Stones of Aran (5 page)

But where is all the rubble from these gigantic demolitions? Finer than dust, most of it, and dispersed by solution into the sea whence it came. The particles sifted and sorted out by currents into muds, sands and shingles along the sheltered north coast are another remnant of it, while the results of the sea’s most recent and crudest hammer-work lie along the coast south of the point this book starts from—the tumbled blocks of stone shouldered above
high-water
mark by the waves that broke them out of the layers of rock immediately seaward, leaving a shore of steps and ledges,
convenient
fishing-seats for the lads of Iaráirne. Among them is a slab about twenty feet square and four or five feet thick which always catches my attention as I walk that way, because its upper surface is curiously webbed with what look like lengths of petrified rope. These are traces of burrows made by some invertebrate
mud-dweller
of the ancient sea-bed. Deposits of sediment have filled in the burrows and then, under the pressure of further
accumulations
, hardened to preserve their form. But these fossil casts are now outgrowths of the
top
of the limestone block, which itself was formed by a continuation of that sedimentation; therefore the block is lying upside-down. As I pace out its canted deck, and later on at home when I calculate its weight at a hundred and twenty tons or so, I begin to acquire a sense of the forces that shook it free from its bed and overturned it.

This “storm beach” or “boulder beach,” as such banks of
broken
stone above high-water mark are called, fades out a couple of hundred yards to the south in the lee of a rising cliff, the
beginning
of Árainn’s precipitous Atlantic face. The cliff is a
continuation
of a little scarp, the riser of one of the island’s terraces, that comes down to the coast here and turns south along it. One can begin to understand how these terraces were formed by looking at the face of this cliff near the coast. The lowest three feet of it are composed of soft shales and clays, which have been eroded back to leave the more resistant limestone overhanging above them. If this
undermining continues, a cliff-fall will follow, and then, if and when the fallen and shattered rock weathers away or is swept aside by waves, undercutting of the cliff will begin again, and stage by stage it will slowly be eaten back into the hillside.

The process can be seen at its most dramatic by following the shore southwards under the cliff. It is possible, if the tide is out and the seas not too high, to reach the easternmost angle of the cliff and look round it at a spot where the swells coming up the channel from the open ocean thrust into a cave they have
excavated
in this same shale stratum, and columns of foam are blasted out through them by the air trapped and compressed by their
inrush
. Over on the coast of Inis Meáin the same thing is happening at a point halfway along the cliffs, where if there is any pulse in the ocean at all it is timed by the repeated building-up and
falling-down
of a tower of white water against a perpetually drenched and blackened rock wall. The two places are both called Poll an tSéideáin, the cave of the blown spray. After a south-westerly gale the Inis Meáin example is a superb sight, a gleaming space rocket launching itself out of solemn turbulences up the one-
hundred-foot
cliff face, to be mysteriously transformed into a great vague fading bird and swept inland by the wind. Seen from Inis Meáin, and responding to a south-easterly, its Árainn partner is almost equally impressive, and the cliff above and beyond it so smooth, grey and apparently indestructible with its long sheer walls and massive square-cut overhangs that it has the grandiose inhumanity of a space-age fantasy fortress of steel, artillery thundering at its base. In reality, the cliffs are extremely vulnerable. In 1980 a livid scar appeared on Inis Meáin’s face just opposite this point, where a piece like the façade of a three-storey house dropped off one night. And here in Árainn the cliff’s clean facets show that it is breaking up along a threefold system of weaknesses: the partings between the almost horizontal strata, and the vertical fissures deeply dividing the limestone, one set of which run parallel to the coast at this point, with the other at right-angles to them. So under the blows of the sea the coast is shedding great rectangular
blocks and slabs, and owes its style of awesome impregnability to a triple predisposition to failure.

The ruinous stone tower that tops the hill here was perhaps a lookout post, as it commands such a fine view of the seas to north and south as well as of the channel below, but how old it is
nobody
knows. It is called Túr Mháirtín, Martin’s Tower, as it was when the first Ordnance Survey was made in the 1830s. There is a path leading in this direction from the village of Iaráirne called Bóithrín Mháirtín, Martin’s “boreen” or little road, which suggests that at some period this forgotten Martin owned the land around the tower, but again nobody knows. The ruin, which has recently been overzealously reconstructed by the Board of Works men, measures seventeen paces round and stands to a height of about ten feet. At the time of the first Survey it was described as being solid, but it looks to me as if it was always hollow, and the original masonry on the north side includes some long blocks that
protrude
into the interior like a crude stairway. Otherwise its stones are as uncommunicative as its history.

Legend, however, has more to say about it: this then is the tomb of a saint from Inis Meáin called Gregory of the Golden Mouth, Grióir Béal an Óir. The site of this hermit’s sojourn in the wilderness of Inis Meáin can be seen from the tower; beyond the little bay and its bright shinglebank on the opposite coast is an
inland
cliff that has collapsed into a line of huge stone blocks like the carriages of a derailed train, and St. Gregory’s cave is a burrow among these. There the unhappy recluse gnawed off his lower lip in a spasm of anguish over the sins of his early life (according to the chronicler monks) or simply because he was hungry (as I was told by a more down-to-earth Inis Meáin native)—and a golden lip grew in its place. When St. Gregory felt death approaching,
regarding himself as unworthy of burial in the holy soil of St. Enda’s Árainn, he asked the monks of that island to abandon his body to the sea in a cask, which they did, and found on their
return
that the cask had reached Árainn before them. The little bay, just north of the starting-point of this book, called Port Daibhche, the harbour of the barrel, was its landfall. So the humble saint was buried in Árainn after all, high on this proud headland
overlooking
the barren island of his lonely struggle and the Sound named after him, Sunda Ghrióra.

In its drift through time Gregory’s story has become entangled with others. Thus, when dying in Rome as Pope Gregory he
ordered
his body to be launched on the Tiber, a tablet on its breast, and eventually came floating home to burial in his native Aran. As Gregory the Fairheaded, Grióir Ceannfhionnadh, he was
beheaded
by a tyrant at Cleggan in Connemara, the name of which town derives from
cloigeann,
a head; and then (as if to harmonize this tale with his Aran legend) he rose up, cursed the people of that locality, carried his head to a spring (now a holy well named after him), washed and replaced it, and came home to Inis Meáin.

These legends are all faded now. Fishing boats used to dip their sails to the tomb of St. Gregory of the Golden Mouth, but
nowadays
the lobsterboats that come throbbing by below regard it only as a useful sea-mark; an Iaráirne man remembers hearing that the old folk used to come here looking for gold teeth; a touch of golden lichen illuminates the tower’s lee side, and that is all.

The slopes falling south from the tower to the coast where it turns to face the full power of the Atlantic are scaly with loose stone, and as harsh and desolate as any in Aran. It is a wild spot to which the magnetism of sanctity steered the desert father from Inis Meáin, and it seems that as such it appealed to another
connoisseur
of wildernesses, the English artist Richard Long, who in 1975 left his mark, a small stone circle, nearby. It still stands in part, a group of limestone splinters jammed upright into crevices of the rocky ground, about three hundred yards south of the tower. Long’s work takes him to the remotest parts of the earth,
where he makes some construct like this out of what is to hand—stone, of necessity, in this instance—frequently impermanent,
often
circular or spiral, a passing shadow cast on nature by a restless culture, and then photographs it and exhibits the photographs with accompanying trophies of maps, stones and words in the
air-conditioned
, neon-lit art galleries of capital cities. I first saw this circle depicted on the poster of an exhibition in Amsterdam, and later made finding it the object of an hour’s wintry loitering about this deserted corner of Aran.

In the last century emigrant ships sailing out of Galway for America used to come through Sunda Ghrióra and sometimes had to wait for days in the lee of the south-east point of the island for a favourable wind. Then if there were Aran people on board their relatives and friends who had already said goodbye to them and may even have held a wake for them, knowing that in most cases the parting was forever, were given another sight of them by this chance that was perhaps more cruel than kind, but at a distance that must have made it an unreal, wordless and ghostly
reappearance
. The way by which the bereaved came down to the shore to wave and weep is a little valley called Gleann na nDeor. This phrase is the Irish equivalent of the old preachers’ platitude for this world as a place of sorrow, “the vale of tears,” and even if the traditional account of the origin of the name I have given is
perhaps
uncertain, a weight of bitter truth about Aran’s past hangs about the place now because of it.

There was another cause for mourning here once, on the 16th of August 1852 (a date every Aran man, woman and child seems to know), when fifteen men were drowned, fourteen of them from Cill Éinne and the other from Iaráirne. They were fishing from the great rock terrace under the cliffs around the point, at Aill na
nGlasóg, known in English as the Glasson Rock (the
glasóg
or
glasán
is the black pollack, a type of shorefish for which the spot is well known). It seems that a freak wave rose out of a calm sea and swept them away; the misfortune occurred on the Feast of the Blessed Virgin and was seen as a consequence of working on the holy day, for rock-fishing was then a livelihood, as it still is for a few men of the eastern villages. The ballads, one in English and the other in Irish, that commemorate the tragedy mention Gleann na nDeor as the way by which the bereaved came down to the shore, and it is often supposed that the placename refers to the tears shed over the bodies of the drowned there. In fact it
anticipates
the event, for it was recorded by the Ordnance Surveyors in the 1830s. (Misrecorded, rather, since the map has it as
Illauna-naur
, anglicizing Oileán na nDeor, island, instead of glen, of tears. The error has imposed itself on one or two islanders who
reverence
the written and official word more than the spoken folk memory, and on my first attempt at a map of Aran.)

Finally, an islander has suggested to me that the name refers to the dew which early morning fishermen sailing by see sparkling on this grassy plot among the grey stones—the dew, proverbially both fresh and fleeting, which still out-cries all human tears.

In the days when all visitors were assumed by the islanders to be of superior birth, the rock-fishermen at Aill na nGlasóg often had a genteel audience watching them from the clifftop, and the big
triangular
boulder perched on the very tip of the point that served as a seat for these observers became known as Cloch na nDaoine Móra, which an Aran man would translate as “the big-shots’ stone.” Some day a wave is going to climb the cliff with enough residual power either to shift the stone a little farther inland or drag it back into the sea. All the more exposed coasts of Aran carry a
rock-bank
above the levels of the highest tides, and where, as here and elsewhere on the south coast, this “storm beach” actually lies above cliffs thirty to eighty feet high, is composed of vast numbers of blocks it would take many men to move, and furthermore is
separated
from the cliff’s edge by a clear space of ten or twenty feet or more, then the impression given of the sea’s power is overwhelming.

It is indeed difficult to find a vocabulary for the combination of the prodigious and the orderly that such natural phenomena display. Most accounts of the Aran Islands, including my own first attempt, give one the idea that these stones have been hurled up over the cliffs from the bottom of the sea, whereas in fact they have been stripped off the rim of the cliff and moved inland by small degrees. Revisiting this spot after the winter of 1981–82, I found startling evidence of this process. A block of freshly broken rock, white with the unweathered calcite of innumerable fossils, caught my eye just a few paces east of the boulder described above. The detached piece was about two feet square and five feet long, and lay askew along the mouth of a trough-like recess of
exactly
the same dimensions running in from the cliff’s edge. There was half a fossil coral in the lower left-hand face of the block, and the other half of it was in the right-hand wall of the recess; clearly a wave had knocked the piece like a splinter out of the rim of the cliff, spun it on its axis and dropped it almost upside down back into its place. No doubt it had been detached from its substrate before this happened, by long ages of shocks and blows, and the unremitting discreet persuasions of daily temperature changes and trickling solvent waters; no doubt too in some future winter storm a wave will mount the sixty or seventy feet of cliff and flip it out of its present awkward rest, and then someday another wave will slide it inland and add it to its accumulated predecessors on the storm beach. By such repeated touches a rampart up to ten or
fifteen
feet high has been assembled all along this next three miles of south-facing cliff, so that the interior of the island is invisible from the broad promenade of ground swept clear of loose rock along the cliff edge.

On Inis Meáin around the low-lying south-western point there are two or three hundred yards of smooth, cleared rock-terrace
between
high-water mark and the gigantic storm beach, and as the cliffs rise from there towards the north the storm beach gradually approaches them and fades out on their brink at a height of a hundred and sixty feet above sea level. Inis Oírr too has an
impressive
storm beach, topped off by the hull of a freighter wrecked off the coast some years ago. These mighty works have been done partly by gale-by-gale, winter-by-winter processes as described above, and partly no doubt by more drastic events like the “Night of the Big Wind” of 1839 which is said to have buried in boulders the prehistoric stone huts on the peninsula of Dúchathair two miles west, or by such combinations of equinoctial tides and
millennial
storms as may only have occurred a very few times since the Ice Ages left Aran a bare slate, as it were, for the compilation of this reckoning. The only force tending to the destruction of the storm beach once formed, apart from the slow weathering of
individual
stones, is cliff-fall, which in places has overtaken the retreat of the storm beach; for instance at Dúchathair it is interrupted by deeply carved inlets, and on the western side of the bay next to the Glasson Rock boulders of the storm beach are tumbling off a cliff that has been cut back under their feet.

This little bay of which the Glasson Rock forms the eastern arm is divided into two amphitheatral halves by a narrow
peninsula
with a rock terrace below it, and in the deeply undercut
recesses
of either half is a sea-cave leading back to a blow-hole or “puffing-hole.” The more spectacular of these chasms, which one comes across with casually horrific suddenness if not forewarned, is the eastern one, a rectangular opening in the ground about thirty-three yards from the clifftop, a dozen yards across and rather more than that from front to back. On its inland side one can scramble down natural steps and ledges to where it opens out sideways into black dripping vaults like some waterlogged
upside-down
Piranesi dungeon. On calm days a tongue of green and light-filled water mutters below, but when the tide is high and the
wind in the right direction waves come breaking up these steps and strew the ground inland with sand and shreds of seaweed. The power with which water has now and again been funnelled up and jetted out of the opening can be judged from the storm beach which here loops back from the cliffs and lies sixty yards inland of the hole, the intervening sheets of rock having been swept bare and the stone skimmed off it or smashed out of the slope of the puffing-hole heaped up in a ten-foot bank. That is not all, for a few yards outside that bank is a second, smaller one, and a third beyond that again. These outer banks must be relics of very
ancient
commotions of the sea, for no wave could reach them now over the inner bank, which itself was not built in recent days. Immediately to the north-west a little meadow very different from its barren surroundings has come into existence where sand, blown up the puffing-hole and carried across by the south or south-easterly winds that would drive waves directly into the
sea-cave
below, has accumulated in a slight hollow. It is called Muirbheach na gCoiníní; the first word means a stretch of sandy coastal land, and this is the “
muirbheach
of the rabbits,” which are softly housed here by grace of this freak outfall of the storm.

The western puffing-hole is much smaller and lies inland of the storm beach; it is about a hundred yards from the clifftop. Its opening is a ragged grassy funnel above a narrow cleft of rock in which the sea spleenwort fern grows. Occasionally a sigh of spray hangs in the air over it, the sea can always be heard in its depths, and sometimes in spring a nesting chough explodes out of its rocky muzzle as one peers down, and flaps black and screaming overhead until one moves on.