Stones of Aran (2 page)

Stones of Aran
PILGRIMAGE

Cosmologists now say that Time began ten or fifteen thousand million years ago, and that the horizon of the visible universe is therefore the same number of light-years distant from us. Appeals are pending, of course, and this sentence of retrospective finitude may be varied, so that in a few years’ time the figure mentioned could look as quaintly crabbed as the dating of Creation at 4004
BC
by an arithmetical theologian of the seventeenth century does today. But for the moment let it stand as the context, the ultimate context, of other spans of time and space mentioned throughout this book (320 million years, a century, a quarter of a mile, a
couple
of paces, are measures that recur, I note, on thumbing through my manuscript) and so of my writing and your reading of these words, that arise like an inwardly directed signpost at one
particular
little crossroads of reality, the coincidence of a period of my life with a spell of Aran’s existence. And let it stand as excuse for such a number of words based on so inadequate an experiencing of such a tiny patch of land, for a natural reaction to the sentence is to immerse oneself in the intense implication of the whole in the particular, if only to make the most out of every square foot of
allotted
ground.

If it is true that Time began, it is clear that nothing else has
begun
since, that every apparent origin is a stage in an elder process. Those three hundred and twenty million years are the time elapsed since the limestone of which Aran is formed was being laid down as layer upon layer of sediment in a tropical sea. But
that sea was already ancient and full of intricate lives, the heirs of a previous three thousand million years of evolution. The sediment itself was the fallout of microscopic skeletons from those
cloud-like
generations of drifting lives, while the shells of bigger, more elaborate organisms buried with and by the rest now form another substantial and visible fraction of Aran’s substance.

This genesis of Aran is not to be distinguished from that of the whole limestone area of central Ireland, or indeed from that of other limestones farther afield in Europe and America that date from this same Carboniferous period. It was another fifty million years before the old sea-bed was brought up into the air so that erosion could begin slowly to carve out the local sea-ways that guarantee Aran a measure of separate destiny. And in another way it is misleading to talk of Aran coming to birth in a tropical sea, as if to imply that the climate here, at this latitude and longitude of the globe, was then tropical. That over-simplification is no longer acceptable even in a layman’s summary of the past, since the
wonderful
speculation of “continental drift” has become the sober
science
of “plate tectonics.” For it is now known that the earth’s crust is made up of fifteen or so contiguous plates, like those of a
tortoise
shell but more various in size and shape, and that these plates are in continuous motion, at rates like an inch a year, bearing the continents and ocean beds with them as comparatively minor
irregularities
of their surfaces. Where two plates are moving away from one another molten rock wells up into the gap from the
interior
of the earth and consolidates to supplement their margins; this is happening along the centre of the Atlantic at present, as America and Europe drift apart. What happens at the other edges where plates are in collision depends on whether they carry the lighter rocks that form continents or the heavier ones that underlie ocean beds. Two continents driven together may crumple and pile up into mountain chains, as in the Himalayas which represent the impaction of India and Asia. Or an oceanic plate may be forced downwards under a continental mass, giving rise to
earthquakes
and volcanoes as it remelts in the depths of the earth; the unrest of the Andes is an effect of South America’s slow overriding of the Pacific plate. So the geographies over which we are so
suicidally
passionate are, on this scale of events, fleeting expressions of the earth’s face. Two hundred million years ago the Atlantic did not exist and all the land-masses of today were clasped together in one continuity, in pre-Adamite innocence of the fact that one day scientists inhabiting its scattered fragments would give it the lovely name of Pangaea, all-earth, and that its unbounded
encircling
ocean was Panthalassa, all-sea.

But even great Pangaea is not the beginning; it is no more than a half-way house, inadequate but indispensable, for the mind
travelling
back in search of Eden. The rocks of Aran, for instance,
pre-date
it, as do many others. Although the previous migrations of the continental bits and pieces that came together to form that one huge and quickly fading image of wholeness are not well
understood
, it seems that the portion of the earth’s crust carrying the sea in which Aran’s limestone was being deposited was at that time in the tropics and south of the equator. The detailed history of that sea, its slow changes in depth, temperature and turbidity, together with that of the life-forms it nurtured, is preserved in the
variations
of the rock-layers themselves, and through its influence on the land-forms carved out of those rocks, with which human
developments
have had to come to terms, impresses a characteristic series of textures—the ground of this book—on one’s experience of the islands today. That history of deposition ended some two
hundred
and seventy million years ago when in the coming together of the provinces of Pangaea mountains were forced up, which would be those of southern Europe, and as a side-effect the bed of this local sea was raised above the waters. Then began the converse process of the breaking down and washing away of highland by heat and frost, wind and rain, a crumb-by-crumb degradation picking away at every weakness in the rocks, until among
innumerable
oddities of topography it gave us Aran, at the same time
as the wider earth-movements were opening Atlantics, elevating Alps and scattering the transitory unity of Pangaea across the face of the globe.

I use the term “Aran” as shorthand for the three Aran Islands, or perhaps for that unsummable totality of human perspectives upon them which is my real subject. But since the islands are a principal part of the Irish language’s last precarious foothold on the world, I will call them individually by their correct names, Inis Oírr, Inis Meáin and Árainn, rather than the anglicisms Inisheer, Inishmaan and Inishmore. (This last was apparently concocted by the Ordnance Survey for its map of 1839, as a rendering in English phonetic values of the Irish “Inis Mór,” big island, a name which did not exist previously but is now replacing “Árainn” even in the island’s own speech.) The islands lie in a line across the mouth of Galway Bay: Inis Oírr, the smallest, has much to do with County Clare five miles away to the south-east; Inis Meáin (which means “middle island’) is the most barren, least visited and until very
recently
the least open to this century’s goods and ills; Árainn, the largest (about eight miles long and two miles across at its widest), exchanges views with the Connemara coast of County Galway six or eight miles to the north.

The name “Árainn,” like the collective “Oileáin Árann,” the Islands of Aran, derives from the word
ára
,
a kidney, the sense of which has spread to include the loins and the back in general, and so come to be applied to the back of a rise of land. This last
meaning
has long been forgotten in speech, but it persists in sundry names of places with the appearance of a long ridge. And in fact the three Aran Islands are fragments of a single, long, low
escarpment
, a broken arm of the limestone uplands known as the Burren on the mainland to the east. They had been blocked out and given their individual existences by the forces described above long before the onset of the Ice Ages two hundred thousand years ago, but it was the glaciers creeping across and around them from the north that gave them their fineness of finish, polishing them like lenses for the clearer reading of the past. By the time the last
of the ice-sheets had melted away about fifteen thousand years ago, large areas of the islands had been stripped of soil and all other debris of previous ages of erosion and left blank for the inscription of subsequent time.

This bare, soluble limestone is a uniquely tender and
memorious
ground. Every shower sends rivulets wandering across its
surface
, deepening the ways of their predecessors and gradually engraving their initial caprices as law into the stone. This
recording
of the weather of the ages also revivifies much more ancient fossils, which are precisely etched by the rain’s delicate acids, so that now when a rising or setting sun shadows them forth,
prehistory
is as urgent underfoot as last night’s graffiti in city streets. And every hairline fracture the rock has sustained throughout its geological troubles is eventually found out by the rain and
dissolved
into a noticeable cleft, so that the surface is divided up in a fashion that has been decisive for the development of field
boundaries
and paths, which have been obliged to follow and so
reinscribe
like visible scars the old invisible wounds. Further, this land has provided its inhabitants—the Neolithic tomb-builders, the Celtic cashelor, the monastic architect, the fence-making grazier of all ages—with one material only, stone, which may fall, but still endures. To this retentive nature of the terrain itself must be added the conservative effect of its situation just beyond the
farthest
reach of Europe, wrapped in a turn or two of ocean. The
material
destructiveness of modern life is only now beginning to impinge on Aran, and until very recently the sole custodian of this land of total recall has been a folk-mind of matching tenacity,
focused
by the limitations of island life and with the powers of memory of an ancient oral culture.

The record in stone of the human presence here covers nearly four thousand years. On each island are tombs and other
structures
dating from the end of the Stone Age, built by a people who probably had migrated up the Atlantic coast from Iberia. They were farmers, in search of land easily cleared with stone axes, and whether or not Aran had at that time rather more soil and tree
cover than it does now, it, like its mainland relative, the Burren, was a more attractive terrain to these settlers than the heavily forested or boggy interior of the country. The Bronze Age too left burials here; a mound containing urn-burials was exposed by shifting sand-dunes in Inis Oírr in the last century, and various standing stones and uninvestigated cairns in obscure nooks of the other islands may date from the same period. But the grandest
antiquities
are the huge stone “cashels,” dating from perhaps
AD
100 or 200, that dominate the uplands of all three islands, and the two coastal forts, which may be a few centuries earlier, Dúchathair and famous Dún Aonghasa, on the Atlantic cliffs of Árainn. These are among the most impressive prehistoric remains of Celtic Europe, and they crown the heights of Aran like inexhaustible reservoirs of mystery and legend.

Aran may have little soil, but what it has is holy. Towards the end of the fifth century the pioneers of the great monastic
movement
sought out a retreat from the world here, and the fame of their sanctity and learning brought flocks of disciples, so that it has been written that “In this island a multitude of holy men resided, and innumerable saints unknown to all except Almighty God are here interred.” The future founders of Clonmacnoise, Kilmacduach, Iona and other great monasteries studied at St. Enda’s foundation in
Ára
na
Naomh
, Aran of the Saints. These monks established a pattern of settlement that still prevails,
building
their cells and chapels in the lee of the low inland cliffs that terrace the north-facing scarp-slope of the island chain, where the good wells are. None of the extant churches goes back quite to this heroic age of sanctity, but there are several tiny oratories from perhaps the eighth century, while some of the later, largely Romanesque and mediaeval churches have a nucleus of massive masonry from that period.

In mediaeval times the islands were under the sway of the Munster sept, the O’Briens, who built a fortified tower-house within the old walls of a Celtic cashel in Inis Oírr, and probably had a stronghold by the harbour at the monastic site of Cill
Éinne, the church of Enda, in Árainn. But given the islands’
position
stretched between the two provinces, it is not surprising that they were also claimed by the “Ferocious O’Flahertys” of
Connacht
, who eventually ousted the O’Briens. The merchants of Galway city, who regarded the O’Flahertys as mere pirates and smugglers against whom the Aran O’Briens had given a measure of naval protection, sought to advance the claims of the latter by referring the dispute to Queen Elizabeth. But the even-handed finding of her commission was that, as monastic lands, and the monasteries having been declared dissolved, the islands belonged to neither O’Flahertys nor O’Briens but to the Crown itself. In 1587 the Queen then granted them to an Englishman on
condition
that he keep a force of twenty English foot-soldiers there, and a castle was built at Cill Éinne. Aran, guarding the approaches to the rich port of Galway, was henceforward a pawn in a European strategy.

The garrison waxed and waned over the next three and a half centuries with the fear of continental invasion and Irish
insurrection
. At the time of the Cromwellian civil war the castle was manned by the Royalists, surrendered when Galway did, was
retaken
by an Irish expedition from Inishbofin, and was finally
reduced
by a large force of Parliamentarians, who rebuilt and enlarged it using stone from the plundered churches nearby. Their previous owner having been declared a “forfeiting traitor,” the
islands
were now made over to one of the London “Adventurers” in return for his financial services to Parliament.