from mediaeval times. Cathair Chomáin, for example, one of the few to have been
excavated
, is thought to have been occupied for two comparatively short periods in the ninth century
AD
, though a much earlier date, in the Early Iron Age, has recently been suggested. The smaller
ringforts (as they are conventionally termed) were simply walls to protect stock, around a farmer's hut. Strong farmers perhaps
expressed
their status in that pastoral society by adding an outer wall or two; in fact ancient Irish law-tracts lay it down, at least as an ideal, that a man of such and such a rank should have so many walls to his cashel. But the scale of Dún Aonghasa together with its extraordinary cliff-top perch seems to exempt it from such comparisons. I do not know what degree of conceit and
indifference
to personal comfort would have made a man a
laughing-stock
in the Heroic Ages, and I would rather believe the place was built for the worship of storms, to which it is well adapted, than to impress the neighbours. It is generally thought to date from a few centuries
BC
, in the Early Iron Age, but on rather vague grounds—the occurrence of the abattis in similar cashels of that age in Iberia, which is a likely source of influence on prehistoric Ireland, and so on. Ultimately nothing definite can be said as yet about the purpose of Dún Aonghasa; perhaps a more detailed modern investigation would provide an answer, but the stony
terrain
is unpromising.

I usually glance around Dún Aonghasa with a slight sense of exasperation on leaving it, not just because archaeologically
speaking
it is a puzzle, for archaeology in itself is not my concern, nor because as a romantic materialist I would have preferred it in its unrestored state, described as “a weird chaos of ruined heaps,” nor yet because it has been drained of poetry by over-frequentation, by me among the thousands, but because once again I have failed adequately to
be
in this strange place, this knot of stone from which the sky has broken out. So I promise to come back and try again, to approach it from a different angle, take it by storm or moonlight, bring a measuring tape or a bottle of wine. But in this mood of frustration I leave it for the moment with this tart
comment
, that could be read as a feminist one, on its military
pretensions
, from the two women writers Somerville and Ross, who walked to it over the rocks from Killeany Lodge where they spent a long hot fortnight in 1895: