Stones of Aran (19 page)

—and then I gave up and turned to survey the dismal geography below. The island is a battered oval plain a third of a mile long from north to south, with a hillock added onto the north-west where a long point of rock runs out into the waves, which today were fretful. The storm beach encircles all the low-lying ground except to the east of the tower, and it has spilled inwards over much of the western sector. Outside it in that direction is a
hundred
yards of wet rock shelving smoothly into a rim of surge and spume, and beyond that nothing but the wan curve of the world that hides America. I soon descended to the frowsty room with the radio, where several men were now gathered.

It transpired that I had chosen a bad time to call, for the
helicopter
bringing a relieving crew was even now on its way from its base at Cork, while the departing men were busy packing, their minds on the coming “month off” rather than the expiring “month on.” A polygonal radio argument was in progress between the helicopter pilot, a controller at Shannon airport, and the
various
lighthouses to be called at in some order which was to be
optimized
. I soon saw that the Lighthouse Service’s toughest logistical problem is the productivity of those empty hours of the “month on,” the ships-in-Dimple-Haig-bottles, lighthouses made of matchsticks, balsawood Connemara cottages, raffia-work stools and red-sails-in-the-sunset done in luminous string pegged out on black velvet, all fragile and voluminously wrapped, which their originators felt should have precedence in the helicopter’s hold over empty gas-cylinders and the like. At last the pilot, rapidly
approaching
the point where he had to decide whether to head first for South Aran (i.e. Inis Oírr’s lighthouse), “Slyne” (Slyne Head light, off Connemara) or “North Aran” (the Earragh light),
ordered
everyone to go and measure and weigh their luggage and count the gas-cylinders. The room emptied except for an Aran man I knew slightly.

The lighthouse keeper (I generalize) is of a phlegmatic and
inward
temperament, engendered perhaps by the tinned diet of baked beans and Irish stew or the restriction of exercise to
left-handed
ascents and right-handed descents of the corkscrew stairs. But along with a formidable capacity for long silences, he has deeply buried resources of sardonic humour. We were talking about a school of dolphins we had both seen playing in and out of the bay at Cill Mhuirbhigh over a period of a few days not long before. I described how they had danced on an evening of silken calm, leaping clear of the water in graceful arcs that crossed in pairs; as I had sat in a little field above the bay to watch, their plunges had been the only sound in the world. He listened to me expressionlessly, then turned his eyes to the dingy window and the
dingy sky beyond. “That’s right,” he said, “and on Sunday
morning
they were all kneeling on the beach!”

Then the buzz of the helicopter was heard and I went out to see it come, ladybird-red, hunched and leaning forward urgently. (Every second Friday we see it go by, a bright noisy little
punctuation
mark in Aran-time.) It clattered down and posed on tiptoe within the circle whitewashed on the bare ground of the yard. The rotor spun impatiently while the doors slid back, three men leapt to the ground, wrestled their bags and boxes out of the holds
below
, ran crouching under the blast to the living-quarters and
disappeared
through the little green doors as if eager to begin their month’s vigil; the departing crew ran out equally eagerly, stuffed their goods in, slammed the curved gleaming scales of the hatches and scrambled aboard; the helicopter hopped into the air at a tilt and blew away over the high wall, thistledown in a hurry, and was gone. As the silence recollected itself I found myself alone in the yard.

At a loss, I loitered out of the gate and climbed onto a rock to see if Seán and Beartla were coming for me yet. The currach was far away off the north of the other island, and stationary. Land, sea and sky agreed on dullness. Fighting the abject determination of mood by weather, I set off on a slow scientific tour of
unpromising
terrain to the north-west. I saw some grey-green leaves of rose-root, and the more usual Aran maritimers such as sea-pink, sea-campion, pellitory and wild angelica. In the deep crevices was a mysterious splendour of buttercup-gold: rank-stemmed and profusely flowering lesser celandine glowing in the dimness three or four feet below ground. And a more unusual find, a dwarf
version
of scurvy grass (a form of
Cochlearia
danica,
I thought, but the botanical establishment later identified my specimen, rather hesitantly, as
C.
officinalis
) in which the leaves were plump
kidney-shaped
pastilles only two millimetres across and the flowers were equally minute white stars.

I also saw one or two rats scuttling from crevice to crevice; they
are there because of the lighthouse and despite the fact that a keeper once brought in some of the highly reputed magic soil of Tory Island to discourage them. Because of the rats, no birds nest on the island. But I did notice a collared dove sitting on the very farthest rock of the north-west headland and staring out to sea as if to make the point that the whole of Aran has now been
colonized
by these recent arrivals (for this species has expanded across Europe from Turkey since the Thirties; it first nested in England in 1955, in Ireland in 1959, and has been part of the street-life of Cill Rónáin since about 1973 so far as I can discover). The perch of this specimen suggested some thoughts about the oddness of the dusky Levantine coming within sight of the glacial fulmar, for that species only started to spread south and east from Iceland in the 1870s, and now nests nearly all round the coasts of Ireland and Britain. But communities of different birds are not only mutually infertile but mutually invisible, it seems; nor did my thoughts come together fruitfully, so I moved on. Desolation threatened; I wished I were at home. I was bored and cold by the time I came round to the landing-place again. The currach was lurching in to the quay, and I had to steel myself for the slimy steps and the
awkward
jump aboard.

Landing on the other island is much easier as there is a bay on its south coast where a currach can be nosed onto a little beach of sand. Two islets, each a single four-or five-acre slab of rock, stand protectively south and south-east of the bay and are joined to its western arm by a natural mole of jumbled boulders called An Clochar Bán, the white stone-heap, from the brightness of its outer face perpetually shuffled and scuffed by the sea. The bay is simply An Caladh, the harbour, and it is so sheltered that the Bun Gabhla men have their
potaí
stóir
, the big wooden cases in which the catch of lobsters is accumulated and kept alive until it is worth taking across to Ros a’ Mhíl, floating at anchor here.

But the protection offered by An Clochar Bán can be delusive. As we edged in through the shallows Seán told me about a
drowning
here long ago. Two Connemara smugglers were sailing by on their way to Kerry with a cargo of
poitín
, the illicit barley spirits, when rising seas forced them to run for this bay. (Their boat was a
gleoiteóg
, a small version of the “hooker,” Connemara’s famous single-masted wooden work-boat.) They moored the boat and came ashore to sit out the night and the storm in the lee of a
boulder
. But with the storm at its height on the top of the tide, waves began to break over An Clochar Bán and burst into the bay from the rear. One of the men went down to see if the moorings were holding, slipped between boat and shore, and was swept away in the darkness.

Seán went on to tell of an incident early in this century when several Bun Gabhla men were weather-bound here for a few days. Their friends and families could see them across the raging
channel
but had no way of getting food to them. The local agent of the British steam trawlers that used to call in at Cill Rónáin in those days, a retired English army officer called Smith, persuaded one of the trawler captains to sail round, and the men were got off
successfully
. But Smith suffered a fall on deck during the rescue which re-awoke an old war wound, and he died not long
afterwards
. (The Aran lifeboat service was instituted, in 1927, as a
result
of the publicity this event attracted, I have been told.)

Fortified by these precedents, I made ready to be marooned once more. By this time the sun had bored through the greyness and was sprinkling the little bay with welcome. The Aran men jumped ashore with me to stretch their cramped limbs for a few minutes, and we discussed the island’s name. Since not even Seán had an opinion as to its significance, I gave them some of the
various
suppositions I had come across (thus thoroughly muddying the wells for future researchers).

According to the Placenames Department of the Ordnance Survey, this island is Oileán Dá Bhranóg (and hence by
anglicization
Brannock Island, whence the two islands are collectively The
Brannock Islands). So far as I know the only warrant for adopting this version of the Irish name is a mention in O’Flaherty’s
West Connaught
: “There is a waste island on the south-west side, called Oilenda-branoge, where they go to slaughter seals yearly, and where there is abundance of samphire.” O’Flaherty here is using English phonetic values to convey the sound of the Irish name; the official Placenames Department version gives it a
grammatically
respectable spelling, but the sense remains obscure.

Bran
is an old literary word for “raven,” so some writers have suggested that the name means “island of the two little ravens,” the -
óg
being a diminutive. But
bran
also means “bream,” a fish that used to be a feature of this coast (and
brannóg
means “
gudgeon
” according to the dictionaries and perhaps could refer to sundry small fish locally), so other derivations are possible. Again, a stone carrying the inscription in Old Irish, “Pray for Bran the Pilgrim,” was found in the last century at “The Seven Churches” in Eoghanacht, and started some fusty speculation among scholars that a hermit saint called Bran lived here;
Dá Bhranóg
could then mean “your little Bran,” for such affectionate and respectful
possessives
occur in other placenames of saintly origins.

All this, however, presupposes that the sound of the name is as represented by the official spelling, whereas both Aran and Connemara fishermen call it Oileán Dá Bhruithneog, and several of them have told me that a
bruithneog
is a batch of potatoes roasted in ashes such as outdoor workers might make for
themselves
in a hearth of a few stones put together. One Araner from whom I heard this derivation drove home his point by acting out for me the part of a boatman clambering ashore on the island, looking down in surprise and saying (in Irish) “Aha! Two batches of roast potatoes!” Can one imagine that this mythical boatman would go on to say “Therefore let this be the Island of the Two Batches of Roast Potatoes!”? An expert in the field of placenames to whom I mentioned this supposed derivation replied that “Some joker must have invented it.” Perhaps so, but for all its absurdity it
is the only current understanding of the name among the
frequenters
of the place.

Now, if the original sense of a placename cannot be retrieved, how does one prevent a placenames-study degenerating into the sterile exercise of preferring old mistakes to new ones? And even if a degree of probability is attainable, is a name’s origin always its most vital factor? A placename (of the questionable sort I am
discussing
) is perpetually gathering and shedding meanings; it comes down to us a loose bundle which may or may not still contain that kernel, the intitial grain of sense that set it rolling through time. Taken as a cluster of more or less untutored guesses at its origin, the placename (in this wider interpretation) may appear
ridiculous
—witness the present agglomeration of raven, bream, pilgrim and roast potato. But if read as a mnemonic for a history of the mind’s responses to a mysterious marriage of sound and place, the placename can be a word of power—a password, perhaps, to that “step” foreshadowed in the introduction to this book.

Some of above I imparted to Seán and Beartla as we ramped on the shinglebank and expanded in the sunshine. They assented guardedly, and withdrew to their narrow boat and wide sea. I turned and strode inland. A dozen donkeys grazing a thin sandy pasturage raised their heads to see me pass. There are perhaps twenty acres of not very nutritious grass here, of which the
penultimate
village of Aran, Creig an Chéirín, has the grazing rights, rather than Bun Gabhla as one would expect. Sometimes sheep are brought out here by currach in summer, and donkeys not wanted for work are towed out swimming and left to breed. There is a price to be got for donkeys from the tinkers who periodically call round Aran looking for them; so some of these castaways will ascend to the comparative heaven of being children’s pets or
seaside
diversions, if they survive the purgatory of spray-soaked
winters
and parched summers here for long enough. Some do not survive, and there are skeletons on the closely nibbled turf to
remind
one of it. I skirted two or three of these revolting tents of
bone and tattered hide, and went on eastwards, wondering what Bran the Pilgrim, if indeed he did penance here, felt that he
deserved
of the Hereafter. A natural train of thought brought me to the chocolate and the apple in my shoulder-bag; I found a soft and sheltered bank of the eastern shore looking out towards Árainn, where smoke was rising from the chimneys of Bun Gabhla up on the hill, and sat down to eat.