Stones of Aran (22 page)
Authors: Tim Robinson
The two long man-forsaken miles of shore from An Gleannachán to Port Mhuirbhigh are alleviated by the pleasant little bays of Port Chonnla and Port Sheánla, where one may at least sometimes hear the ring of a spade on stone from a nearby potato-plot, even if tall field-walls hide the digger; the intervening lobes of land, however, carry one out into deep solitudes although they lie in view of the houses ranged along the hillside half a mile inland. The fields of the coastal plain either have no soil at all—An Chreig Dhubh, the black crag, is the name of a typical one of these
unregenerate
tracts—or only a shallow layer built up by many annual applications of sand and seaweed hauled from the shore. The storm beach—a confusion of jagged slabs where it emerges from the shelter of each bay, a smooth shinglebank where it turns into the next—divides this bare lowland from an unemphatic shore which is merely its final descent, by way of slight steps and broad shelves of rock, into the fields of seaweed that stretch out towards the vague limits of low tide. Such an expanse of intertidal rock
extending
from a headland is called a
cora
,
and to the “black crag” on the land correspond An Chora Dhubh Thiar and An Chora
Dhubh Thoir, the black
cora
of the west and of the east, which continue the shores enclosing An Gleannachán far out into the sea like two dark horns. The former
cora
blows an almost perpetual visual fanfare, the trumpetings of white foam from the rollers that break across the shoal in rounding the headland to shape themselves into the curve of the bay. Indeed there is always more colour and spectacle out there, where the terns hunting for fish flicker against the sky and shriek like wet glass before shooting themselves like darts into the sea, and the occasional lobsterboat in sea-worn blues and whites chugs by clinging to the bucking waves. But the shore itself is dark as with sad memories, a deep depression that both rebuffs and pleads for interpretation of the few remaining signs of the vigorous, rancorous, laborious and sometimes joyous comradeship it hosted before it was forsaken.
The waning and extinction of the old shore-life was sufficiently prolonged into this century to be briefly illuminated—old moon in the arms of the new—by the first brilliant generation of island writers. Máirtín Ó Direáin has jotted down a note of one of its good moments in a poem called
An
tEarrach
Thiar.
(“The
Western
Spring” will have to do as English for this title, but it could also be the late spring, or even, stretching a grammatical point, a spring of the old days, of the Dublin literary figure’s Aran origins, for the word
thiar
and its derivatives have two sets of meanings as intimately related as warp and woof: one is connected with “west” and the other with “back,” as relative position in space or time. Further, the frictions of Irish history and geography have given the concept of “the West” such a charge that
thiar
is
almost as potent a word as
sean
,
old, is in Irish. Indeed this whole book, like all
possible
books on Aran, could be read as a footnote to the full
explication
of these two simple Irish words. But the following line-by-line translation of Ó Direáin’s poem does not presume to look into such mysteries.)
| | | Fear ag glanadh cré | A man cleaning earth |
| | | De ghimseán spáide | Off the tread of a spade |
| | | Sa gciúnas séimh | In the mild quietness |
| | | I mbrothall lae: | Of the heat of the day: |
| | | Binn an fhuaim | Sweet the sound |
| | | San Earrach thiar. | In the western Spring. |
| | | | |
| | | Fear ag caitheamh | A man throwing |
| | | Cliabh da dhroim, | A basket off his back, |
| | | Is an fheamainn dhearg | And the redweed |
| | | Ag lonrú | Glistening |
| | | I dtaitneamh gréine | In sunshine |
| | | Ar dhuirling bhán: | On a white shinglebank: |
| | | Niamhrach an radharc | A lustrous sight |
| | | San Earrach thiar. | In the western Spring. |
| | | | |
| | | Mná i locháin | Women in pools |
| | | In íochtar díthrá, | At the lowest ebb |
| | | A gcótaí craptha, | Their petticoats tucked up, |
| | | Scáilí thíos fúthu: | Reflections beneath them: |
| | | Támhradharc sítheach | Peaceful trance-vision |
| | | San Earrach thiar. | In the western Spring. |
| | | | |
| | | Tollbhuillí fanna | Languid hollow strokes |
| | | Ag maidí rámha | Of oars |
| | | Currach lán éisc | A currach full of fish |
| | | Ag teach chun cladaigh | Coming to shore |
| | | Ar órmhuir mháll | On a slow golden sea |
| | | I ndeireadh lae; | At the end of the day; |
| | | San Earrach thiar. | In the western Spring. |
Ó Direáin was born (in 1910) in the village of Sruthán just a few hundred yards from An Gleannachán, and many of his
writings
commemorate the shore-work of his childhood; conversely, various placenames of the Sruthán coastline refer one back to his work. The title of his collection of prose pieces,
Feamainn
Bheal
taine
,
“Mayweed,” could indeed be taken as symbolic of literature’s
gathering-in of the old shore-life, for it is the Aran term for the banks of redweed cast up by the gales of spring. Ó Direáin’s
reminiscential
work often returns to this sea-harvest in the fresh of the year, and it is the moments of relaxation from toil, of stillness and contemplation, that shine most brightly in the memory of that child whom Sruthán thought of as a lazy dreamer—while in fact he was already at work, picking up the whole village, its cottages, fields, shore and folk, to carry them across into our world:
The taste and smell of bread and butter come back [
aniar
, from the West] to me through the mist of years. The sheet spread on a convenient mossy hummock in a corner under a high wall…. The midges would come with the sultry heat of midday…. A long sunbeam over the weedbank making a lustrous frame of the midges.
A man taking his rest for a moment. Looking out at the bay, the islands of Connemara little blue fragments in the haze, like blobs of blue spittle left by a sea-dragon on its way to the western world. The Connemara boats nearer in view, their sails furled. The crew catching fish for dinner perhaps. The man pulls his bobbled cap off with one hand, takes a piece of tobacco out of it with the other. He pushes the
tobacco
into his mouth. He tightens his woven belt around his waist and starts to fill baskets again.
Against Ó Direáin’s nostalgic watercolours one can set Liam O’Flaherty’s lurid oil-painting (from the story “Poor People’) of a man from a sick and hungry household labouring “in the
poisonous
cold of a February morning”:
The edge of the sea was full of seaweed, a great load spilling from the deep, red, slime-covered, dribbling in with every wave that broke murmuring in the darkness of the dawn.
Patrick Derrane came running down the road with a pitchfork on his shoulder, his rawhide shoes squelching with
the wetness of the road, a white frieze smock tucked into his waist-belt, his slim body shivering with the cold. He reached the sandbank and saw the seaweed in the tide through the darkness, being sucked in and out by the mighty slow
movement
of the sea. He uttered a low joyous cry and ran down, running ankle-deep in the soft sand….
The seaweed must be gathered and the potatoes must be planted because another winter was coming after the warmth of summer, another winter with cold and sickness and hardship. The great whip of poverty lashing his back, driving him down the beach through the soft sand.
He had no thought of his wife or of his son or of his hunger, walking rapidly back and forth from the sandbank to the tide, lifting the seaweed on his pitchfork and spilling it in a slipping heap. He worked wildly, gritting his teeth against the cold. He only remembered the crop he had to sow and that great lash of hunger, the dread spirit that ever taunts the poor, reminding them of the hardship that is to come, deadening the pain that is present….
The sun rose, daylight sparkled on the land, on the beach and over the sea. The birds awakened and sent their sweet music dancing through the depths of the sky. The cloak of red seaweed on the beach shimmered like freshly spilt blood on which the sun is shining, against the dark blue background of the freezing sea.
Derrane had gathered a great heap of seaweed, ten loads for a horse. He went home. Weak after his sickness he was hardly able to walk the road. His thighs were scalded by the brine. And now that he was going home, he remembered the sadness that awaited him there, lamentation and a grave being opened.
The shore’s own indications of its past—a few scarcely
noticeable
stones, the significances of which have been given me by sons and grandsons of the old seaweed-gatherers, and a handful of
obscure placenames—are meagre. It is a faded picture, but these writers and one or two others have preserved at least some of the authentic pigments for its restoration. This is a task to which I am prompted by my own limited experience of shore-work (groping in pools left by the ebb of generations), as well as by many
conversations
with former labourers remembering their tidal fields, in words which remind me that not all the genes of poetry in that first literary generation were foreign to their Aran stock.
Certain small boulders visible when the tide is low in the bay of An Gleannachán mark a convenient start in this work of
restoration
, and from there I work eastwards.
Two boreens come down to An Gleannachán, the one from Eoghanacht already mentioned, and another from the next village to the east, Sruthán. The boundary between the two villages is the west wall of the latter boreen, and the boulders lying in the
shallows
of the bay are the continuation of this boundary towards low tide mark. Thus the Sruthán people could gather seaweed off the eastern half of the bay and the coast around the headland to the middle of the next bay, Port Chonnla. Within this division by
villages
subdivision by households was equally clearly established. These finer details are largely forgotten now, but when I spent a day cutting “blackweed,” as the dark seaweeds of the upper shore are called here, my instructor, task-master and host was careful to show me the boulder and the rock-pool that delimited his
ancestral
patch.
These long-standing regulations of the shore have not always prevented disputes. On the north coast of Inis Meáin, for
instance
, the name Cladach an tSiúite, the shore of the quarrelling, is said to derive from the fact that weed always seemed to drift ashore there exactly on the boundary between the two townlands.
I have even heard an old history of Gort na gCapall men being killed in a brawl over the divisions of weed on Cill Mhuirbhigh strand. And sometimes when wind and tide combined to bring weed ashore in great quantities it was “a case of every family for
itself
,” as the Aran writer Pat Mullen tells:
At such times my father was like a tiger. He yelled at us and cursed us up and down the shore as we gathered the seaweed in the tide and filled our baskets, which he would carry up the beach and then come running back again for more. On a pitch-dark night he would hurry just as much as in broad daylight and would never let us rest until we had gathered more seaweed than anyone else. I tried to carry my first
basket
of seaweed when I was fourteen. I wasn’t strong enough and it brought me down, but I was growing strong quickly and a few months later I managed to carry my first basket, and I was very proud.
On certain gently sloping shores weed could be cut in
partnership
and left where it lay because the rising tide could be trusted to wash it in rather that sweep it away along the coast, and then after the tide had turned it could be divided up at leisure. But this measure of co-operation gave no quarter to the feeble or lazy. Pat Mullen again:
In such a shore a man to be fully qualified must be able to change his knife into either hand and with each be able to cut equally well. I remember once I got a chance to go
cutting
on such a shore. I was to get my first man’s share as a cutter. I felt very nervous as a full score of men walked down the path towards the shore, each man having made, long
before
, his choice of a sharpening stone—and on these they were carefully whetting their special knives to razor edge. It was my father’s job as every man there well knew. He was a first-class knife man, but he was now looking for some better
work somewhere else and threw me in his place…. On my first day I kept close to my Uncle Jim, thinking it would be safest to be under the arm of a relation; but I was mistaken because he soon began to give me hell, shouting out so that everyone could hear, that it was a shame that I should be looking for a man’s share.
Weed gathered in common like this would then be divided into as many heaps as there were workers, and the heaps allotted by the following procedure, which was also used in sharing out a catch of fish amongst a boatcrew, and which a Sruthán man
described
for me. Little objects picked up on the strandline served as tokens for the casting of lots—a seashell, a fragment of driftwood or searod, a wisp of seaweed and so on, to the requisite number. While the rest looked away, one man would arrange these objects in a row across his two palms from thumb to thumb, close his fists over them, and take his place behind the row of seaweed stacks. Then he would call on each of the others to name his choice of token. When he opened his hands and revealed the order of the
tokens
, the stacks would be assigned to their owners in the
corresponding
order, from one end of the row to the other. A very similar way of casting lots was used in Clear Island off the
south-west
tip of Ireland, according to an account taken down from an old fisherman there in the Thirties. In his words it was done so that “nobody would have a straight mouth or a crooked one on him” when he got his portion. The Stone-Age folk who gathered shellfish round Ireland’s coasts probably did the same. In
comparable
circumstances today we would appeal for justice to coins or to pieces of paper marked with our names, that is, to the basic
apparatus
of our daily lives. The old shore-folk picked their
talismans
off the naked strand, and threw them away again without a thought.