Stones of Aran (3 page)

By degrees the islands then dropped out of history again. The landlords (the Digby family of Kildare, from about 1744 and throughout the famines of the nineteenth century) were absentees who took their two or three thousand pounds a year of rent and cared nothing for the place; in island folklore they are unreal and remote figures, not held responsible for the bitter oppressions worked by their local agents. More immediate and
comprehensible
were the principal tenant-farmers, middlemen and Justices of the Peace, the O’Flahertys of Cill Mhuirbhigh in the west of
Árainn. In the first half of the nineteenth century Patrick O’Flaherty “ruled like a King in Aran,” summoning offenders to appear before him in his cattle-yard “on the first fine day,” and if necessary ordering them to take themselves off to Galway gaol. His son and successor James was hated as a “landgrabber,” one who would take over the leases of land from which another had been evicted, and he and his bailiffs were the principal targets of the sporadic terrorism of the islands’ Fenians and Land Leaguers. The “Land War” in Aran culminated in the driving of the O’Flahertys’ cattle, blindfolded, over the highest of the Atlantic cliffs. By that time the O’Flaherty estate included much of the best land in Árainn, and even today, although much of it has changed hands as the family fortunes were squandered, and some has been redistributed among smallholders, the contrast between those areas and the rest is striking; on one side of the old
boundaries
are the broad acres of one who could command the
carrying-off
of countless tons of stone, and on the other the incredible jigsaw puzzle of little fields of those who could only clear their stony patches and mark the ever-increasing subdivision of their holdings by building walls. These crooked dry-stone walls, about a thousand miles of them, are of all the islands’ monuments the most moving, an image, in their wearisome repetitiousness and tireless spontaneity, of the labour of those disregarded generations.

Aran shared in the rent reductions and other benefits won
nationally
by the Land League agitations, and though hunger, fever, evictions and emigration were persistent curses on life even into this century, the islands’ dark ages began to draw to a close. The old fort had long been in ruins and Cill Éinne had dwindled into a poverty-stricken village of landless fishermen, while nearby Cill Rónáin had grown into the islands’ administrative capital and the home of its little Protestant community, triangulated by the
barracks
, the coastguard station and the Episcopalian church of St. Thomas. A steamer service from Galway was inaugurated in 1891, and the Congested Districts Board (the government agency set over those western districts in which the disproportion between
population and resources was particularly dire) began to develop the fishing industry. Cill Rónáin became the port of a fleet of trawlers that has grown, with occasional setbacks, into a sizeable industry today. It became usual for those who came here in search of the residual essences of old Gaelic ways to throw up their hands at this raw, anglicized, profit-making Cill Rónáin and retire to Inis Meáin, which being less accessible had not suffered the same “
corruption
.” But now that the old barracks is shared between the post office and a bar, and the coastguard station between the telephone exchange and a couple of
gardaí,
while the Protestant church is roofless and its potential congregation nil, that turn-of-the-century gombeen-town of Cill Rónáin has acquired a patina of interest and defers to the bright young world of mini-supermarkets, discos and craft boutiques with a certain frowsty charm. The Seventies, a decade of relative prosperity based on fishing and tourism, slowed but could not reverse a population decline that had come to seem inevitable. (In 1841 the population of the three islands was at its maximum, 3521; in 1971 it was 1496, while the figure for 1981 was 1386.) However, in that decade the building of bungalows has linked the villages into an almost continuous band along the north-facing slopes. Nevertheless little has changed as soon as one steps off the main road. The Congested Districts Board bought out the Digby estate (which by marriages had passed into the hands of the Guinnesses) in 1921, so the Aran farmer now owns the field of his labours, but holdings are still small, broken up into numerous separated parcels, and unproductive. In fact, as
land-use
falls off, some areas are becoming wonderfully overgrown with brambles and hazel scrub, outriders of the coming wilderness.

As with the fields and paths, so with the language; there are ominous signs of disuse and decay. Irish, the irreplaceable
distillate
of over two thousand years’ experience of this country, which has been poured down the drains in the rest of Ireland but which was carried unspilt even through the famine century in those few little cups, the western
Gaeltachtaí
of Aran, Connemara and parts of Donegal and Kerry, is now evaporating even here (as if a word or
two disappears every day, the name of a field becomes unintelligible overnight, an old saying decides that its wisdom or foolishness is henceforth inexpressible), while what remains is splashed with the torrents of English. Many in Aran, as elsewhere, stake heavily on the future of Irish (and it is an awesome choice for parents to
entrust
their children’s mental development, or a writer a life’s work, to an endangered language), but the cruel twists of history have put the survival of Irish in the hands of English; at least as
essential
as the dedication of Irish speakers would be a tolerance, indeed a positive welcoming, among English speakers, of cultural diversity, an awakening to the sanity of differences—and such
wisdom
is contrary to the stupefying mainstreams of our time. However, at present Irish is a vigorous reality in Aran, and is now as it has been for over a century one of the reasons for the outside world’s fascination with this bare little place.

The history of this interest in Aran and its accumulated
marvels
is a rich series of footnotes to that of the Romantic
Movement
. These words from the earliest modern account of the islands, by John T. O’Flaherty writing in the
Transactions
of
the
Royal
Irish
Academy
in 1825, give the flavour of that typical
enterprise
of contemporary scholarship, the reconquest of ancient Ireland, which would be followed by the reinstallation of its
long-dispossessed
but uncorrupted heir, the peasant:

For over a hundred years Rousseauistic nostalgia and the
complexes
of nationalist emotions were wonder-working ingredients in the Aran spell, interacting strangely with academic objectivity and personal vision. Celticists of every specialism made the
pilgrimage
to Aran. After the antiquarians came the linguists,
ethnographers
and folklorists, and then the writers, poets, film-makers and journalists. George Petrie, whose work was to wean Irish
archaeology
from a century of baseless speculation about druidical fire-temples and the like, had made his first visit to Aran’s
monuments
in 1822. John O’Donovan wrote the first careful description of them and collected the relevant literary references and lore in 1839 for the first Ordnance Survey, which was among other things a stock-taking of Ireland’s richness in antiquities. In 1857 William Wilde led an excursion of the Ethnological Section of the British Association to Aran; a banquet for seventy was held within Dún Aonghasa itself (the natives looked on from its ramparts) and among the eminent diners were Petrie, O’Donovan, MacDonnell the Provost of Trinity College, the historian Eugene O’Curry, the poet and antiquarian Samuel Ferguson and the painter Frederick Burton. Subsequent visitors of note included Lady Gregory
looking
for folklore, W.B. Yeats looking for magic, Douglas Hyde, Eoin MacNeill and the young Patrick Pearse all looking for
Ireland
in Inis Meáin, Father O’Growney the apostle of language
revival
, and most memorably the playwright J.M. Synge, because of his peerless report,
The
Aran
Islands,
of 1905. One could write an intellectual history of renascent Ireland out of fireside encounters in those hungry but hospitable Aran cabins, as well as a comic serial
out of the confrontation of dream and reality (without prejudging the question of which was which, or in what proportions) when the Araner and those who had come to save and be saved by him groped towards each other over the cultural rifts. And at last Aran began to speak for itself to the world. Even this briefest of surveys must name two of the islands’ half-dozen authors: Liam
O’Flaherty
, 1896–1984, well known as a novelist in English and writer of short stories in both his languages, and Máirtín Ó Direáin, born in 1910, one of the chiefs in the poetic re-establishment of Irish.

The noble file of discoverers of Aran by degrees was absorbed into the ever-increasing summer traffic of visitors that is bringing such changes to the islands today. A decisive moment in the
formulation
of the Aran myth was the making of the film
Man
of
Aran
by the famous American director Robert Flaherty in 1932, which featured as if it were contemporary reality a long-abandoned aspect of island life, the harpooning of the gigantic “basking shark” from frail-looking “currachs,” Aran’s famous canoes of lath and canvas. The images Flaherty dealt us, of Man as subduer of sea-monsters, of Wife anxiously looking out for his return while rocking Babe-in-the-Cradle, and of Son eager to follow him into manhood—the perfect primal family in unmediated conflict with a world of towering waves and barren rocks, as if eternally in
silhouette
against the storm—remain like grand, sombre court-cards on the table of the mind, and will not be brushed aside by
subsequent
knowledge of the subtle actualities of Aran life.

As with thousands of others, it was a mild curiosity engendered by Flaherty’s film that first brought us (my wife and myself) to Aran, in the summer of 1972. On the day of our arrival we met an old man who explained the basic geography: “The ocean,” he told us, “goes all around the island.” We let the remark direct our rambles on that brief holiday, and found indeed that the ocean encircles Aran like the rim of a magnifying glass, focusing attention to the
point of obsession. A few months later we determined to leave London and the career in the visual arts I was pursuing there, and act on my belief in the virtue of an occasional brusque and even arbitrary change in mode of life. (I mention these personal details only as being the minimum necessary for the definition of the moment on which this narrative will converge, the point in
physical
and cultural space from which this timescape is observed and on which this book stands.) On that previous summer holiday Aran had presented itself, not at all as Flaherty’s pedestal of rock on which to strike a heroic stance, but rather as a bed of
flower-scented
sunlight and breezes on which one might flirt delectably with alternative futures. But on our definitive arrival in November we found that bed canopied with hailstorms and full of all the damps of the Atlantic. The closing-in of that winter, until the days seemed like brief and gloomy dreams interrupting ever intenser nights, was accompanied by an unprecedented sequence of deaths, mainly by drowning or by falls and exposure on the crags, that perturbed and depressed the island, quite extinguished the glow of Christmas, and ceased only with the turn of the year, the prayers of the priest and the sinister total of seven. It was a severe
induction
but it left us with a knowledge of the dark side of this moon that has controlled the tides of our life ever since.

For my part (M’s being her own story), what captivated me in that long winter were the immensities in which this little place is wrapped: the processions of grey squalls that stride in from the Atlantic horizon, briefly lash us with hail and go sailing off towards the mainland trailing rainbows; the breakers that continue to arch up, foam and fall across the shoals for days after a storm has abated; the long, wind-rattled nights, untamed then by electricity below, wildly starry above. Then I was dazzled by the minutiae of spring, the appearance each in its season of the flowers, starting with the tiny, white whitlow-grass blossoms hardly distinguishable from the last of the hailstones in the scant February pastures, and culminating by late May in paradisal tapestry-work across every meadow and around every rock. The summer had me exploring the
honeysuckled boreens and the breezy clifftops; autumn proposed the Irish language, the blacksmith’s quarter-comprehended tales, the intriguing gossip of the shops, and the discovery that there
existed
yet another literature it would take four or five years to begin to make one’s own. This cycle could have spun on, the writings I had come here to do having narrowed themselves into a diary of intoxication with Aran, but that some way of contributing to this society and of surviving financially had to be found.