Stones of Aran (8 page)

The sea makes a ferocious attack on the peninsula of Dúchathair, and may after a few more centuries leave a remnant of the fort
isolated
on a sea-stack, for it is cutting through the neck of the
headland
from the bay on its west, eating out colossal overhangs from which one can look dizzily down at breakers crawling among
giant
debris of past cliff-falls. In the last century there were traces of another fort on the headland on the other side of this bay; it was described as having a wall six foot seven inches thick and
enclosing
a stone hut eighteen foot six across. Nothing can be made out now of either fort or hut among the tumbled slabs of the last of the storm beach, which ceases here as the cliffs beyond the next bay are unscalable by the waves of any storm.

The headland of the vanished fort is Binn an Phrúntaigh, the cliff face of the
prúntach
or young black-backed gull. No doubt that species does nest here, and I often see one go drifting by, alarming the lesser gulls, for it is a huge bird and a nest-robber. But the most familiar gull on this particular cliff is the mild little kittiwake. An aerial survey of sea-birds in 1970 estimated the
nesting
population of kittiwakes in Árainn at eight hundred and twenty pairs. In spring one can watch them here assembling on the ledges below and greeting each other with childlike cries. They are trim, sea-grey birds with a crisp, newly painted, nautical look due to the unbroken black of their wingtips, which distinguishes them from the other gulls, in which the black of the wingtips is dashed with white. They are marvellous fliers too, circling around the bays with a buoyant, yacht-like glide that makes the herring gulls and common gulls appear to be perpetually stumbling over invisible irregularities of the air. One soon learns to recognize birds by their styles in this three-dimensional rite performed each spring in a dozen great theatres of the cliffs. The fulmar—a rather short-bodied grey bird, not a gull though very like one in
appearance
—is the most dazzling performer, in a more mechanical mode than that of the dreamy lyrical kittiwake; it rides the updraughts
of the deep cliff walls without a sign of effort apart from minute adjustments of the angle of its stiff, blade-like wings to maximize the efficient use of the air’s impetus, sometimes looking about it with a turn of its short neck as it whirls by, like a pilot abstractedly glancing out of the cockpit of a little plane as he gives a deft touch to the controls. This bird has only nested on Irish shores during the last decade; formerly its breeding ground was Icelandic, but a century ago it started to expand its range enormously, for no
well-understood
reason. For nine months of the year the fulmar never rests from flying, far out over the Atlantic. In February, it comes shorewards, though never venturing inland, and nests on cliffs such as these, from which it can drop itself directly into flight by shuffling itself off a ledge, its legs being degenerate and almost functionless. Once when I had ventured a little way down such a cliff-face I disturbed a mating pair of fulmars, and saw the male throw himself into space off the back of his partner. It is strangely disturbing to watch a fulmar approach its nest a dozen times or more before landing, sweeping up to the site and falling away from it into another wide circuit over the water, before it finally commits itself to a stalling flop onto the ledge, as if it were as
distrustful
of solid ground as we would be of the empty air beyond the brink that separates its world from ours.

Islanders tell me there are puffins at Binn an Phrúntaigh too, but I have never seen them on Aran’s cliffs, though they nest on the Cliffs of Moher and I once saw one from a boat not far offshore from Aran. However, the commoner auks, the similarly plump and black razorbills and guillemots, line the ledges here in hundreds during the nesting season. Sometimes, as if they suddenly tired of sitting in rows on the cliff face, a group of them will hop off and go whirring down to the water in a long sagging arc, skim close above the surface with the motion of clockwork mice, and sit in rows on the sea for a change. And the big black cormorants go by, flying very low, with necks outstretched, making that same urgent line across the water as a wild goose against the sky, and carrying their absurd courting gifts of scraps of seaweed, tokens of nests to be.

A bay half a mile wide separates the sequence of cliffs so far
described
from the loftier range to the west, and corresponds to a valley that breaks through the island’s escarpment ridge here. The valley is broadest to the north-east where it embraces low land
between
the villages of Cill Éinne and Cill Rónáin, but as it
approaches
the southern coast it rises and narrows into a gorge that fades out just short of the cliffs. This gorge must have formed along large joints of the limestone—it shares the general direction of the major set of joints—and these same lines of weakness no doubt have led to the formation of a striking feature called An Aill Bhriste, the broken cliff, at the point of the coast nearest the head of the gorge and in the centre of the bay’s arc. Here a great mass has come half adrift from the clifftop, and forms an arch between it and a rock-stack based on the terrace below. When you are close to the spot it all looks so firm and long-lasting that its top of green turf invites you to hop over the ragged chasm onto a perfect picnic site. But then when you look back from farther along the cliffs and see how the stack below leans outwards and that weighty fallen blocks are wedging open the crevasses you jumped, you have a vision of the inevitable crumbling of the whole crazy pile, carrying you with it into the foam.

For the lads of Cill Rónáin the gap opened up by this incipient collapse is an invitation to scramble down to the terraces which run a long way to the west under the cliffs at sea level. I watched two of them recently salvaging a floating spar down there and heaving it up from step to step of the jumble of blocks that hangs like a wrecked staircase between the cliff and the rock-stack. This bay was always well known for the flotsam that accumulated in it, and its name, Poll na Brioscarnach, refers to fragments of
wreckage
. In the last century there was a winch on the clifftop for
hoisting
up timbers, and I am told that the O’Malleys, who had the Hill Farm, kept a man stationed here to claim anything of value that came ashore. All that is left of the winch is a rusty iron peg set
in the ground at the head of a wide track that comes through the valley and reaches the coast just east of the rock-arch. This road was another nineteenth-century famine-relief project, and is still of use to the men who have fields in An Screigín, the quarter of Cill Éinne it traverses. But its final section, now walled off, served no purpose other than the transport of salvage, and only an
isolated
and apparently pointless length of it remains, ending
mysteriously
in mid-air eighty feet above the sea.

This scrap of history’s jetsam, the bit of road abandoned on the clifftop, at least serves to mark a corner of Cill Éinne. The exact boundary is the field-wall between it and the rock-arch, and the next half-mile of land, around the bay and up the hillside to the western skyline, belongs to Cill Rónáin people. This skyline is the beginning of the island’s central plateau. The stone fort of Dún Eochla, high on the inland shoulder of the plateau, stands out to the north-west, and from it the skyline runs as evenly as a
roof-ridge
, with only the slightest southwards dip, to the coast ahead, where it ends in a boldly jutting headland, An Aill Bhán, the white cliff, so called from the cladding of bright calcite on its vertical eastern face. The promontory terrace below the cliff is equally
simply
named, An Pointe Fiáin, the wild point—“And it is too!” added the retired fisherman who gave me its name, his jaw suddenly
setting
as if he were once again gripping the tiller to take his lobster boat out of the sheltered bay, around the point’s white thunders and into the track of the great rollers coming from the west.

Walking on around the bay from the rock-arch towards the high white promontory, and keeping as one thinks well away from the edge because of the undercutting of the cliffs, one jumps over a field-wall to find an opening at one’s feet that gives like a
window
onto a plunging view of waves breaking on a beach vertically
below. This little chasm is called simply Poll Talún, the hole in the ground; it is marked on the Survey maps as a puffing-hole, but the arch of the overhang it opens into is so lofty I doubt if anything more than spindrift is sent up it even by the wildest storms. The young men of the village used to boast about having jumped across it, but erosion, or else degeneration of the race, has made that game too dangerous now. Aran’s last fox, according to a local story, evaded its hunters for a long time because no-one could
discover
where it had its earth, until one day someone saw it slinking down Poll Talún. Then the hunters lay in watch nearby and found out that the fox lived on a ledge in the vault of the cliff below, which it reached by clamping its jaws on a fern that grew in the bottom of the hole and swinging itself down. So they cut the stalk of the fern half through, and the next time the fox swung on it the fern broke and let the beast fall into the breakers.

This shameful anecdote has its setting, if not its excuse, in a lapse of the rock itself; the opening in the roof of the overhang is due to a small fault that shows up as a fissure in the cliff face and a little valley running inland obliquely, north-westwards from it. A fault is a dislocation of the strata (as opposed to a joint, a break that leaves the strata on either side of it in their original relative positions) and here by peering over at the face of the cliff one can see that the layers of rock on the west of the fissure are displaced a foot or so downwards relative to their continuations on the east. Faults are the exception in Aran, and the land-forms, from such major features as the long skyline terminating in the promontory ahead, to the little crevices of the rock underfoot, have been carved out by erosion along the joints, the lines of least resistance. And since these joints occur almost throughout the island in two sets, each astonishingly parallel, the most developed ones trending north-north-east and the others at about ninety degrees to that
direction
, a great rectangularity underlies all the oddities and
complexities
of the landscape and even the network of field-walls. Poll Talún, on the other hand, owing its existence to a fault rather than a joint, lies askew in the fields around it, and jars with the pattern.

Some of the joints of the major set are filled with crystals of
calcite
, a purer form of calcium carbonate than that which makes up the limestone itself. These crystals have been deposited from a flux of hot aqueous solutions that forced its way up through such planes of weakness in the rock during some remote geological
period
of thermal activity in whatever strata lie deep below the
islands
. Such veins of calcite show up, especially in the bare rock of the shore, as white lines, of all thicknesses up to a few inches, and sometimes continuing for dozens of yards as straight as rays of light. And where a freak of cliff-fall has entirely removed the rock on one side of a calcite vein, the free face revealed is badged with white, as is An Aill Bhán here and the sides of several other
headlands
orientated along the major joints.

A steep climb along the coast past the white cliff brings one onto the edge of the plateau; that threshold attained, the eye is suddenly made free of new expanses, broad and lofty by the
measures
one adopts after a time in Aran, and disquietingly secretive despite their utter openness. A mile to the north the long and level ridge-line, behind which the inhabited slopes of the island fall away, carries three empty monuments like three blind heads
gazing
over the plain: a roofless signal tower of stone and a
half-ruined
lighthouse, both unmanned and unlit for more than a century, and the darkly peering bulk of the huge Celtic cashel,
deserted
since prehistory. In summer it is unusual to see anyone moving along the narrow paths, walled with stone, that angle their way through the plateau’s thousandfold replication of small crookedly rectangular fields. In winter cattle graze here and there in these fields, and one may occasionally meet a lad sent up to bring a sack of feed-beet to them, for this level of the island carries a thin soil and a healthy pasture useful as winterage; it corresponds to such plateaus of the Burren as Slieve Carran and Turlough Hill, and in that district too it is the custom to drive the cattle up onto the hilltops in the autumn and bring them down in spring. The limestone that gives rise to this soil, in both Aran and the Burren, differs from that of lower levels with their tracts of bare, smooth,
pale-grey pavement; it is rougher in texture and darker in hue, and the geologist would recognize it as dolomite, a sort of limestone in which some of the calcium carbonate is replaced by magnesium carbonate. It seems that this exchange of calcium for magnesium ions takes place in hot and very salty water, so that occurrence of dolomite is an indication that these limestone beds once underlay a shallow and evaporating sea.

Where exposure thins out the grass near the clifftops one can see that the stratum now underfoot has a characteristic pattern of fissures too; joints of the major set rather regularly occur a foot or two apart, so that the rock surface is divided up into long
plank-shaped
sections separated by gaps of a few inches. And as if to
emphasize
that one is treading new ground here, a thin layer of a blackish mineral called chert occurs over wide areas of this terrain, either just a few inches below the surface, when it is visible in the sides of every fissure, or on the surface itself, where it fragments into little bricks. Chert is a form of silica that occurs in sheets or nodules in limestone; it is a non-crystalline substance with a
coke-like
texture, and it gives the ground here a charred look that makes both natives and visitors speculate about a volcanic origin for Aran. In fact chert has its birth in water rather than fire, though how exactly it comes to form such layers is a matter of
debate
. Sea water contains some dissolved silica, which various
marine
creatures can extract for use in the building of their own skeletons. For instance the single-celled animals called
Radiolarians
, which form a large component of the ocean’s planktonic life, have an internal skeleton of silica, and in certain circumstances the accumulated remains of their teeming, quickly succeeding generations will collect as an ooze on the sea-floor; trapped under succeeding layers of other sediments the gel of silica will
eventually
be compressed into a layer of chert. Again, some sorts of sponges also use the sea’s silica to rigidify themselves. After their death the tiny “spicules” of which their skeletons were composed lie scattered on the sea-bed and in the course of the ages are
incorporated
into rock along with all the other sediments. Later, water
percolating through the rock—rainwater in Aran, for instance—will redissolve the silica of the spicules, leaving them as empty
cavities
, and on reaching saturation will precipitate it at another level. Thus it could be that chert bands were formed millions of years after the deposition of the rock in which they are embodied.

So, just as the calcite in An Aill Bhán seems to pick out in white a vertical element of the island’s hidden structure, here one of the horizontals of its three-dimensional geometry is, as it were, underlined in black. For the two sets of joints, giving rise to
fissures
running in two directions at right-angles and dividing the strata vertically, together with the almost horizontal partings
between
the strata, constitute a skeleton (one made up of weaknesses rather than strengths) very like the system of cleavage-planes in a crystal of the cubic order. In other parts of the island this
underlying
logic is hard to see among the incidentals of the terrains, but the headlands, bays, terraces and overhangs of the great cliffs the sea has carved out of this upland have been modelled, with sweeping decisiveness and on a grand scale, according to the cubic schema of fissure-planes and strata-partings, and the giant crystallinity of Aran made manifest.

And the setting of this rough gem? Correspondingly vast,
almost
immeasurable, leaving the walker of the clifftops a
microscopical
figure assailed by immensities that pry at cracks in the self: the sea’s temper, whatever it may be, unchecked to the
horizon
, where in the south Mount Brandon in Kerry is a mere shadow seen when rain has cleared the air, and there is nothing at all to the west but the sky of the hour; and this sky colossal in all its moods, sometimes raising shield upon shield of tenuous greys against the blinding voids behind it, sometimes opening out into unsoundable rooms opulently furnished with cumulus in white and cream, delicately stratified in various perfections of blue, flawed only by the course of transatlantic flights from Shannon, along which slow silver darts rise one by one far in the south-east, arc silently across the dazzling heights and sink to the western horizon while their murmurous voices are still lagging past the
zenith; I have seen their departures follow on so closely that three or four are glinting in the sky at once and their vapour-trails
entwine
and merge and are scored into the blue as if the sky itself were weakened, fissured and veined, along an invisible line of
predestined
fall.