Stones of Aran (35 page)

I am no disinterested historian; I study the past only to amplify my greedy awareness of the present. The foregoing account of the pier’s stage-by-stage construction, with the brief history of the Aran fleet I have moored alongside it, is designed to lead me out to the pierhead, the place of arrivals and departures, as the past continually conducts one to the present, the moment of perpetual arrival and departure. What is it like to see Aran for the first time?
I wonder, watching the comings and goings. What is it like to see Aran for the last time? The latter question I will face some other time, I tell myself, if time does not catch me unawares in the meantime. The former question I can never answer for myself; my first impressions of Aran are as withered and insignificant now among the later ones as some scrap of holiness in an ornate
reliquary
. Therefore I find myself eyeing new arrivals coming off the steamer with a twinge of envy, and I have to remind myself that the holiness and innocency of first sight is a myth. At
disembarkation
, that transition from ship-board lethargy to the freedom of an islandful of choices, anxiety about mislaying physical luggage leaves one more than usually fettered to the luggage of the mind. Nevertheless I try to catch in the eyes of those coming down the gangway some reflection that might enhance my carefully built-up mosaic of perceptions, replacing the lost or faded tesserae of my own first steps on Aran.

Summer arrivals are the least productive. For those who come every year it is a moment of unreflective expansion; rucksacks are shrugged off gratefully in the quay, because these
habitués
know that there is no further need to hurry; there are knowing scraps of Irish to be flung to those islanders generally reckoned to be “great characters,” and reminiscential laughs to be exchanged with other veterans of last year’s “great crack.” For first-timers, and especially for foreign tourists, the steps down the awkward gangplank are anxious ones. Even while the steamer was yet some yards from berthing they have been picked out, sized up and apportioned by a number of almost ominous pillar-like figures standing a little apart from one another in the forefront of the crowd on the pier: the “jarveys” or drivers of jaunting cars for hire. Their wide-legged trousers and dark jackets of stiff tweed make them monumental, their caps pulled down to the bridge of the nose give them a lofty and inscrutable demeanour. (The hardy islander, one’s ideals and preconceptions agree, is impervious to winter gales, but, in fact, it is summer heat that has no effect on these well-insulated
traditionalists
.) As “the strangers” struggle down the narrow gangway
with their bags they are solicited by the more forward of the
jarveys
, who thrust their rigid sun-cured masks close to them from either side with incomprehensible whispers. Those who accept out of free-will or out of bewilderment the offer of “a ride to the Dún” are jealously shepherded through the tangle of minibuses and taxis waiting on the pier with open doors as if trawling for custom, to a line of traps and side-cars along the harbour road, where the Connemara ponies stolidly waiting in the shafts with occasional twitches and snorts have been filling the air with the green tang of their dung.

The rest of the visitors, having shaken off the last of their
importunate
shadows, press on around the harbour, free now to look around themselves. The things they notice are probably just the ones I omitted from my panorama of the sea-front, for instance the small monument of blue limestone half-way round the curve of the sea-wall, the plaque of which has been wrenched off. This commemorates, or dumbly fails to commemorate, the landfall here on the dark rainy evening of September the 3rd, 1966, of the first men to row the Atlantic, John Ridgeway and Chay Blyth, two English paratroopers. (Whether the plaque was stolen by our Cill Rónáin vandals or by “a crowd from the North” as I have heard, the monument might as well be left blank until all soldiers on Irish soil are as harmlessly employed and as welcome as these two heroes were made upon their unexpected arrival.) A little farther on, perhaps the visitors will stop to read the notice by the
lifeboat-house
door listing vessels assisted and lives saved by the famous Aran lifeboat, which itself is always at the ready, anchored out
beyond
the harbour mouth. (I would have written about the lifeboat if all my acquaintance with it had not been at least second-hand. I did once stand looking out at it for a long time waiting for
inspiration
on the topic, noting its low, alert, hare-like crouch, and the way the mirror-smooth water reflected blue-white-orange, its neat orange, white and blue paintwork. Eventually a dim sense of
déjà-
vu
stirred. What did it remind me of? Nothing more exciting, I
realized
with a sigh, than the familiar R.N.L.I. collecting-box in the
shape of a lifeboat, sitting on the glass counter in a shop.
Fortunately
, like the Ridgeway-and-Blyth epic, the Aran lifeboat service has been copiously written-up by more seaworthy hands than mine.)

Then, on passing the lifeboat-house and reaching the foot of the
carcair,
a botanist among the visitors would notice a swag of delicate floral forms on the curve of its retaining wall, enhancing its absurd likeness to a megalithic opera-box, and might go over to identify it, braving the impassive gazes of
lucht
an
charcair
above. The ivy-leaved toadflax it is, an exquisite little purple-flowered wallplant, very common around Galway docks but only recently come here, no doubt on the heels of some visitor, and so far
restricted
to this its point of arrival (though, most mysteriously, it is well established in fissures of the crags of Inis Meáin some way from any houses).

Meanwhile the botanist’s companions will have gone on
impatiently
, and are wandering out onto the old quay to watch the messing about in boats that goes on there or are queuing at the information-caravan parked nearby, or making their way up into the town past the tall Celtic cross—where I will not follow them because of the vow or
geasa
this book is under, to complete the
circuit
of the coast before broaching the interior.

These great shoals of tourists, a hundred or two or even three at a time, day-trippers most of them, come on the
Galway
Bay,
which sails between Galway and Cill Rónáin every day of the week except Wednesdays, from the beginning of June to the
middle
of September. In fact the sight of her snowy upperworks
sliding
towards us out of the pale trough of heat-haze between the limestone-blue of Clare and the purple-brown of Connemara is the very emblem of summer itself for us, that brief and profitable season of charming, irritating novelty. The other steamer, a little green-painted freighter called the
Naomh
Éanna
(which is Irish for Saint Enda), comes all the year round on Wednesdays and
Saturdays
, weather permitting, as the timetable says. And very often the weather does not permit, especially around the spring and
autumn 
equinoxes, so that the shops may run out of bread and the pubs run dry of porter. Or there may be a gale warning on
Tuesday
evening so that the sailing is cancelled, and then the gale does not materialize and the only possible sailing-day of a turbulent fortnight is lost. Sometimes if the weather is worsening the steamer may only stay at the pier for long enough to fling the mailbags ashore before turning and running. It has happened that having come within yards of the pier the captain has decided not to risk being damaged against it, and has returned to Galway with his groaning passengers. (I remember hearing about an Aran man who was bringing a bull into the island once; the steamer turned back from the pier because of the weather, and delivered him and his bull back onto the rainy streets of Galway late on a Saturday evening. What he did then I do not know, fortunately, as the episode has the makings of an all-too-Irish short story.)

Passengers other than islanders are very rare in the winter months, but if I happen to be on the pier (awaiting delivery of some timber for more bookshelves, perhaps; for we all have to be on hand to collect our own freight when the
Naomh
Éanna
berths) and I catch sight of a stranger half hiding in the cabin door from the blast as the steamer makes her cautious crabwise approach, then I have hopes of someone with an eye committed to seeing, who though perhaps half-effaced with weariness (as the voyage may have started at six or seven in the morning and taken six or even ten hours, with long waits on the heaving seas off the two other islands on the way) will relish the wildness of the scene on the pier, having come with something of that in mind. The
rain-squall
that has lashed the grey-faced town comes pelting across the harbour and blackens the backs of the men trundling gas-cylinders and beer-kegs out of the way as pallet after pallet of them is winched up from the hold and swung ashore. The shopkeepers shelter in their vans, hoping the rain will stop before the cartons of groceries and wicker bread-hampers they are waiting for are dumped on the pier. Sacks of cement, drums of petrol, stacks of drainpipes, Mrs. Dirrane’s
TV
set back from the repairers,
accumulate among mountains of miscellanea, through which we all go hunting for our own packages (and I am left cursing because my shelving hasn’t turned up, for the third time). Then round the corner of the pier come running a dozen bullocks, whacked through the maze of vehicles by men with sticks, to be penned
between
a wall of coalsacks and a heap of chipboard until the
captain
gives the word to begin loading and one of the beasts is grabbed by six or eight men holding onto all its natural handles; the sling is passed under its belly, and it suddenly becomes an
inert
black sack against the sky, lofted, swung out, and dropped into the hold. If a horse is being shipped in the same way, everyone leaps back out of range of its lashing hooves as it pendulums
overhead
. The men sending the empty gas-cylinders and beer-kegs rumbling across the concrete and hefting them on board work on doggedly, hunched against the rain. The captain and the sky in glowering collusion advance the time of departure, for the gale is rising and it is time to run for Galway, however much still lies
unloaded
on the pier.

Meanwhile the stranger has slipped (not unnoticed though) through the turmoil at the pierhead, and is trying to decipher the names of the trawlers at their uneasy berths one outside another, all along the body of the pier. The
Arkin
Castle
(we shall come to the origin of that name), the
Fort
Aengus,
the
Carraig
Éanna
(I painted that name, I want the stranger to know; it has been
repainted
since, and half-scuffed off against the pier, but that is still in part my hand, my sole contact with the beyond-the-horizon life of the herring-fishermen, those fabulous compounds of ancient virtues and modern skills, the hunter-technicians, who will be flashing impressive wads of notes in the pubs this Saturday night, who will stagger down to sleep in the boat after the Sunday-night
céilí
and will be off into the grey drizzle some hours before I stir on Monday morning. And that name has been a lucky one, the owner tells me, it has brought good catches; so that once when I passed by on the pier he shouted out “Do you want a feed of fish?” and sent a lad below to fetch a ray the size of a tablecloth, which
he rolled up around half-a-dozen mackerel for good measure, clamping the whole slithery impossible parcel onto the carrier of my bike… but that was in the middle Seventies when fish were plentiful and prices high and the fisherlads were the envy of the shorebound; luck was in the air and on the waves in those days.) Then comes the
Rose
d’Ivoire
(pronounced “rose divoyer”), bought second-hand in Brittany many years ago. And then this
abandoned
wreck (if you must know, stranger), taking up valuable space by the pierside as those irascible old trawlermen will readily point out, is the
Asco,
a little cargo-vessel bought very cheaply and ill-advisedly in Stornoway by our island co-operative. It was nursed through the Caledonian canal and round the coast to Aran with only one major breakdown, but since that epic and funereal voyage has well merited the nickname some pessimist wit (not I) gave it, the
Fiasco.

So, having loitered along the pier in the rain, the stranger, whose reading of these names I cannot read, since I cannot
unlearn
their little histories, jumps down onto the scruffy beach around the head of the harbour and tramps across it, kicking at clumps of driftwood, plastic bottles and dead dogfish, to the lifeboat slip opposite, and disappears up the
carcair
with a nod to the one or two figures maintaining their dogged harbour-watch from the rain-shadow of the pub’s gable-end.

Stranger (I find myself using the familiar Aran term,
stráinséir,
which carries no charge of exclusiveness): one who arrives and
departs
, to whom time here is strange. Is it only the stranger who can hope to be met by winter and summer on the pierhead of a single moment? Or is there a way of inhabiting a moment, rather, of knowing all its bays and headlands intimately and lovingly, without that familiarity making one half-blind?

Cill Rónáin’s waterfront comes to a dead end to the south, after the old quay, the crafts shop and one or two fishermen’s
storehouses
, and sometimes it is my pleasure to jump over the low seawall onto the rocky foreshore and sneak out of town behind the backs of the houses instead of going up through the busy parts, for after some months of life in Fearann an Choirce even Cill Rónáin seems to buzz with illicit distractions and tiresome obligations.

Once over the wall, the moody sea reasserts itself even while the town is still lagging alongside. The first point of rock beyond the end of the waterfront is Spur Cháit, but of the woman Cáit I can learn only that she had a little cottage on it and was perforce at home to high spring tides. Such anomalies are not tolerated now; the town keeps well back from high water mark, and even where the road running around the bay towards Cill Éinne
follows
the curve of the shore closely, it is separated from it by a
concrete
wall the waves slop across only when a spring tide coincides with a northerly gale. Nevertheless a very high tide is
psychologically
disturbing to those who live nearby, especially when it comes in stillness and silence. I remember a young woman coming out to stand in the doorway of her shop in the part of Cill Rónáin that looks out this way, and murmuring more to herself than to me, “The tide’s very high today”—and there at the end of the street was the bay, much nearer than one had remembered, brimming, gleaming, pressing on some nerve in the town’s subconscious.

But then the waters withdraw so far across the shallows here, exposing the luminous acres of sand called Cockle Strand, that this vast neighbouring mutability seems purely benignant towards the town, giving it a pleasure-ground for half a day at a time. The old Cill Rónáin people tell me how when they were children they would look for the tiny plump cowrie-shells they call “pigs” here, for let’s-pretend farms, and an almost salivary gleam comes into their eyes when they speak of the delicious cockles from which the strand is named. Far out on it among the rocks near low water lies
a rusty boiler from some forgotten wreck, which children used to put bait in to catch the occasional foolish lobster that couldn’t find the way out of it. The young lads of the town still sometimes go hunting razorfish here, the molluscs with long curved shells like old-fashioned barbers’ razors, which can dig themselves deep into the sand very quickly and have to be prodded for with long
skewers
or made to come out of their burrows with a pinch of salt.

Cockle Strand is the delight of summer visitors, who come here to bathe or paddle, or to sunbathe on the rocky steps and slopes along the roadside. For me, though, when I walk or cycle by, there is usually an inkling of unease about the place, a rawness of the adjustment between its vaguely open oval of unemphatic
naturalness
and its patchily socialized rim, which I think antedates the new houses so crudely sited above scarps to the south of the road. The sun-cultists sprawled on their awkward rocks look
uncomfortable
, and even the vegetation of this shoreline is somehow dispiriting. At the Cill Rónáin end of the curve there is almost a low hedge along the concrete wall of an odd conjunction of species, both with coarse and ragged leaves and flowering in a
barbarous
dissonance of colours, the creamy yellow of sea-radish and the pinkish purple of common mallow; while at the other end of the beach where broad sheets of rock interrupt the sand, the
principal
growth is a four-inch forest of glasswort, like a miniature translucent cactus, and seablite, a dull rubbery-green dwarf. The slight tedium I feel sometimes along this shore has been replaced on occasion by a more positively disquieting atmosphere. About half a mile from the town there is a little cabbage-plot on the shore side of the road called Garraí na Taoille, the garden of the tide, because a high enough tide makes a little promontory of it. I remember watching the still waters come creeping up around this garden one stifling day when there were muttering fog-banks
off-shore
and lighting punching down into the sea; the mullet, big grey fish that visit muddy shallows in summer, were making
sudden
rushes to and fro, ripping the glassy surface. It was a sinister hour, that dispersed with the turning of the tide.

Sometimes I like to go and poke about a small lake over the road from the shore a little farther on, although it is not now a peaceful spot, as the generators supplying our electricity grumble and throb in a slovenly enclosure nearby; nor is it attractive at the first glance, for the waters are often covered by a green slime and seem to lie inertly among grey sheets of limestone pavement. One of these expanses of unfissured rock is so broad and smooth that it has been made into the floor of a handball alley, little used
nowaday
s
, the great blank wall of which (built, it used to be said, with the money from some nineteenth-century relief scheme) seems to mirror the ambience of dereliction. This sullen water is Loch an tSáile, the lake of the brine (for although it is a hundred yards from high tide mark the sea infects it through fissures running
under
the road), and its name, anglicized as Lough Atalia, recurs in many of the botanical reports on the island written by generation after generation of visiting scientists. Its fascination is primarily the extraordinary interpenetration of diverse habitats around its margins, giving rise to a species list that might make one think a botanist had muddled together field-notes taken in a variety of different places, and secondarily, the anomalies in some of those botanical reports, which successive investigators come here hoping to resolve, so generating further reports and making for a
self-perpetuating
cult of Lough Atalia.

For instance, the earliest attempt at a comprehensive listing of the Aran flora was made by Dr. E. P. Wright, Professor of Zoology in Trinity College, Dublin, in 1866, and he includes among his finds at Lough Atalia
Ranunculus
lingua,
the greater spearwort, a large and rather uncommon buttercup of fens and marshes, not to be expected in Aran. The next important investigator was H. C. Hart in 1869; he searched the lake and found the lesser spearwort, which is common, but not the greater. He also noted here a rare horsetail,
Equisetum
variagatum;
Robert Lloyd Praeger, most
ubiquitous
and comprehensive of Irish naturalists, confirmed this find in 1895, but since then nobody else has been able to do so. During the intensive combing of the islands and the critical
re-examination
of old records undertaken in the preparation of the most recent and definitive work on the subject, Professor D.A. Webb’s article, “The Flora of the Aran Islands,” of 1980, the lake was closely scrutinized by amateurs and experts, but neither of the missing plants was found. The conclusion was that Wright must have mistaken a particularly hearty specimen of the lesser
spearwort
for the greater (after all, he did describe his sufferings in the Atlantic Hotel, working at his specimens in the evenings, when the only choice of light was between “a farthing dip of the worst description—i.e. with the thickest possible wick and the smallest amount of tallow—and a slender cotton thread lying in a saucer of fish-oil”). The rare horsetail is accepted as a reality, however, and may yet turn up in the anomalous margins of Loch an tSáile.

Coming on the scene after these illustrious discomfitures, it would give me a slightly improper pleasure to find either of these plants, and so I turn off the road here now and again and make a circuit of the lake, trying to tune out of my mind the buzz of the generator, the egoistic discovery-ethic, and other fragmenting
influences
on the consciousness. Laying aside the search for rarities, it is marvellous to see how a single crevice running into the
surrounding
rock from the edge of the lake contains a summary of Aran’s flora, from the seaweeds of the middle shore like
Ascophyl
lum
(the knotted wrack, which only grows in the inmost parts of Cill Éinne bay, as it needs quiet water), and those of the upper shore like channelled wrack and spiral wrack; then the flowers of shinglebanks and rocky foreshores like thrift, sea campion,
pellitory
, and the sea spleenwort fern that one finds in fissures on the clifftops; and only a few feet away from them all of the usual
crag-plants
, wall-pepper, hemp agrimony, thyme, and dozens of others; while a muddy hollow nearby will hold a miniature saltmarsh of glasswort and seablite, then sea-aster, and farther back where the freshwater springs feeding the lake from under the scarp south of it make themselves felt, the plants of Aran’s turloughs such as marsh pennywort, loosestrife, watermint, bog pimpernel, etcetera. These ecological sentences (all multicoloured punctuation and no
sense) lead me back to the seductive tangles of the scarp itself, with its sweet-smelling hawthorns and dog roses sheltering rank garlic mustard, delicate wood sorrel and hidden gardens of violets and primroses in spring, and thence to the open hillside above, luring me away from the puzzles of the shore, to which I must now return.

Beyond the lake and the ball, alley the road climbs the scarp and leaves the coast, which here stretches out a low headland into the bay, dividing it into two lobes. This flat area of crag, thicket, little fields of rough grazing and low stony shore, has a name that remains indeterminate however often I hear it: Carraig an Bhanbháin, Carraig an Mharbháin, the rock of the something-
or-other
; its consonants seem to hesitate between
b
’s
and
v
’s
and
w
’s
,
r
’s
and
n
’s,
and everyone is ready to make wildly various senses of it: the rock of the little piglet, of the corpse, of the white woman, of the sultry weather…. I record another of these guesses out of respect for deathbed testimony, for an old man of the locality who died a few years ago used one of his last breaths, no one knows why, to explain to those around his bedside that this shore is really Carraig na Mara Báine, the rock of the white sea. Unlikely, I am afraid; but it does make me think of a night I have heard of when the sea was white with foam along this normally sheltered shore. It was on the evening of the 28th of December, 1899, and a number of fishermen were sleeping in their boats moored offshore in readiness for an early start the next morning, when a storm struck suddenly into the bay. One man was by himself in a nobbie and managed to lower the mainmast single-handed, reducing the wind’s purchase and saving the anchor from dragging. Five other boats were driven against the rocky shore and three of them were utterly smashed. The seas were so fierce that those on land could do nothing to help; four men were drowned, and the corpse of one of them never recovered. It was a terrible blow for Aran’s new fishing-fleet. Synge heard of the tragedy when he visited Inis Meáin the next summer:

The name of the headland, like this event, remains
uninterpretable
for now, but the low rockface the boats were smashed on is Aill na mBád, the cliff of the boats, and it was baptized by this disaster.

There are slight traces of a ruinous stone quay there, for the blocks used in the building of Cill Rónáin pier in the 1850s were quarried close by and rafted across the bay from this point. Later on, the stone for Kilmurvey House came from here too, and there is a big block with a curved face lying not far away which looks as if it had been intended for one of the lighthouses. A field near the old quay is still called Garraí na Craeneach, the garden of the crane, from the winch used in loading the blocks. Evidently these massive pieces of stone were split out of the bedrock by tapping wedges into rectangular slots, for rows of these slots can be seen here and there in what remains of the original limestone pavement surface. The interior of this headland always seems to promise
archaeological
discoveries, in the way the lake nearby promises
botanical
rarities, which do not materialize, for it is a neglected corner of the island and very overgrown, but the intriguing hummocks of stone half-hidden in brambles all derive from nineteenth-century quarrying, so far as I can tell.

Disappointed, I return to Aill na mBád, the site of the disaster. What exactly did Synge’s islander think was “in it”? What
significance
did he see in its happening on a holy day? And what art have I been exercising on this bay through the epithets I have
associated
with it (moody, disturbing, uneasy, raw, dispiriting, tedious, ominous, sinister, slovenly, derelict, anomalous, indeterminate, uninterpretable, disappointing)? I become anxiously aware of a
convergence between these two questions as I walk on towards the turn of the headland, mentally reviewing what I have written. (And what a peculiar shore this is, beyond Aill na mBád,
confirming
me in my choice of adjectives: dreary rock-flats patched with an extraordinary black-and-white strand made up of limpet-shells and wave-worn lumps of coke, perhaps from the same wreck as the rusty boiler stuck out there in the tide.) The islander did not have in mind any such comparatively modern and well-formulated concept as that of a jealous Old-Testament God snatching up a storm to smite those who slight his feasts. Similarly I would not impute to this bay a devious, recalcitrant, inconsistent personality, nor indeed a human characteristic of any kind. The islander’s thought moves in a vague and ancient terrain around a craggy idol only half-worked into a human face: Luck. On the one hand luck is merely the interplay of the random; on the other it is a force
influencing
the outcome, if not absolutely fixing the game then at least improving the odds. Observing the feast-days, whether they be Christian in origin or Celtic or even neolithic, is lucky;
skimping
their observance is unlucky. I worship Art, another
half-humanized
boulder lying on unprofitable ground. Calling Nature names is only my way of claiming a relationship deeper than blood. Observe the rites and obey; observe the facts and describe; otherwise, it is hard to know what to do for the best, for survival, in this improbable, probabilistic world. We are not all as
hard-headed
as that other native of Inis Meáin who told Synge, “A man who is not afraid of the sea will soon be drownded, for he will be going out on a day he shouldn’t. But we do be afraid of the sea, and we do only be drownded now and again.” Under the fey charm worked by Irish grammar on English speech, this is a classic statement of the facts of life in a chancy universe, in which
anything
can happen at any moment….