Stones of Aran (9 page)

A cliff face is ignored by the conventional map, which leaves its extent unrepresented except by a mere line between the spaces
devoted
to sea and land. Nevertheless it has its geography, and
sometimes
its history too. In Aran, where it was for generations a hunting-ground for fowlers, the cliff has its named and familiar paths, its exits and entrances, hazards and amenities, haunted spots and favourite nooks. As a part of the island that humanity shared with the destructive and superhuman forces of wave and wind, a region to which access could only be won through rare personal qualities and which was ultimately as uninhabitable as the open sea, the cliff face was a wide province of the islanders' mental landscape, a theatre of anecdote, tradition, boast and dream. Ever since I first heard tales of this extinct part of Aran life I have looked back into it with appalled fascination, like that which drives one to peer over the brink of the cliff itself. Perhaps the odds and ends of lore I have collected, and a few of the earlier accounts, can be knotted together into a rope that will let me down to salvage something of the quotidian weirdness of those times. And, in descending the cliff of the past, a little geology seems a useful peg to start from.

Men visited the cliff face because birds dwelt on it, and the ledges that house the birds exactly correspond to the terraces on which men have their homes along the island's northern slopes. Both owe their existence to the layers of shale that lie between the limestone strata; on the cliff face the shale has been picked out
and worn back by the elements' direct onslaught to leave ledges between the limestone beds, while more complex processes of
erosion
have worked on the same shale bands to produce the inland terraces. These ledges run horizontally around the bays and
headlands
, dividing the height of the cliff into a number of sections like the storeys of a façade. In general the cliffs rise from east to west. Near the eastern end of the range they are of a single storey—there is a shale band at their base but the cliff face is
uninterrupted
limestone. At Dúchathair they have two storeys, with the ledge between them about half-way down the cliff face. Along the central section of the range there are three storeys, and on the very highest cliffs, west of Dún Aonghasa, there are four. In places the lowest storey stands forward of the rest as a broad terrace edged with a small cliff of its own, and in others it is worn back into wide-arched caves so that the storeys above appear to rest on pillars. This geography is hard to make out in the dizzy
perspectives
from the land's edge that are all one can get where the cliffs run straight, but certain huge salients and re-entrants of the higher cliffs allow one less oblique views of it. For instance,
walking
westwards from An Aill Bhán, it is impossible to see much of the cliff below, although the first of its recesses, An Poll Gorm, the blue cave, is big enough for one of the island's small trawlers to sail into. But after half a mile a turn of the coast reveals the inner and farther walls of a magnificent bay with deeply incised ledges running around it, one third and two-thirds of the way down its sheer cliffs. This is Poll an Iomair, so called no doubt because it is shaped like three sides of a square
iomar
, a trough or font. In spring it is the island's most populous breeding ground of
sea-birds
; a pair of ravens too usually comes sweeping up over its rim with defiant cries as one approaches. Multitudinous flotillas of guillemots and razorbills assemble on the sea at its mouth on sunny afternoons in April, and fly in clouds up onto its shadowy precipices with the coming of dusk. Throughout the nesting
season
birds are packed close all along its ledges, like books on shelves. Their aboriginal clamour resounding across the two
hundred
yards of dark water between the echoing walls of stone soon becomes oppressive, and it is sometimes a relief to turn inland, away from such prehuman, unearthly, sights, and sounds. Yet this savage place was like one of the island's fields, cropped every year, and perhaps has been so since the Stone Age. Its ledges, wet with ground-water flowing out of the shale bands, its slimy rock-slabs the waves explode over and the low-roofed caverns they surge into along the foot of its walls, were all ways to a livelihood for the cliffman, who prowled them at night and alone.

This bizarre hunt is of unknown but certainly ancient origin. According to some casuist the old monks must often have blessed, the flesh of certain sea-birds partook of the nature of fish rather than of meat, as is explained in one of the very earliest accounts of the islands, written by Roderic O'Flaherty in 1684:

John T. O'Flaherty gives more details of the custom, in the first of the modern accounts of Aran, published in 1824:

Perhaps puffins were common on the cliffs in those days, and certainly they used to be caught in the way O'Flaherty describes on Tory Island, but it may be that some details of this account are mistaken, as is nearly every mention of plants and animals in his article. In more recent descriptions of the cliffman's trade, and
according
to the stories I have heard myself, the killing was done with the bare hands. However, the huge numbers of birds that O'Flaherty mentions are certainly correct. In 1929 a former
ail-
leadóir
or cliffman, Mícheál Ó Maolláin of Baile na Creige,
describing
his methods, mentioned catching eight score cliff-birds (that is, guillemots) and two rock doves in the cave of An Poll Dubh, handing them out one by one to his companion who wrung their necks, and killing thirty score birds at Gleann an Charnáin (both places are towards the western end of the cliffs). In Aran this Ó Maolláin was called Micilín Sara (Sara's little Michael), from his mother's name. He was so well known on the cliffs that, as I have been told, the raven would fly across and start swooping on him as soon as he started off down the main road from his house with his rope on his shoulder; then Micilín would brandish his otter-spear at the bird and swear to make a widow of it. According to one of the many stories still remembered of him, constables searching for illicit brews of
poitín
once came across the remains of large numbers of cliff-birds around his cottage. It was of course illegal to catch them without the agent's permission, and the fine was five pounds a bird. When all the beaks and legs had
been collected up and counted, Micilín Sara was charged with the taking of thirteen score birds. But when the case came to court the judge was persuaded that this was Micilín's first and last offence, and reduced the fine to a penny a bird.

Razorbills, guillemots and black guillemots, puffins and
cormorants
were the birds usually taken on the cliffs. Both eggs and birds were eaten, the young cormorant and the razorbill being particularly prized—though one could get tired of them, and
blas
an
seachtú
crosáin,
the taste of the seventh razorbill, was a
commonplace
phrase for a flavour made nauseous by surfeit. The flesh also provided oil for lamps, a horribly smoky oil to which that of the basking shark's liver was preferred when it could be got. The feathers used to be sold in Galway market, and provided the
island
itself with its filling for pillows and mattresses.

The hunt was conducted as follows. The men would walk across to the cliffs at dusk with the rope, which was often a
communal
investment. One end of it would be tied around the
cliffman's
waist and between his legs, and the other made fast to an iron bar driven into a crevice or wedged in a cairn on the clifftop. A team of up to eight would lower the cliffman, guided by signals from a man stationed out on a headland from which he could watch the progress of the descent. The cliffman would carry a stick to keep himself clear of the cliff face while swinging on the rope, and wedges to help him round awkward corners of his climbs. Having reached the chosen ledge the cliffman would
remain
crouched in it until darkness came. When all the birds had flown in from the sea and settled down to roost he would begin to crawl along, and would silently murder the first bird he came to, putting one arm round it to stop it flapping—for a cormorant with its five-foot wingspan could have knocked him off the cliff—and giving a couple of quick twists to its neck with the other hand before it could raise the alarm. Then he would move on, pushing the dead bird before him until it was up against the next victim, which thus would not feel his hands until it was too late. The dead birds would be strung on a cord by a running loop around
the neck. At dawn the cliffman would be hauled up again, bent and rigid with cold and cramp.

Because his was such a dreadful trade—the sea constantly
picking
at the unsound rock of the ledges, the weather unpredictably changeable in the middle of the night, the village rope a poor thing of frayed and knotted pieces—the cliffman's exploits and narrow escapes provided the community with serial stories which were not the least valuable product of the cliff face. Micilín Sara's little cottage in Baile na Creige was the great talking-shop of the middle of the island, and the young people used to gather there every evening to hear real cliff-hangers, old and new, recollected or reinvented. Some of these stories are still current, and Micilín's words and gestures, which have been fondly reproduced for me time and time again, portray him as a curious, rheumy-eyed, twisted little cat of a man who could make a comedy out of the stuff of nightmares—of getting his head stuck when trying to squeeze under an overhang, so that he could move neither forward nor backwards, or of having to crawl backwards along a ledge too narrow to turn in, pulling a bagful of peregrine falcon fledglings after him. There was a court case over one of these chicks which Micilín Sara had sold to some visitor instead of to the agent who had commissioned him to get them; I have had Micilín's
Aran-Irish
oaths and witty interjections from the dock rehearsed to me often enough, but they are still as incomprehensible to me as no doubt they were to the judge in the case. Another story records what were nearly his last words, when he was saved from death by a companion called Conneely. Micilín had jumped down on top of a cormorant perched on a ledge that sloped outward and was slippery with droppings, and found himself sliding towards the brink astride the great flapping bird. Thinking he was riding to his death he cried out, “Give my blessing to all the old neighbours who live down on the Creig!”; but Conneely, who was a huge strong fellow, put out a long arm and dragged him back by the hair. His farewell seems oddly formal for such an occasion, but
then, as the man who told me the tale explained, “Micilín Sara was like a king among the people of Baile na Creige!”

It seems that early in this century the islanders got permission to catch the seabirds with nets lowered from the clifftops, and the cliffman's skills were no longer needed. The smaller nets were worked from above by three or four men, but to manage the larger ones another team had to be positioned in currachs at the foot of the cliff. An expedition would be made only once or twice in the season, between the arrival of the birds around St. Patrick's Day in March and their departure near the Feast of Our Lady in August. The net would be lowered past each of the ledges in turn, its
bottom
edge kept well in against the cliff as the tendency of the birds was to fly downwards from the ledges. However, it often
happened
that the birds merely cowered back into the ledges when they saw the net, and this difficulty was overcome by a local
invention
, the
dorú
drárs,
a pair of white
báinín
drawers on the end of a fishing-line or
dorú,
which would be lowered beside the net and jerked at the right moment so that the drawers flapped against the cliff and flushed the birds from their retreat.

Even the netting was given up perhaps fifty years ago, and the cliff no longer plays much of a part in the islanders' lives. In fact most of them shun that side of the island, and sometimes when a man has to visit his cattle in a field by the cliffs, he will hurry home knowing that his wife will be anxious about him. Over the last eight years I have walked the cliffs hundreds of times, in all weathers and all seasons, and the occasions on which I have met anyone over there are so few that I can remember them all
individually
—the man fishing with a long line from the cliff west of Dún Aonghasa, another looking out for basking sharks from a sheltered recess above An Pointe Fiáin, a group of Cill Éinne men disconsolately loitering near Dúchathair one holiday weekend when the pubs had run out of beer, and only one or two other such encounters. The last of the
ailleadóirí
were old when the
people
from whom I learn of them were young, and their way of life,
unlike that of the boatmen and farmers of the last century, has no successor today; like the cliff face itself it is turned away from the existent Aran, and seems to look back into a dateless past.