Authors: Tim Robinson
Another way of passing a disease on to a randomly chosen victim was to deck a cockerel in coloured ribbons and let it loose on the crags, far enough away for it not to return home; the first person to see it would die of the disease, or else his cattle would die, while the patient recovered. A herb-woman called Nellóg, who lived in Corrúch in the last century, was known to practice this method.
The “evil eye” was a constant threat to mental and physical health. A person could put the evil eye quite unintentionally, for instance by praising someone and omitting to add the customary
Bail ó
Dhia,
the blessing of God. The remedy then was to spit on the victim, and if it was not known who had put the evil eye, everyone would have to contribute their saliva. District Nurse Hedderman railed against the custom in her account of her years of duty in Inis Oírr:
I have seen lives ruined and lost that might have been saved, if only means could be found for dispelling this black ignorance when sudden illness attacks the young and healthy. The first resort is the saliva cure, and should the person accused of casting the spell resent the insinuation and not be friendly disposed in that special direction, the patient’s progress and relief from suffering are supposed to be hindered until he enters the sickroom and saturates the bedclothes with this filthy secretion.
Many illnesses, especially of children, were blamed on the fairies, and medical help, even if available, was disregarded in these cases. It was thought that the fairies stole human children, especially boys, and left changelings in their place which soon faded
away and died. To prevent this, boys were dressed as girls, in petticoats, up to a certain age. A retarded or deformed baby was likely to be regarded as a changeling, and might be left outside overnight on the blade of a spade for the fairies to take away, or be burned in the mouth with the heated tongs to make it go away of its own accord. The virtue of iron as a prophylactic against enchantment played some part in these horrific practices.
Shortly before the beginning of the sequence of distressful years, a woman came to live in Cill Éinne who was to personify the community’s dealings with birth, sickness and death; Nell an Tower is still vividly present to the islanders, and her legend has already flitted across a page of my first volume. The census of 1821 lists her and her household:
John McDonough, 41, fisherman
Nelly McDonough, 34, woolspinner
Pat McDonough, 6
Ann McDonough, 3
They lived in a cottage built against a small round tower forming a sort of bastion at the south-west corner of the old castle, which has long since vanished, and from which she got her name, Nell of the Tower. Island tradition is uncertain of her origins, but its best opinion is that she was of the Greelish family of Ros Muc in south Connemara, and that she was already married with a son when she came to Aran. Perhaps her husband soon died, for it is as a widow that she is remembered. She may have brought a certain reputation with her, for she was related to a
bean feasa
or wise woman in Connemara who came into conflict with the parish priest, a dangerous state in those days when priests had magic powers, and was found naked and dying in a field in which the crop had been leveled as if by a gale.
The older Aran people have no doubts about Nell’s supernatural powers; one man said to me “She could fly, though there was no talk of jet planes or scooters in those days!” However the various
stories in which a husband comes from a distant village on horseback to bring her to attend upon his wife in childbirth, and Nell refuses a seat on the rump of his horse, saying she will follow him on foot, but still reaches the house before him, do not make it clear how she is thought to have travelled so quickly. She was highly regarded as a herbalist, and no doubt she employed the usual Aran pharmacopoeia of ferns, mosses, flowering plants and seaweeds, some of which, such as comfrey, had genuine curative properties; but it was the ceremonies with which she gathered her ingredients and applied her potions that gave them their effectiveness, and here she was understood to be doing her best with powers that were not totally in her control. Once, when she was picking a certain herb, she looked out to sea, to avoid transferring the disease she was treating to anyone who might be passing by, but her eye fell on a man rowing a currach, and he died; she was very upset about it, I was told, but she could not help it. Another story confirms her stance on disease transference:
There was a man in Creig an Chéirín who got a sort of stroke—but a very light one, his mouth twisted, as if the sinews had shrunk. The priest and the doctor were coming to him but I think he didn’t get much out of them as he wasn’t very twisted. But he was bad enough for his wife to think he wouldn’t live at all. And she was horrified because he was a good man, and he had three sons. And Nell was sent for. But when she came, she didn’t go to look at him. And the wife was so wild with fear he might die that she started to bargain with her in advance. She was suggesting that she would would rather send off one of the sons and keep the father—that was what the Creig an Chéirín woman had in mind.
“Ah” said Nell, “Isn’t that murder? I couldn’t do that.” Probably she thought she would go to hell! “But” she said, “If you have a sheep or a goat for me to put to death, I wouldn’t think twice about it.” “Well” said the wife, “there’s a heifer that was in calf, that’s all.”
But they say that there never was a night as bad as that with rain, and it was as black as the pot, at twelve o’clock or later, when she had to be on her way.
“Well, I’ll go now,” said Nell, “and I’ll get that beast, and when you shut the door after me,” she said, “on the skin of your ears, don’t any of you open the door whoever knocks, until I knock on it myself.”
Off she went. I think two of the sons were at the fireside, whether the third was there or not, and a long time later in the evening she came to the door and she ordered them to shut it firmly behind her. And she went to the fireside, and her two feet were nothing but blood, cut by briars when she was walking in the dark. After a bit she said “Well now, when dawn comes, be looking out, and you will find that beast in the back corner of the Crogán. And in the other place there is a hollow” she said, “and there is enough earth in it to cover a good bit of the crag. And drag it to that spot, and bury it there. It is dead.”
And indeed it was. They went back there in the morning and they found the heifer dead, and they dragged it across, and they had never known of such a hollow in that little craggy field. And they dug out the earth from it and threw the beast in and covered it over.
And they say that that land never had a good day ever after. The man who lived there had no luck with cattle or anything, but beasts dying on him, dying in strange ways.
There are several stories of Nell’s ability to foresee the hour of birth or death; when a man came from one of the western villages to tell her his wife was in labour, she sent him away, saying “I know the time to go west.” In Mainistir once she saw some men making a coffin, and asked who it was for. The men told her that an old man of the village was nearing death, but Nell replied, “He will live. The one who will go into that coffin is still alive and running around.” And indeed the old man survived, while a young lad who was out hunting rabbits on the cliff tops at the time fell into the sea and drowned, and was buried in that coffin.
It is said that Nell knew of a death-curse, but there is no memory of her having used it. However, in the following tale there is a hint that it was wise not to cross her:
A man in Eochaill was very ill and his family sent for Nell. She looked after
him for a bit, until he was thought to be well again. Then the family were not willing to pay the amount of money Nell asked them for, and after an argument she took whatever they gave her.
Not long afterwards the man fell ill again and the wife told the son to go and tell Nell. “Do you think she’ll come?” he said. “Well, try her anyway,” said his mother. The son went east on his horse, and she said she would come. He told her to ride pillion, but she told him to go on and she would be able to come by herself. He rode off west. When he was nearing the house he saw her sitting by the road, and he asked her how she had got there before him. “Don’t mind that,” she said, “I’m going back east.” “Were you down at the house already?’” he asked. “I was not,” she said. “He’s passed on already, and there is no need for me to go down.” And away she went.
As it happens, we have a precise date for the most famous illustration of her powers of second sight:
A man from Bun Gabhla, one of the Ó Tuathail family, was out on the crags one day. He came across a flagstone and he turned it over. Whatever was under it, a horrible smell came up from it. A weakness came over the man and he went home. He got dizzy then and he had to go to bed. He was ill, and Nell an Tower was sent for. She came, and spent a long time working on him. In the end she cured him, with some herb, probably. She went to bed herself then, exhausted.
In the morning the family were up when Nell an Tower suddenly opened the door and shrieked “My son is killed! What shall I do without him?,” and started to weep and wail. The people of the house tried to find out what was wrong or what had happened to her, but she ran out of the house and eastwards towards Cill Éinne. It was on that same morning that her son was drowned at Aill na nGlasóg, and fourteen others with him, on the fifteenth of August, 1852.
Most islanders today, if asked about the truth of such stories, would reply, “You wouldn’t know!”—an answer at three subtle grammatical removes from either asseveration or denial. The stories I have recounted here are often told, but rarely nowadays in
the detail of these versions, which I have translated from the Irish given in Ruairí Ó hEithir’s treatise. He recorded them in about 1980 from his grandfather Pádraic Ó hEithir, who had come to Aran as a schoolteacher in the 1920s and married a daughter of the most genial of Aran families, the O’Flahertys of Gort na gCapall. For Pádraic, the zest of Aran life was its speech, the oblique sayings, the bizarrely comic anecdotes, in which Araners are so profuse. He would have relished the juxtaposition of the weird and the homely in these stories, picked up in those days when the long evenings took their moods and rhythms from the blazing or smouldering of the turf fire. But however much he appreciated their native savour, the literate and sophisticated teacher would not have wasted much time on their truth-value, any more than would his grandson the Dublin University College graduate, forty years later. For a less sophisticated, older contemporary of the teacher’s, Pat Mullen, it was important explicitly to discount the reality of such incidents. Nell of the Tower is an important character in his novel
Hero
Breed,
published in 1936, in which the hero himself comes to live in Cill Éinne and falls in love with Nell’s beautiful daughter. Here he questions his future mother-in-law about her powers:
“Nella, why is it that you pull your herbs at night? Wouldn’t the daylight do just as well or better?”
“It is this way, Avic: half the power of my medicines is the belief by the person who takes them that they
will
cure. It is in daytime that I pull them really, but if people saw the herbs I pull they would soon lose faith in my powers of healing, because some of those herbs are weeds and are considered good for nothing by the islanders. On the other hand, by making the people believe that I pull them at night I bring an air of mystery over my work…. Of course there
are
herbs that must be pulled before sunrise because their medicinal properties are much better when they are gathered in the freshness of the early morning dew. What knowledge I have of herbs and medicine has been handed down in our family for more than a thousand
years. Lots of witchcraft stories have also been told about me, but the one Orla and I laugh at the most at is the one about the Iararna man who galloped his horse five miles to Kilmurvy to bring me to his house when his wife was nearing her confinement….”
—and she continues with an unquotably lengthy account of how this man left her to make her own way to his house while he went off for a sup of
poitín,
and then pretended to be amazed that she had arrived before him, and said that she must have crossed the Black Crag by witchcraft. For the purposes of his plot Pat Mullen brings Nell fifty or sixty years nearer our own time, so that she is still flourishing during the modernizing of the fishing fleet in the 1890s. But there is a deeper anachronism in this collusion between character and author in turning out the dark side of her work to the light of common-sense. Mullen’s Cill Éinne is brimming with life—the novel is hardly more than a succession of vividly physical episodes, stick-fights, feats of sailing, rowing, horse-riding and weight-lifting, interspersed with the materials of a manual of nineteenth-century fishing techniques—but it has no shadows, it is all lit by the solar vigour of his protagonists. The real Nell an Tower picked her herbs beneath the moon because, like the society she was born into, she was groping among the ultimate mysteries; scepticism, like sanitation, was still a hundred years away. She shared the common belief in the powers of her own charms, in those times that offered no other recourse apart from the priest’s equally incomprehensible rites, because they seemed to work often enough to offer a fingerhold to hope. At the very least they had that sometimes curative ingredient: care, the human touch. As for her moving through the island as swiftly as rumour, as disease, as death itself, there are in fact certain shortcuts, only known to those who have reason to use them, by which it was possible to go from village to village with surprising speed even at night, as I shall reveal in the right place; there is even one across An Chreig Dhubh, the “Black Crag” of Mullen’s novel. But
for the moment I leave Nell an Tower her mystery, which was necessary to the only angel serving those benighted dwellers among stones hallowed by saints, cursed by Cromwell, and bled dry by landlords.