Stones of Aran (7 page)

The scale of the coast begins to increase westwards from Poll na gCarrachán. The bays are more deeply excavated, out of higher cliffs; the storm beach stands fifty yards or more inland of the cliffs, falling back in wide arcs to yield even more ground around the side of each bay opposite to the prevailing south-westerlies. The grandly sweeping way so formed along the clifftops is as smooth and clear as if it were paved with flagstones.

For a few months in 1975 another art-work by Richard Long stood on this natural exhibition site, a ring of stones which M and I first saw when the plane bringing us from Galway happened to turn and bank over the spot, an instantly recognizable mark that told us who had visited the island in our absence. The following Sunday we made an expedition there as if to authenticate this
signature
, for things seen from an aeroplane, like dreams, lack a
certain
validity in recollection. We found it after a long walk, on the small headland immediately west of the giant sea-mark boulders of Na Clocha Móra. It was an elegant work, a circle about twenty paces across of small limestone blocks from the storm beach, that skimmed the brink of the cliff with an aesthetic, almost dandified, poise. It did not withstand the criticism of the autumn storms,
however, and on a later visit we found that every bit of it had been tidied back into the storm beach again.

The loitering eclecticism of such Sunday strolls perhaps allows mention of two other signatures of sorts in the rock of this stretch of coast, one geological and the other legendary. The first is a thick sprinkling of tiny white dots, little granules of calcite a
couple
of millimetres long and pointed at either end. These are the fossils of an alga, or perhaps of the spore of an alga, called
Saccamenopsis
, which lived in the seas from the sediment of which this particular stratum of rock now lying along these clifftops was formed.
Saccamenopsis
was only found to occur in Irish rocks a few years ago when it was discovered in the Burren, though it is well known in the corresponding limestones of Derbyshire in England. The plant must have flourished for a comparatively short period, geologically speaking, and the absence of its traces from other strata makes this one a useful marker-bed for the
geologist
, recognizable wherever it is exposed.

The other signature left on this shore was made at some date not strung on the same thread as those of
Saccamenopsis
and
Richard
Long, by a sea-horse that leapt up the cliffs and skidded inland on the rocks. I was led to its hoofmarks by an islander, and as he had some difficulty in finding the exact spot I carefully noted how to do so: a field-wall leads up the hill from a bay called Poll Dick a quarter of a mile north-west of Na Clocha Móra, and the marks are about four paces east of this wall and forty paces from the clifftop. They consist of a series of horseshoe-shaped ripple-marks in the bed of a rivulet worn by rainwater in a sheet of bare rock. Nearer the wall is a smaller, fainter set, attributed to the foal of the sea-horse. I have met nobody, apart from a well-known
bar-keeping
Münchhausen of Cill Rónáin, who claims to have seen a sea-horse, but several islanders knew folk of the last generation who did, and the stories are not disbelieved. The blacksmith
remembers
that when he was a child he overheard a man telling his father at the forge about how he went fishing at Aill an Ára, a cliff a mile west of this point, and saw a
capall
fharraige
or sea-horse and its
foal swimming below, whereupon he wound up his line and never went rock-fishing again. And once, I am told, a man called Dirrane and his crew got a terrible fright when a sea-horse came up beside their boat. Sometimes it used to happen that a mare kept in a field near the shore would produce an unexpected foal, and the
stail
fharraige
or sea-stallion would be held responsible. Such are the stones I have heard, and they are much the same as those Lady Gregory collected here in 1898.

Low tides lay bare a wide terrace under the cliffs from Na Clocha Móra to Poll Dick, and half-way between these two places is a spot called Dabhach an tSnámha, the swimming-pool, a name that points out a striking feature of such rock-floors backed by cliffs: their surfaces are what the geologist calls “mamillated,”
having
smoothly swelling projections, which are in fact sometimes breast-shaped as the etymology demands. These convexities flow into equally rounded concavities, so that the rock has a curiously organic undulating surface, and retains the falling tide in fantastic cups and wayward baths that invite one to loll in sun-warmed shallows. Liam O’Flaherty has written a story in which a young girl makes the discovery of her own body among the pools and mounds of just such a terrace of the shore near his native village farther to the west. Why does this so readily eroticized
rock-surface
occur below sheer cliffs, as if a concern for privacy entered into its making? The connecting link is the layers of shale and clay that separate the limestone strata at various levels. The cliffs come into existence where they do because the waves excavate a clay band that happens to lie within their range, and so progressively undermine the limestone above, which collapses and is
demolished
. Therefore the terrace below the cliff is formed from a
stratum
that immediately underlay such a clay band, and its
characteristic
surface has been exhumed by the waves from beneath the clay.

The mamillation, though, is not the result of wave action but of some process of erosion during the original deposition of the clay. This took place when the floor of that ancient sea of the Carboniferous era had been brought up by one of its periodical oscillations to lie exposed to the air. Weathering then broke up the topmost rock-layers and reduced them to a soil, of which the
present
clay bands are the fossil remains. This soil of course bore
generations
of plants, and the humic acid of their decomposition seeped down in rainwater to the limestone bedrock, which it
corroded
. This diffuse chemical action of a mild acid held in the sponge of soil and vegetable fibre is enough to explain the smoothness of the rock surface it produced. And if that ground-water tended to accumulate in any initial depressions of the
bedrock
, rounding them out into bowls, the result would have been the topography of coalescent hollows and mounds now revealed. Similar processes are known to be at work today in areas of
limestone
covered by soil and vegetation, for instance in the Burren.

Such are the links, as a geologist has explained them to me,
between
these mamillated surfaces and the cliffs that overhang them, between the earth-movements of the Carboniferous era and a story of O’Flaherty’s—links not in any simple “chain of being,” but in the network of being, which consists of tangle within tangle within tangle, indefinitely, but of which nevertheless we can tease out a thread or two here and there.

This terrace of beguiling tubs and hummocks ends in a little bay called Poll na gColm, the bay of the doves, under a
westward-jutting
bastion of the cliff; Poll Dick lies just beyond. The first name refers to the rock-dove one occasionally sees hurtling along the faces of the precipices it nests on, the wild forbear of the street-pigeon of town centres—though it is difficult to associate that jostling, motley, mangy throng scavenging underfoot on
Galway’s pavements or in Trafalgar Square with this discreet
solitary
, briefly glimpsed from the clifftops, a blue-grey arrowhead on a shaft of wind.

The second bay, Poll Dick, is a superb cauldron of roaring whiteness in wild weather when waves rushing round the salient of the cliff beat into the undercuttings of its recesses and send
sea-horses
of foam leaping up its walls. There is something unnerving in the way the waters withdraw from it in the slack of the wave, regroup with apparent deliberation, draw breath and swell up, and then come crashing tumultuously in again, rearing and licking around its rims, and leave its terraces streaming with hazy,
rainbowed
cataracts. In calm weather this is a favoured fishing spot; its deeps are directly below the cliff, so that one can sit on Ulán Cúl le Gréin, the “ledge shaded from the sun,” on the northern face of the little arm of cliff that almost encloses the bay, and drop a line into water even when the tide is out. Dick, it is supposed, was an
habitué
of the place; that is not an island name, however, although a Rickard Fitzpatrick owned Aran in the early eighteenth century, and one could imagine him taking a sunny day off from his
turbulent
Galway career to doze on the shady ledge of this corner of his domain, his mayoral hat over his eyes.

The next bay to the west is Poll na Naoi bhFeá, the “
nine-fathom
bay,” that being the length of line needed to fish from its cliffs. A fathom is six feet (originally it was the distance from
fingertip
to fingertip of outstretched arms). I have heard an elderly Aran man complain that the young shop assistants in Galway
embarrass
him by pretending not to understand when he asks for so many fathoms of rope; the old man and the youngster would have resentfully shared a moment of that insecurity which makes the first vow never to leave Aran again if he can help it, and the
second
to suppress his memory of country ways and even his Irish language, wanting to be as different from his parents as are the
pigeons
strutting at the shopdoor from the wild dove inured to the spray of the sea.

Fishing from these cliffs is not just for sport and supper. I
learned the names of these places from old Antoine Ó Briain, one of a well-known Cill Éinne family of rhymers and
seanchaí
or
custodians
of lore, when I found him fishing here one day. He was catching fat golden-red ballan wrasse, called
ballach
or rockfish here, which he would later fillet, salt and cure in the sun, for sale to the dealer who comes out from An Cheathrú Rua in
Connemara
where this Aran product is still relished—I remember
buying
some myself there once thinking they were kippers, and as I had not soaked the salt out overnight the more I cooked them the tougher they got until they were as unpalatable as an oily doormat and had to be thrown out. Antoine had brought his bait from the shallow northern shores: little crabs he tore the shells off and
winkles
he cracked with a stone before filling his hooks with the
horrible
living mixture. His line had two hooks and was weighted with a stone which he swung underarm two or three times before letting the line fly out (the men who fish the taller cliffs to the west whirl the weight around their heads so as to carry the line clear of the cliff face). Rockfish lurk close to the crevices of
underwater
cliffs; the practised fisherman can drop his line in exactly the right spot. Antoine did quite well that day; I carried his sack of sixteen fish home for him over the crags, and it nearly defeated me. The price he was expecting (this was in 1979) was “two score pounds a hundred,” the hundred being actually a hundred and twelve, as in hundredweights.

The nine fathoms of line must mean that the cliffs here are about fifty feet high, and in the next half mile they double in height, to the peninsula on which stands the ruins of a Celtic stone fort, Dún Dúchathair. As the cliff rises the storm beach
becomes
intermittent, being interrupted by deep and comparatively sheltered inlets. Each peninsula has a wave-cut terrace at its foot; on the east of the nine-fathom bay it is called Carraig an Bhrutha, the rock of the surf, and on its west it is Leic Uí Ghoill, Gill’s
flagstone
, which is a dangerous reef extending far out from the coast. Below the peninsula before the fort the terrace is An Creachoileán Istigh, the inner
creachoileán,
and a great rectangular slab forming
a grim little island off it is An Creachoileán Báite, the submerged or drowned
creachoileán.
The island writer Tom O’Flaherty, Liam’s brother, used to translate this word, which occurs in a dozen or more placenames around the islands, as “Island of Woe,” as if it derived from
creach,
woe or ruination, which is picturesque and well-suited to such dark and threatening reefs, and perhaps this is the true origin of the word, which is not in the dictionaries.

I notice that on the Ordnance Survey six-inch map the head of the bay between the
creachoileán
and the great fort is marked “Barally.” This is the anglicization of
barr
aille,
literally “top of the cliff.” Aran people refer to the whole southern coastline thus;
obviously
one of the surveyors asked someone on the spot the name of this place and wrote down the answer without checking its
extension
. A common phrase here for a fruitless endeavour is
“ag
dul
go
Barr
Aille
gan
tada,”
“going to Barr Aille for nothing,” for the islanders almost never visit these tall cliffs without good
reason
, and there are many whom no reason at all could bring to this mortal edge of their holding.

From inland the fort of Dúchathair appears a slouching mass dark against the southern sea-spaces; hence, no doubt, its name, from
dubh
cathair,
black fort. It consists of a single wall of immense thickness built of rough, unmortared limestone blocks, which
defends
the outer hundred yards of a peninsula from landward attack, sheer or overhanging cliffs a hundred feet high making
approach
from the sea impossible. Two fat buttresses of masonry like that of the wall are the work of the nineteenth-century restorers, and knowing this it is easy to subtract them in the mind's eye from the grand unity of the whole and indeed to replace the blocks of which they are composed on the top of the wall whence they had fallen. The skyline of the wall is rather slumped, but at
its highest, where it crosses a slight hollow running down the
centre
of the peninsula, the wall presents a twenty-foot face, very even, and slightly inclined inwards. Before the wall an area of crag is closely set with long stones jammed upright into the crevices; many of them have been taken for fencing or are now fallen, but enough remain to show that they would have been a formidable obstacle to a direct storming of the fort. At either end some length of wall has been lost with collapse of the cliffs; what remains is an arc, convex towards the land, about ninety paces in length. There was a gateway at the east near the cliff which fell away more than a hundred and fifty years ago. Until recently one entered the fort by picking one's way across fallen masonry on the brink of this cliff, but now a gap has been cleared there, for better or for worse, and the wall comes to a neat and stable end a few yards short of the edge.

The inside of the wall has two terraces running around it, as if for viewing the Atlantic horizon that completes its circle. The
remains
of a number of stone huts clustered like the cells of a wild bees' nest cling to the wall's base in the double shelter of its
concavity
and the grassy hollow in the middle of the peninsula. Only the bases of their walls remain and these have been tidied up into stout curved arms of stone that embrace half a dozen ideal picnic spots of flowered sward. To seaward the turf is more salt-blasted and intermittent, and the south-western side of the promontory bears a storm beach of jagged flags, among which a few hollows can be read as the sites of a line of stone huts said to have been overwhelmed by the storm beach on “The Night of the Big Wind,” the 5th of January 1839.

The outer parapet and the two terraces of the big wall are each the top of an individual thickness of it, for it is composed of three contiguous layers one inside another, totalling sixteen to eighteen feet in thickness at the base, and each raised to a different height. A fourth terrace along the base of the central length compensates for the sag in the ground-level there, and all the terraces and the topmost parapet are linked by little flights of steps running directly
up recesses in their inner faces. There is a low aperture under a heavy lintel in the base of the wall, inside the innermost of the huts built against it, from which a tunnel about two feet high runs directly into the wall. This has only recently been opened up; I was shown it first in 1978, and it is not mentioned in any
descriptions
of the fort, although a tradition that there had been such a tunnel was recorded around the turn of the century. By the light of my match it appears to be about sixteen feet long; its floor is the bare ground and it is roofed across with long slabs, and when I crawled to the end of it I saw a chink of light above me, so it reaches very nearly to the outer surface of the wall. Such passages are well known in many cashels, but this is the only such structure apart from very small recesses to be found in any of the Aran forts. Like the underground chambers or “souterrains” found in many of the Burren's cashels, they probably served as storage places and in some cases as shelters or escape routes. This tunnel looks as if it might have been intended as a secret exit or sally-port that could have been knocked through to the outside of the wall should the gate have been forced by an enemy.

The whole organization of the interior of Dúchathair gives one an immediate impression of resolute, concerted and ingenious
application
to an imperative purpose. But as one paces and puzzles about it and inquires into its genesis, doubts besiege and
overthrow
one's initial certainties. Firstly one learns that the interior was a tumbled wreckage when the restorers set to work in 1880, and as earlier records of it are vague it is not known how much of the present arrangement of terraces and steps is a result of their preconceptions of what a prehistoric fort should be. However, it is likely that the general scheme of a layered wall rising in terraces is correct as this recurs in Aran's other cashels and in many
elsewhere
. But how exactly would such terracing be of advantage in defence? It appears that each thickness of such walls is a complete wall in itself, faced with carefully coursed masonry and infilled with loose stone, so that if the outer thickness were pulled down the next would stand unharmed. But any attackers in a position to
pull down part of the wall would have been able to scale it too, and then would have had the advantage of height in fighting their way down the terraces within. It has also been suggested that the stepped construction was an aid in building, but then the
islanders
of today who are periodically called in by the Office of Public Works to rebuild a collapsed section of one of the dúns quickly rig up a little hoist to raise the stones directly up the outer face of the wall rather than heave them up from terrace to terrace, and this would not have been beyond the original artisans.

Perhaps the terracing was adapted to some feature of life within the cashel—but what sort of life could that have been? Since there is no spring in or near it, and given its exposed situation, it can hardly have been inhabited for more than brief periods of danger, or perhaps of ceremony. Even the monks who came to Aran in search of a landscape to scourge the senses lodged themselves in nooks of its milder northern slopes and wrapped at least a fold of cliff about their shoulders against the blast of the ocean. Are these gloomy parapets and gardens of spikes an architecture of fear or of display? Perhaps the people of Dúchathair with its standing army of stone sought to impose upon folk of lesser forts, and were in turn overawed by the spacious outworks of Dún Aonghasa.

Since none of the dúns has been studied by modern methods (and the same is true for all but a very few of the scores of
comparable
cashels in Ireland), it is not even known if they were
inhabited
simultaneously or not. Folk-history ascribes them either to the Fir Bolg, one of the mythical invading races from whom the modern Irishman has come dwindling down, or to “the Danes,” the Vikings whose seaborne raids made the mediaeval monks fear calm weather. Who indeed could have built such monstrous nests of stone, and especially on such a wind-racked, spray-blasted
extremity
of the habitable world as this, but remote ancestral beings, half man and half force of nature, or else mysterious foreign
pirates
so rapacious that only stormy weather gave respite from their fiercer storms?

Archaeologists are rightly tentative in all they have to say about
the origins, dates and purposes of such cashels, which are perhaps only miscalled “forts.” In general it is agreed that they were built by a Celtic people, a cattle-raising society with a warrior
aristocracy
of whose life-style the Irish heroic legends give us a glorified view. Some cashels date from the Iron Age and perhaps most from early historic times, while a few were certainly inhabited in
mediaeval
times and one or two to within living memory. Aran's two coastal examples, Dúchathair and Dún Aonghasa, both have the
chevaux-de-frise
(as the defensive bands of set stones are called,
after
the Frisians, who having no horses used a similar device of spikes against cavalry attacks), and this feature may indicate that they are some centuries earlier than the two inland forts and
perhaps
date from the Early Iron Age, a few centuries
BC.
But their purpose, for all their purposeful air, remains obscure.

Dún Aonghasa, four miles to the west, will allow me to amplify these suppositions and their evidences, but in leaving Dúchathair, and in the dearth of sounder information, I will pass on a theory I heard from a Cill Rónáin farmer about the
chevaux-de-frise
. This was, he tells me, a defence not against men but against hordes of wild pigs that infested the land in those days—his evidence for these is the vast numbers of stones lying everywhere which can only have been rooted up by pigs, and the name of a certain area of the island, Creig na Muc, the crag of the pigs, where no pigs have been kept in island memory. The stones of the
chevaux-
de-
frise
, he points out, are set just far enough apart for the
inhabitants
of the dún to run in amongst them when hard-pressed by the pigs, which themselves would have been too fat to follow. So, mighty residences of stone fall bit by bit into the sea, the myths of huge cloudy lords quit them, and the irrepressible if shrunken folk-mind repopulates them, even before archaeology has done so, with normal-sized mortals devising witty solutions to pig-sized problems, just like their original true inhabitants, whoever they were.