Stones of Aran (43 page)

The way to the end of this stage of my walk has eluded me for a long time. But now, having dreamed of crossing An Chois—
dry-foot
, on a sandbank of words, the accumulated dust on my heels—perhaps I can let the impetus of that dream float me smoothly past what remains to be described: the headland of Barr na Coise, because I did not do it justice before, Port Daibhche, the bay almost severing it from the rest of Aran, and the half-mile of shore leading south from it back to my starting-point.

It is not true that I have only explored Barr na Coise on
difficult
days. Reviewing my memories of it from the disadvantage-point of that tombstone on which the Reverend Kilbride left me stranded, I lost sight of certain hours, scattered through the years, that were as rich in life as the richest Book of Hours, but with their own Atlantic astringency. Once or twice interweaving
showers
and sun have laid a fine tweed carpet over this bare floor for me, a tough, close-knit sward minutely flecked with blossom—scarlet pimpernel, the mauve common storksbill, wild yellow
pansies
with afterthoughts of violet—that celebrated each step with a bounce and a puff of many-scented ozone. One year, I remember, the yellow wall-pepper flowered here so abundantly that when I climbed up the dune-cliffs of Port Daibhche onto the headland I found a Land of Cockaigne in which every hollow was brimming with custard. And in 1975, on a day of clouded blue, I saw a clouded yellow butterfly here. That was one of those rare years that bring an influx of these migrants from the Continent to the southern parts of Britain and Ireland; unusually favouring breezes must have floated this one so far north, for the species had never been recorded from Aran before.

Generations of rabbits following each other along lines of least resistance through the ankle-high maquis of Barr na Coise have worn neat tracks radiating from every burrow and triangulating a terrain that is shapeless to us. Certain plants find an ease of growth on these paths freed from the wirier species. In summer the yellow-wort raises its star-like flower on straight stems a foot high, like lampposts along these ways. The common daisy here
attains
to a glory of a mention in
Flora
of
Connemara
and
the
Burren:

Along the white avenues of this garden city of rabbits, stoats deliver swift death, and in between times lark about. I watched a couple of them playing Pop Goes the Weasel here once. They
began
by facing each other, a dozen yards apart, tensely upright on their hind legs with their front paws neatly folded against their white chests. Then as if at a signal they bounded forward a short way and vanished down separate burrows. An instant later they shot up from other burrows, one here, the other there, whirled around to locate each other, and began the game again.

If Barr na Coise is only now and again a dreamworld, a
fairyland
or a playground, Port Daibhche is more settled in benignity. Facing eastwards, with the great wall of Inis Meáin opposite, it is sheltered from the most prevalent gales, and has gathered into
itself
shelving sands on which the currachs of Iaráirne can run ashore softly, while among the dunes around it are deep hollows in which they can lie safe from all winds. These dunes hug the beach with soft sandcliffs, the matted overhangs of which are tressed with the rare sea bindweed, flowering in June with flared bells striped in pink and white. Another and even rarer plant is
frequent
here, the purple milk-vetch,
Astragalus.
In describing the clifftops west of Dún Aonghasa I stated that it flourishes there
“because of rather than despite the adjacent gulf,” but one year since writing that harangue I found it so abundant as to produce a colourful haze on the sandy pasturage inland of Port Daibhche, where it was luxuriating in one of Aran’s kinder environments and declining the stern metaphoric role I had chosen for it on the edge of the abyss.

Legends of peace and promise are harboured by Port
Daibhche
. Near the beginning of this book I told how the corpse of St. Gregory, the hermit of Inis Meáin, was set adrift in a barrel, and as a sign of the forgiveness of his sins found landfall here, on the holy shores of St. Enda’s Aran; hence, it is said, the name: Port Daibhche, the harbour of the barrel. Kilbride suggests that the name may in fact have been Port Duimhche, the harbour of the sand-plain, but in any case long usage has smoothed all the
consonants
out of the second element of the name, so that many
islanders
hear and understand it as “Port Aodha” (in which the “dh” goes for nothing), Hugh’s harbour, and wonder who Hugh was. However, the derivation from
dabhach,
a barrel, is very ancient, for the mediaeval
Life
of
St.
Enda
contains another legendary
justification
for it. When Enda arrived in Aran (by stone boat from Connemara, as I have told), he found a pagan called Corban in possession. Corban was soon persuaded by various miracles to withdraw to Corcomroe (in what is now County Clare) for a trial period until God’s will for the island should be made manifest:

And now, may that serene and luminous current float me on from Port Daibhche to a calm conclusion.

Just one placename and one place and the mystery of their
conjunction
remain to be considered. The southern rim of Port Daibhche is a shinglebank that gives way to a level terrace of rock where the coast turns due south again; about three hundred yards beyond this corner there is a seepage of fresh water onto the
terrace
from a spring under the stony ledges above it, and a few rough steps, more than half natural, by which one could bring
water
from the spring to cattle in the fields inland of it. This is the place. The name is Teampall na mBráthar, the church of the brothers, that is, the friars. But the Franciscan monastery founded by the O’Briens had its church in Cill Éinne, so far as is known, until the Cromwellians took its stones for their fortifications, and no other friars are recorded in Aran. There is no mark of
foundations
in the fields or on the shore here, and since this is a
comparatively
sheltered coastline of solid rock it is unlikely that a church-site has been lost through erosion. Neither have I heard or read any suggestion, except for that made by the name itself, of there ever having been a church here.

So, since this is still dreamtime, or some illicit after-hours of it, and there is no rationale of the name to inhibit me, I could build a church here and call it Teampall na mBráthar, or let the name
float free and spread like a sea-mist over Aran as a whole: the Temple of the Brothers. Would such a foundation do as a half-way house for my meaning? Somewhere I have read of a temple built around a footprint of the Buddha, and, looking back, I see that it was a god’s all-comprehending step I had in mind when I set out. But that footprint (is it in Ceylon?) is, I believe, the last, the
take-off
point for transcendence, and the next one, which would
complete
a step, does not exist; whereas in fact the earth and its powers of healing and wounding, of affirming and contradicting, of
supporting
and tripping you up, can never be finished with. And the idea of brotherhood, even leavened with sisterhood, has only a limited application to the dense thorny thickets of interrelatedness I have been skirting around. When I review the cast I have
gathered
in this round of Aran of the Saints and Stones—myself the walker, you the reader, they the farmers and fishermen, landlords and bailiffs, rabbits and stoats, gulls, cormorants, dolphins, plants, fossils; the gamut from saint to stone—I realize that the idea of a temple of brotherhood is born out of loneliness, that it soon
recoils
before the bitterness of sibling politics, and that it subsides at last into cosy tautology. Better to let the obscuring name
evaporate
. There remains the bare stone, upon which, having completed this circuit of the island, we can now pace to and fro, marginally better informed as to its provenances and properties, its
relationships
to those other horizons of stone to the north and east, its usefulness as a sea-mark to Mikey going by there in his boat piled high with lobsterpots; this ordinary stone of Aran, of which we can scarcely dream now that its virtues could all be caught
together
into a moment of vision, having peered a little farther down the bottomless cliff of its reality.

From this point, Teampall na mBráthar, looking south I see once again the ruined watch tower perched high above the Sound, marking the resting-place of St. Gregory of the Golden Mouth. It suggests the possibility of going round the island once again,
looking
at everything in more detail, or in others of the infinity of ways of looking. Perhaps a second circuit would be more rewarding
now that my pace has been chastened by so many miles, my breath deepened by so many words. But for a book to stand like an island out of the sea of the unwritten it must acknowledge its own bounds, and turn inward from them, and look into the labyrinth.