Stones of Aran (21 page)

The transition from one type of coast to another, from sheer cliff to low-lying rock-sheets bearing huge storm beaches, is
accomplished
in three dramatic steps around the most northerly arc of the island’s perimeter. First the lower two-thirds of the cliff face steps out beyond the upper third, which continues eastwards as an inland scarp; a quarter of a mile farther on the bottom storey of the remaining sea-cliff moves outwards again while the upper storey runs on eastwards, and finally this last sea-wall divides, dwindles and straggles inland as benches of a stony slope above a shore of shallow rock-shelves. The upper of the two wide terraces between these three lines of cliff successively discarded by the coast is called Scrios na gCapall, the
scrios
of the horses, and the lower one is An Scrios Mór, the big
scrios.
This word means (in Árainn at least, for I have not come across its use in placenames elsewhere) a tract of land not much divided up by field-walls, and it occurs in half-a-dozen names of such areas around the island. In other contexts it means destruction or ruination, a scraping, or a thin covering (of soil, for instance). It may be that none of these connotations is relevant to the Aran usage. Scrios na gCapall in fact has comparatively deep soil from the weathering-out of the thick clay band under the cliffs behind it, together with one of the few aboriginal patches of soil, a reddish laterite formed by rotting of the limestone in a subtropical climate, that has not been
scraped away by the Ice Ages. So it is a grassy area, and not only were horses grazed on it but before rabbits become the plague they now are throughout the island people used to come here to hunt them.

An Scrios Mór, which lies lower and is within reach of the spray, is craggier, and although local people tell me that waves cannot climb up onto it, there is a storm beach along its edge,
dating
perhaps from five thousand years ago when the sea level was rather higher than it is today. Waves driven by modern storms can in any case very nearly scale the forty-foot cliff below this terrace, for after a long period of high but not unheard-of seas I noticed bright unweathered scars where a great weight of stone had been chipped out of its rim only just below the storm beach.

Grimness and desolation intensify from here on, as the coast falls more and more into the power of the sea. This storm beach fades out as the cliff carries it inland, but another starts on the lowest level where the tides come flooding in over wide flats and shallow steps of bare rock. At first it is merely a string of big
isolated
blocks swept along from under the last of the cliffs, but as one follows it eastwards it becomes a great reef up to twenty feet high that snakes along the coast, dividing the flat shore from the little fields in its lee, into which it occasionally spills stone-falls when a wild winter has heaped up its
crest beyond stability. The going is harder now. If the tide is full one has to choose between stumbling from boulder to boulder along the knobbly spine of the storm beach, or sacrifice the sight of the sea and climb wall after wall of the fields inside it; but if the tide has withdrawn one can pick one’s way along the slippery flags uncovered, the interior of the island hidden by the looming rampart on one’s right but with the left open to the lovely distances of Connemara.

Sometimes this difficult mile, from the last of the cliffs to the bay of An Gleannachán below the village of Eoghanacht, can close on the mind like a trap, especially if one has spent one’s spirits on the exhilarating heights and is beginning to count the plodding steps homeward. Then if a sea mist annuls the beatific vision of
Connemara and the waves turn leaden and the sky hangs low, the generalizing monotony of the rock-bank is suddenly replaced by a dreadful multiplicity of individual boulders, each an ugly
confusion
of angles and edges. With every pace one’s mood darkens. These endless ankle-twisting contradictions underfoot,
amorphous
, resistant, cutting, dull, become the uncountable futilities heaped upon one’s own shores by the surrounding ocean of
indifference
. If then one could elevate gloom into metaphysical
despair
, see the human race as no taller than that most depressing of life-forms, the lichen that stains so many of these bare stones black, one might, paradoxically, march on with a weightier stride that would soon outwalk the linear desert. Instead, the
interminable
dump of broken bits and pieces one is toiling along
stubbornly
remains the merely personal accumulation of petty worries, selfish anxieties, broken promises, discarded aspirations and other chips off a life-worn ego, that constitutes the path to one’s own particular version of nowhere. And then, is it not a conceit, that further convicts one of conceit, to read one’s own misfortune into even these random sheddings of processes so many magnitudes vaster than the human span of space and time? But at such
moments
it seems the only alternative is to let these supernal
processes
grind all one’s concerns down into utter insignificance. Whereupon, rebelliously struggling through this clogged
precipitate
of scourings worn off its housing by the gyrating sea, this lumpish outwash of the wasting-away of the Earth, this dandruff of a seedy cosmos, one begins to feel that even if the whole did have a meaning narrow enough to be discovered by or revealed to such infinitesimals as Man, it would be one which we, honouring ourselves as dust, should decline to read or make our own. Better to keep our eyes
on the ground, our ground, wary of the next stumbling-block and the crevice crouching behind it ready to snap at the ankle like a bad-tempered dog.

Here and there, though, even on this surly shore, is a nascent significance. Once I found a hatched egg-shell of black rubber, a broken fishing-float that had drifted over the ocean from Cuba
and made me think of revolution and renewal. And a doll’s arm waving from between two stones, an infant gesture, a birth-cry impossible not to heed. Many foam-born amoeba-goddesses of wave-worn polystyrene bring archetypal touches in art colours to the grey of the storm beach. From all over our plastic Babel come greetings in bottles labelled Drink-Me/Drink-Me-Not in effaced print and unknown languages. These and innumerable other
fragmentary
and ambiguous emblems, washed up here to be pounded to bits or imbricated whole among the stones, fatten the rock-bank, and shorten the way.

In fact the way itself is not without interest, once one’s
perceptions
are reborn. Two shifts of waves a day work over the
rock-bank
, cracking its stones together and sorting the fragments. While its inland slant is greyish-black except for an occasional
red-tinged
chunk of dolomite or glinting ovoid erratic of granite, its weather-flank is scuffed silver bright. And, as a pilgrim’s progress, its rigours ameliorate eastwards. Its beginning in the west is of cabin-trunk-sized blocks, then they are tea-chest-sized, then parcel-sized, for whatever the local weather, billows entering the North Sound with the accumulated energies of an Atlantic wind-pattern strike at this shore obliquely, rolling stones eastwards as well as
upwards
before lapsing into the arms of gravity and abandoning them on the bank, and the smaller pieces are each time carried a little farther than the larger. When a stone finally cracks up its
remains
migrate even faster; as corners and edges are blunted the chippings are swirled onwards. By the time the storm beach rounds the point into the bay of An Gleannachán it is
a smoothly curved and flat-topped dam of heavy shingle, which retains an oval of brackish water called Loch Dearg, the red lake.

The appearance one after the other of a few species of plants accompanies this process by which the terrain becomes less
inimical
to life. First one sees
a thin straggle of herb Robert on top of the bank, a small reddish thing with neat little pinkish-purple
flowers
, almost indefeasible in Aran; then the dull nettle-like pellitory, and a few long strands of bittersweet with its blue-and-yellow
poison-warning flowers and tempting glossy red berries. On the shingle-dam by the lake grows the rarest of Irish shore-plants, seakale, which used to be such a striking feature here that the place is marked Sea Cabbage Point on the old Admiralty charts. It has declined to only about twenty plants now, and until recently it was thought to be extinct elsewhere in Ireland. In 1981 I found two unrecorded colonies of it on the Connemara coast, at least one of which has in fact always been there. However, it does seem that the species has had a narrow escape from extinction, at least in the wild, for it has of course been adopted into cultivation. A few plants recently appeared in Inis Meáin, but this is its only
station
in Árainn. Here every spring its gnarled and contorted
rootstocks
thrust aside the massive shingle with new growth; the leathery, prehistoric-looking blue-green leaves unfurl, and suffer the caterpillar like any common cabbage; its massed flowers are white and sweet in June, and fall to reveal many-branched
seed-heads
, bearing round capsules, like fantastically complicated
molecular
models, which are smashed down and deeply drowned in stone again by the winter storms.

The grading of ever-finer beach material continues around the curve to the bay’s most sheltered recesses, where there are even
deposits
of sand, and where for that reason one will perhaps
exchange
the first spoken words of this dour trek, with a man filling his cartrailer or the baskets on his donkey with sand to spread on his potato-patch or to make concrete for a septic tank. A road comes down to the shore here from Eoghanacht village, just
quarter
of a mile inland, and so while pausing to chat one can consider whether to follow it and hope for a lift along the main road, or to let the lovely curve and nearly tints of the outswinging
shinglebank
beyond lead one on, to the further trials and visions of a coast which is proving to be more subtly challenging than the tall cliffs.

The pale shinglebanks of An Gleannachán frame a dark half-oval of shallow and seaweed when the tide is low. Sometimes one sees a man moving slowly to and fro out there, stalking and stooping just like the shore-birds that come in clouds to pick over the sea’s leavings. Perhaps he is collecting periwinkles for bait before going to some taller shore to fish, but if the season is late spring or
summer
he may be gathering the edible seaweed called
carraigín
or “Irish Moss,” which he will spread to dry on the short grass of some field by the shore, and sell to a mainland wholesaler through an agent in Cill Rónáin. Some of it goes abroad; in London, for instance, little cellophane packets of it can be bought in the more expensive stores, in health-food shops and in corner groceries catering to nostalgic Irish exiles. A few packets even come back to the Aran shops and are sold at amazing prices (65p. for two-and-
a-half
ounces in 1982, when the pickers were getting £4 a stone for it), and not only to tourists. Next to whiskey it is the Aran
people
’s most trusted cure for coughs and colds; they simmer a few sprigs of it in milk or water and after straining out the insoluble bits drink the resulting bland and soothing essence of rock-pool. We have occasionally used a thicker brew of it as the basis of a sort of blancmange, which is nutritious and soothing but soon palls, and no doubt it has other unexplored potentials, but so far the picking and drying of it has afforded us more health and pleasure than the eating.

On some still day between May and August we go down to a shore like An Gleannachán and spend an hour or so paddling in the sun-warmed pools and groping under the leathery fronds of the larger seaweeds draped over the rocks for the small round clumps of
carraigín
,
that come away softly in the hand. Searching these limpid recesses, perturbing the surface of their waters as
little
as possible, is like trying to recall the images of strange but soothing dreams. Some of the living things waiting there evade the eye by stillness, some by swiftness and others by transparency,
while every now and then one goes wavering by wrapped in
incredibility
rather than invisibility; I remember in particular a sea hare, a few inches of deep red, slowly rippling worm-stuff shaped like a hare, or rather the reflection of one in uneasy water.

The
carraigín
itself is beautiful in its life and in its dying. There are two sorts, that grow intermingled; the slightly taller tufts with inrolled, dark brownish-red fronds, are what the biologists call
Gigartina
stellata
,
and the more common, smaller species is
Chon
drus
crispu
s
,
which has flat, dark red fronds with mobile touches of phosphorescence on their tips like liquefying sapphires. These delusive jewels vanish as soon as the weed is lifted out of the water, but when it is spread out on the ground for the rain and dew to wash the salt out and the sun and wind to bleach and dry, it goes through a sequence of colour changes that is enough to
compensate
for the withering of the satisfactory load one had lugged home wet and living into an almost weightless few handfuls of crumpled tatters. As its initial, glossy midnight-chestnut pales by coalescence of spreading lunar patches, each last spot of darkness dissolves into an auroral flush of greens, pinks and oranges, and then after a few days, if one has luck with the weather, flaccid ivory is replaced by suntan crispness.

Of course for those few men who want to or have to augment their income by gathering
carraigín
,
it involves more labour and less aesthetics, and this final stage can be anxious. Once I fell into conversation with an old man considering his small heaps of
car
raigín
in a field by An Gleannachán. He eyed the darkening clouds and fingered his chin doubtfully, saying “If I thought it wouldn’t rain, now, I’d leave it out for another night. But, the way it is, you wouldn’t know….” If it got soaked at this stage it might rot before it dried again, and then the task of picking out the bad bits would be added to that of picking out the dead winkles in it, and at the price he could expect it was scarcely worth the trouble. As much at a loss as he in this ancient dilemma, I could not advise. Eventually we propped the sticky masses against the wall of the field where the wind could blow through them, and left it to fate.

The only other seaweed product exported from Aran nowadays is the
slata
mara
or searods, the thick stems, three or four feet long, of the seaweed
Laminaria
digitata
,
which grows at or below the level of low tide, and comes ashore among the great masses of brown tangleweeds thrown up on the beach by winter storms. Gathering searods is a much more considerable business both in scale—the shore of An Gleannachán produces six or eight tons of searods yearly—and the rigours of the work. It even has its effect on the landscape, for many of the island’s shinglebanks have a ribbing of low walls built out of the shingle on their inland slopes, over which the rods are hung to dry; in fact some of the storm beaches of Inis Oírr, where searods are gathered much more intensively, have been largely remodelled by the building of drying-stands for them. Nevertheless, when one first comes across the scene,
perhaps
on some quickly fading afternoon when land, sea and sky are thick with winter, the solitary man knee-deep in the sodden
weedbank
, dragging out the club-like stems with their gnarled
holdfasts
and flinging them heavily up the shore one by one, seems to be engaged in a task so wild, forlorn and picturesquely aboriginal that one is not quite pleased to learn that this is no mere local,
archaic
and obsolete mode of survival, but the first stage in an
industrial
process of international ramifications.

The rows of searods arranged side by side across the tops of the neighbouring field-walls represent a sum of money—not the fortune they suggest when still juicy red, but more than one would expect from their shrivelled grey thong-like look after a few weeks’ exposure. When thoroughly dry they are laid and tied in
rectangular
stacks, and in May trailer-loads of them are hauled to Cill Rónáin pier to await the coming of a personage known in the islands as
Fear
na
Slata
Mara
,
the searod man, who weighs and pays and oversees their shipment by trawler to Cill Chiaráin on the
Connemara
coast. There by the harbour are the slovenly sheds of a
factory
, surrounded by reeking mountains of other sorts of seaweed delivered by lorry from various parts of the mainland coast. Aran’s contribution like the rest is fed into one of the two furnaces—
huge cylinders turning on an axis of roaring flame—and reduced to a powder, which a little freighter, the
Saint
Ronan
,
takes in lots of four or five hundred tons directly to the works of Alginate Industries Ltd in Scotland. There, together with the similar
product
of many other regions of the North Atlantic coast, it is made into a thickening agent used in various manufacturing processes. In icecreams, paints and cosmetics, a little of it eventually finds its way back to Aran.

Gathering searods is an intermittent occupation for a few Aran farmers in the winter when little can be done on the land. “It puts the time by,” one or two of them have told me, and indeed a
superfluity
of time is one of the rigours of the season. A man might expect to gather one or two tons of searods, or even more, in the course of a winter. The lump of cash comes in handy, and buys a calf when the grass is greening to feed it. In the Seventies the
island
was producing about thirty tons a year; Inis Oírr was
producing
twice that, alternative employment being scarcer there, while Inis Meáin contributed much less as comparatively few searods come ashore there. The price offered is announced by Arramara, the Cill Chiaráin concern, each year, and as one would expect with such a broadly useful constituent, it follows general
economic
trends. It rose rapidly in the mid-Seventies in line with that of other raw materials, and then reflected the subsequent
depression
, and is now responding to demand again. In 1973 it was £15 a ton and in 1984, £70.

In general, the number of searods washed ashore is thought to be declining, and Arramara’s technical experts attribute this to the expansion of the lobster-fisheries, though it is not known if it is the lobsterpots themselves that injure the growing weed or whether the removal of lobsters encourages the proliferation of their prey, the sea-urchins, which themselves feed on seaweed. However, a lot of searods rot uncollected on the shores of Aran these days, as the deeply scored habit of labour, a value stubbornly outlasting the necessity that decreed it, wears away with the older generation. A ton of dried searods represents a weary number of
cold, wet, stooping hours, and few of the younger men are
constrained
economically or psychologically to follow the old ways. In the past, although the traditional allotment of the shores always meant that if through age or illness a man was no longer able to gather the searods on his portion, they would remain ungathered there for some years, eventually a younger relative would take over. Nowadays there is little competition to keep bright the
honour
of the shore’s divisions, and if the number of searods lying
disregarded
on a certain beach reminds us that old Tom or old Seán has taken to his bed, we suspect that it is not tradition but
indifference
that leaves them scattered there.