Stones of Aran (41 page)
Authors: Tim Robinson
The great strand, An Trá Mhór, presided over by St. Enda’s bones, is at high tide a broad oval of shallow water held between two promontories—that on the west carrying the airstrip, the other on the east a similar low duneland—and a sandspit extending
westwards
from the latter towards the former, leaving only a narrow gap for the sea’s exits and entrances. As the tide falls it gathers
itself
into a sinuous channel around the southern and western perimeter of the strand, passing close under the cemetery knoll and then winding river-like around the sandspit to flow out into the wider reaches of Cill Éinne bay. The bed of sand it leaves
behind
to dry is deep and soft in places, but with caution one can walk the lesser, quarter-mile, axis of the oval from the cemetery to the spit, though not without leaving an incriminatory trail of footprints across the delicate patterns of the sandwaves.
There are a few patches of marram grass off the point of the spit with incipient dunes swelling up around them, and local
people
have the impression that the spit itself is longer than it was, and that high tides driven by northerly gales break across it less frequently than formerly. If so, it may not be very long before the bay is completely enclosed and turned into an extension of the sandy grasslands around it. On the other hand the neck joining the eastern promontory to the general shoreline is said to be
narrowing
as winter storms coming up Gregory’s Sound eat into Port Daibhche on the other side of it, so perhaps another gap will open
up here in the south-east to replace the one now closing in the north-west of the bay. Certainly there have been some drastic changes in the geographical past of this corner of Aran. While the Ordnance Survey map of 1899 shows things much as they are
today
, on that of 1839 the spit is only a quarter of its present length and lies much closer to the southern shore of the strand.
According
to the Reverend William Kilbride, the Protestant pastor, writing in 1868, within the previous twenty or thirty years a ten or fifteen-foot depth of sand had been swept by winds into the sea from off the plains around the south and east of the strand,
leaving
them bare rock. Today they are plentifully sanded again, but rock shows through here and there.
This stripping away of the sand a century and a half ago
revealed
evidence of much earlier changes in the relationship of land and sea here, as will become apparent in the course of a walk around the bay. Kilbride can be our guide, as his observations on shifting sands were preliminary to an account of “several objects of antiquarian interest” exposed by the denudation of the rock, which he contributed to the
Journal
of
the
Historical
and
Antiquarian
Association
of
Ireland.
The first of these objects, going eastwards around the bay from the cemetery, seems to have disappeared long ago, perhaps
reburied
by sand, so it is impossible to be definite about its nature. Kilbride termed it, rather warily, a “flag cell.” His text locates it “on the western brink of Traighmhór, about forty or fifty yards south of the mortuary chapel of St. Endeus,” but clearly his mental compass was almost ninety degrees out, for the
sketch-map
accompanying his article marks it about five hundred yards east-south-east of the chapel, close to the southern shore of the strand, and this is where some Iaráirne people vaguely remember it, on the plain directly below their village. It was (or is; who knows?)
about nine feet long, enclosed on three sides. The ends face south and north, which is open on that end; the west side is
formed of one entire flag, rather thin for its size, and is nine feet long; the south end is also of one flag; but the east side is formed of two, whose tops have evidently been broken off, as it is somewhat lower than the western one. The
horizontal
capping stones are wanting, and not to be seen near the place, however they cannot be removed far, and may yet be found under the sand close by.
Again the map shows that one should read “east” for “south” in this account, and “west” for “north.” Kilbride also says that the villagers who remembered its gradual emergence from the sands recognized its likeness to certain other structures of flagstones that occur here and there in the islands, and called it as they did these others
Leaba
Dhiarmada
agus
Ghráinne,
Diarmaid and Gráinne’s bed. The ancient Celtic legend of Gráinne’s elopement with Diarmaid, and Fionn Mac Cumhal’s pursuit of them throughout Ireland, is well known to countryfolk, and various odd
configurations
of stone, some natural and some artificial, used to be
explained
as being the beds the couple built for themselves, in a different place each night. Kilbride followed tradition in ascribing such “beds” to Diarmaid and Gráinne, whom he regarded as
having
actually existed, in the second or third century
AD
:
From the legends associated with them… it would appear that some change or development had been effected by them, or in their age, in the ancient Celtic religion. Their disenchanting powers, their expertness and ready ability in transforming individuals at will, by magic, into animals of various kinds, would lead us to suppose that they, if not the actual introducers, yet helped to propagate and extend a
belief
in the metempsychosis.
Kilbride himself was of evangelical persuasions, and it seems more likely that he has endowed his Celtic forerunners with a little of his own temperament than that he re-embodied theirs.
However, since his day all theories based on the existence of the heroes of ancient days have been dissipated by the winds of
scepticism
; Diarmaid and Gráinne have been expelled from history into mythology, where they shine as deities, while many of their “beds” are known to be megalithic tombs, very much earlier than the coming of the Celts to Ireland. In particular the two island
specimens
that I shall be visiting in
Labyrinth
are identified as “
wedge-graves
” (so called from the fact that they are narrower towards one end), and date from the beginnings of the Bronze Age, about three or four thousand years ago. Kilbride’s “flag cell” may well have been a tomb of this type; they are usually aligned east-west (which is why I mentioned the corrections necessary to Kilbride’s compass-points) and often have the dimensions he recorded. But, whatever it was, the sand has swallowed it again.
There remains something to be seen yet of Kilbride’s second object, a set of ruinous field-walls irregularly netting the plain
below
the village and parts of the promontory east of the great strand. I have slightly abbreviated his description of them as they were in 1868 not long after their exposure:
Some are double, a few single, and extremely well built. They are without cement, and the stones are of limestone, but none similar to the partially worn down ones now
visible
on the shore. The fields partitioned off were of good size, but the soil must have been very shallow as the walls rest upon the solid rock. We find the fences, some altogether denuded of sands, others with only a foot or perhaps a few inches exposed; following these, we find them receding
under
the sand until they are finally lost to view; when digging down a foot or so we again come upon them. Some appear to have passed through the Traghmhór, thus indicating that this tidal lake was not in existence at the period of their erection. Others ran out apparently under the sea; at least they are traceable to low water mark, thus showing the sea has encroached in this quarter upon the land.
A few years later Kilbride wrote that these walls had become “a delapidated wreck, no longer a delight for the enquiring mind,” but how this had happened he did not specify. Many of the walls he records are still traceable and no doubt the rest could be found by probing the sand; certainly the scattered remains visible at low tide of the walls running out into the basin of An Trá Mhór for two or three hundred yards are still enough to delight the enquiring mind.
In other parts of the country, notably Mayo and more recently Connemara, old field-walls have come to light through the cutting away of peat bog for turf. Since it is thought that the bogs started to form about three and a half thousand years ago these walls represent the agriculture of the late Stone Age, and some of them are associated with megalithic tombs. Whether Kilbride’s walls are contemporary with his “flag cell” or not could only be
established
by a proper “dig”; but it is noteworthy that in many places on the Connemara coast the blanket bog that covered the old field-walls as well as a few megaliths extends down to low
water
mark or beyond, showing that there has been a rise in relative sea level since the beginning of bog formation; similarly here in Aran the sea now flows in over the sand covering the old walls.
The changes in sea level since the Ice Ages have been extremely complex, but it has been concluded from a wide range of evidence that the sea was a good deal lower relative to the land than it is
today
for a period starting about four thousand years ago and
ending
about one thousand years ago. These fluctuations were long-delayed aftereffects of the last Ice Age. The great thaw topped up the oceans with melt-water, but as the sea rose, so did the land, for as they were freed from the weight of ice the plates constituting the earth’s surface rode higher on the “mantle,” the layer of slightly more fluid material supporting them below. The post-glacial history of relative sea-levels is the outcome of the race between these two processes, which themselves varied from place to place and time to time. Here at An Trá Mhór the building-up and breaking-down of sandbars may have further complicated the history, so that the most one can deduce from the fact that
Kilbride’s fences run down into the tide is that they are “very old.” In fact one could imagine that, should the bay ever be totally
occluded
by the spit’s growing across its outlet, it would grass over and become a soggy hollow pasturage, whereupon the old fences might be repaired. The nature of Aran is such that it can never quite forget the Stone Age. If the Neolithic is the era in which these fences were built, and should they ever be renewed, it would be only one of the many instances in which the farmer of today works shoulder to shoulder with the earliest farmers of Aran, manhandling the same stones between them into whatever
configurations
suit the times.
The third and last of Kilbride’s “objects of antiquarian interest” lies on the peninsula that embraces the eastern and north-eastern sectors of the oval strand. The peninsula is wide, but its
attachment
to the mainland is only a hundred yards or so across. (In
disturbing
fact, at this point I am within a few minutes’ walk of the starting-point of this book and finishing-point of this volume, should I choose to cut across the base rather than persist in
tramping
out to the ultimate footstep of this last complication of my course—which is why I am proceeding in such an orderly and composed way, under the Vicar’s guidance.) The site I am making for is a pair of stony hummocks close to the eastern shore of the headland, and half a mile from its base. Let Kilbride describe them:
At a little distance they appear like two large mounds of loose, disjointed stones, half buried in sand; but on a nearer survey something like order, though of a very rugged and rude character, begins to be perceived, but it is not until we really stand upon the summit of the one nearest the Sound that it could be identified as one of those ancient structures denominated clocháns. The rounded or beehive-shaped roof then becomes apparent. When the writer first saw it a few years ago, the greater part of this building was embedded in the sand, nothing of it being visible except a few of the
topmost
courses of light flags forming part of the roof, and the
horizontal ones stretched across the top, and covering all in…. The second clochán is only distant a few yards from the first…. Externally it only presents a mass of ruins imbedded in sand with loose stones scattered over it. On the top, in the centre, lies a heavy slab of limestone… used to point out where some lone stranger found his last
resting-place
. Around about this mound several small headstones are apparently observable. On the south-east side are two smaller ones of that description, placed, one at the head and the other at the foot of a grave.
Such beehive-roofed huts (for which the Irish word
clochán
has been adopted by English-speaking Ireland) are well known in Aran and in other parts of the country. Most of them are of early Christian or mediaeval date, but given the conservatism of
building
techniques in remote areas some could be earlier and others later even than that broad range of time.
The eastern clochán, Kilbride goes on to tell, was excavated in 1867 by the land-agent Mr. Thompson and a visitor, Captain Rowan of Tralee. Men were employed to dig out the sand filling it, whereupon part of the roof collapsed. The interior proved to be just over eight feet square, the walls rising vertically to about four feet and then being corbelled inwards to form the roof, the total interior height being eight feet. The doorway, on the east, was only one foot seven inches wide, and from it an open passageway extended east-wards (for about eighteen feet, judging by the plan Captain Rowan made of it for Kilbride’s paper) between walls three foot six high, ending with six steps leading up to the same height. Kilbride speculates that this was to protect the doorway from drifting sand.
Behind or on the west of this clochán is an oval area
seventy-two
feet long enclosed by a wall or bank of loose stone that abuts onto the north and south sides of the clochán, and the second clochán lies within this enclosure, near its western end. Kilbride explains why it is more ruinous than the other: