Authors: Tim Robinson
On the way down the hill again Seán took me to the “
graveyard
”—an irregular structure about seven feet long and two or three across, aligned east-west, of rough slab-like stones set on edge. Goulden had told them that it was a grave, said Seán, and
they had not believed him because they thought that “you couldn’t have buried a fly on that
creig
!”
But one day when
Goulden
was away in Inis Meáin a couple of the workers took their picks over to it for a private dig. To their surprise they were able to root stones out of its floor down to arm’s-length; then they came to a cross-stone they couldn’t shift, and piled everything back so that Goulden wouldn’t know. In fact this monument—one of Kinahan’s “fosleacs”—might be some sort of cist grave.
Some time after this conducted tour I spent a few afternoons exploring Baile na Sean by myself. In an early draft for this
chapter
of my book I recorded the fruits of those September hours. As examples:
Three hundred yards further along the boreen is a very short branch to the west, and in the third field counting west from the end of this are the remains of a rectangular and a circular clochán, very ruinous …
and:
Two fields south of the above is a twelve-foot-high heap of stone topped by a tall growth of ivy, that looks from a distance like a bit of a ring-fort.
However
it seems to be the result of energetic clearance of a little field and the piling up of stone from a ruined clochán, of which some corbelling can be made out to the north-west…
There are several pages of such diligent plod, arranged into two itineraries, the first taking one up “Bóithrín Denny” from the chapel in Eochaill to the boreen that runs along the spine of the island, and back by Bóithrín na bPóil, and the second
following
the boreen up the hill south of the medieval chapel in
Corrúch
and then by ramifying narrow paths west and north again, both with numerous excursions into the interiors of these loops. No coherent image of the place emerges from this dry stuff,
nothing
that explains what I thought I was at—playing the
Schliemann
of a dwarfish Troy, perhaps. Why did I spend so much time
interrogating this amnesiac rubble? It may be of some help to
future
researchers that I have pinpointed all Kinahan’s sites on the six-inch OS map, as his own article provides only a rather out-
of-scale
sketch-map by Kilbride; and I have added another dozen or so unidentifiable ruins to Kinahan’s tally, which I am told were the despair of the field-workers on the Galway Archaeological Survey when they came to the islands a year or two later (“Oh no, not another of Tim Robinson’s cnocáns!”), because they had to go and find all these featureless hummocks among the hundreds of hummocky fields, and measure them up and write reports on them. A few of the sites of Baile na Sean are worth individual description, and I can thread those into the weave of this book somewhere, but they are poor pickings from those hours of
scrambling
over tottering walls and thorny hollows. Again I follow my own footfalls:
… But usually, when one is nearly exhausted by the endless succession of obstacles and pitfalls, one is heartened by finding a rarity—such as a
frog-orchid
, or some more than usually odd conjunction of old stones, or a family of plate-sized horse-mushrooms to take home for dinner.
Crumbs of comfort, scraps brought by ravens to the hermit Paul in the desert! The wearisomeness of this chill
Thebaid
was not only due to its countless grey fields and proliferating walls and vacuous ruins, but also to the crushing weight of nothingness above it, the harsh empty birdless blue skies of those long
afternoons
. The light was nullifyingly even, reducing the mysteries of the past to tedious puzzles. An old, poor, place, it seemed, all grappled down into meaninglessness by the briars. Nothing stands, from the life of the people who crept in and out of those little huts and comforted themselves with a chew of sweet
sea-weed
, and whose one silver treasure was a delusion. I wasted my time there.
Coming down disconsolate from Baile na Sean after the last of these explorations, I stopped to talk to one of the wilder-looking
and more retiring islanders, a man I never met on the roads, who was cutting down brambles in a field that held more stone than grass. I leaned over the wall near where he was kneeling to drag at a tangle of briars with his great scythe, and asked him in Irish about a certain ruin that, Seán had told me, was once a chapel. He shuffled himself around on his knees to look in the direction I was pointing, and shook his head in silence; it seemed to take him a minute to collect the powers of speech that had wandered off into his solitude, and then it was as if he had never heard of the place. After a desultory conversation I left him, wondering if I had made myself comprehensible. From further down I glanced back. Joe (it wasn’t Joe, of course, but in the low perspectives of bramble-arches it might as well have been he) was still kneeling there, staring up the hillside in the direction I had indicated, a dark knot in a faded tapestry.
That evening I suddenly got sick—perhaps it was just eye-strain, from locating myself again and again in the lattice of field-walls on the map, as tenuous as a spider-web in that seething, unilluminating glare—and I spent the night trailing miserably between bedroom and bathroom, until I was absolutely empty from end to end.
A dozen cottages, most of them beside the road, a few reached by boreens running uphill or down from it, constitute Corrúch, the last of the villages of the central height and the townland of
Eochaill
. Looking down the hillside falling northwards from it one sees the shinglebank and seaweed-covered shores of Port
Chorrúch
half a mile away; it may be from the shape of this bay, or from one of the smaller inlets within it, that the area derives its name:
corr-fhuach,
bent or uneven cove. But if that is too
humdrum
an origin, one can discover a better one by mumbling the
name of a saint, Caradoc Garbh. I will let myself briefly be drawn into the wild-goose chase for this saint.
In that intriguing list of churches drawn up by Archbishop O’Cadhla and published by Fr. Colgan, we have:
Ecclesia Kill-namanach .i. Cella Monachorum, dicta, quae S. Cathradhocho, sive Caradoco, Monacho, cognomento Garbh .i. aspero, dicta est.
(The church called Cill na Manach,
i.e.
the church of the monks, which is named from the monk Cathradhoch or Caradoc, called Garbh,
i.e.
rough.) Roderic O’Flaherty adds to this the statement that Port Caradoc is in Eochaill; hence it is to be identified with Port Chorrúch. However, no such saint as Caradoc is known to even the most inventive of hagiographers, apart from these
scholars
who have taken O’Cadhla at his word.
O’Flaherty’s mention of it seems to imply that the church was extant when he was writing in the 1670s, but in 1839 O’Donovan’s most diligent enquiries could find no trace or tradition of it. Since then various investigators have tried their hand at identifying it. Fr. Ó Domhnaill says it is a certain ruin near Bóthar na gCrag south of Baile na Sean; John Goulden suggests another one a quarter of a mile up the hill from Corrúch village; Fr. Killeen almost convinces himself it is Cill Charna near Cill Rónáin, but ends his lucubrations with a sigh: “
In
tenebris
ambulo
.”
I have no opinions on the matter, and am content to watch this ghostly church flit from place to place pursued by antiquaries lay and clerical, all “walking in darkness.” Caradoc, or Cathradhoch as he first appears, is I suspect only a mishearing of the original form of the place-name, Corr-fhuach.
If Caradoc is the mere wind of a word, it is not so with the four saints connected with the one known church in Corrúch; they shared a provocative, fragile and dangerous characteristic: beauty. The church is called Teampall an Cheathrair Álainn. The noun
ceathrar
(from
ceathar,
four, and
fear,
man) means “a set of four persons”—“a foursome” would be accurate but sounds too modern,
since these special numerals are an ancient Indo-European
feature
of the language—and so the name means literally the “church of the beautiful four,” or less pedantically, “the church of the four beauties.” Since the church itself has inherited that
challenging
quality of its dedicatees, I shall approach it cautiously, starting with these saints’ legends.
The names of the saints are not familiar to the islanders, but according to O’Cadhla they were Fursey, Brendan of Birr, Conall and Berchan, and were said to be buried in the one tomb, in the cemetery of the church. Fursey or Fursu is famous; he was one of the great missioners of the seventh-century Celtic church, and founded the monastery of Peronne in France, where according to the
Annals
of Tigearnach
he died in 649. A member of his
community
wrote his biography within a quarter of a century of that date, and it is one of the two earliest surviving Lives of Irish saints. This work states that after twelve years of missionary work in Ireland he withdrew with a few monks to an island in the sea, but it does not name Aran. Fursu himself wrote an account of Heaven and Hell, which he saw in a feverous vision once when he was ill, and so initiated a genre which culminated in Dante’s
Divine
Comedy.
Brendan of Birr is also known to sacred history; he is said by the same annals to have died in 573, and is buried at Tallaght. His connection with islands has a note of the fabulous about it. In a work perhaps originally composed in the eighth century,
The
Voy
age
of Maol
Dúin,
the hero and his companions wander limitless oceans, visiting islands full of wonders, and in one of these they find a small church covered with ivy, and meet an aged cleric; he tells them that he is the sole survivor of fifteen disciples of
Brendan
of Birr who went on a pilgrimage with their master, and found this hermitage. But again, the island is left unidentified.
As to Bearchan, again there are several saints of that name, none with any known connection with Aran. The one O’Donovan opts for is supposed to have been a disciple of Kevin, the saint of Glendalough, and his beauty is the subject of this story:
A man named Cronan who was first a tanner but afterwards became a holy and pious man before God and men, and built a noble church for God, sent a message to St. Kevin requesting him to send a faithful and proper brother to him, through whom he might transmit his secrets to St. Kevin. St. Kevin without hesitation sent him Bearchan, a monk, alone, according to the
custom
of ancient times. That brother, commencing his journey through woods and desert mountains, met a woman alone on the way waiting for a guide to conduct her through the desert, and she, seeing Bearchan, said to him, “Oh man of God, for the sake of the omnipotent Lord permit me to go with you through the wilderness.” The brother therefore for the sake of the Lord permitted her in her faith to go with him as far as her own village. On observing the beauty of Bearchan she was captivated in love of him, for he was truly beautiful and then in the flower of his youth. She tempted him
frequently
with alluring language. At length on their coming to a certain river she said to him, “I request of you, Sir, in the name of Christ to wait for me till I take a drink of water and bathe myself in the river, for I am now
wearied
with traveling.” She did this wishing to show him the beauty of her person. On her stripping off her clothes St. Bearchan laid his head on the ground, not wishing to look at her, and he was overcome with sleep. The woman, coming out of the water and seeing him asleep, was very desirous of lying along with him, and lifting up his cloak began to lie down by his side, embracing him with her hands. But the soldier of Christ, being roused from his sleep, resisted her with fortitude, and, extricating himself from her grasp, began to strike her with his staff on the back and sides.
Now St. Kevin and St. Cronan, far off in their cells, saw all these
proceedings
by the divine power, and St. Cronan said, “Act manly, oh good brother Bearchan, by scourging the immodest woman.” But the most holy Kevin said, “Oh son, indulgent Bearchan, spare and do not beat the wretched woman.” By the will of God Bearchan, far off in the desert, heard these words expressed by the saints sitting in their own cells, and on hearing the command of his master St. Kevin he ceased from striking the woman. And she, doing penance, was conducted by St. Bearchan through the
wilderness
as he had promised, and, magnifying the sanctity of the man of God, told her friends what had been done on the way.
The fourth saint’s name, Conall, is a common one; Fr. Killeen says we can be quite sure that St. Conall mac Mainecaoil, a great traveller and a relative of Colm Cille’s, spent a while in Aran, but the grounds of this surety must have been in the nature of a
personal
revelation, for he cites no evidence.
What is known of the saints named by O’Cadhla, then, varies from comparatively well-founded history, to myth, edifying
anecdote
, and mere guesswork, and it is hard to hold them together in the mind as the four beauties of Aran. But whoever they were, their reputation is spreading. Synge visited their church with his old half-blind guide Martin Conneely, during his first visit to Aran, and noted the legend of the holy well there in his journal:
At the church of St. Carolan, which I have just visited with my old guide, there is still a holy well remarkable for many cures. While we visited in the neighbourhood an old man came to us from a near cottage and told us how it became famous. A woman of Sligo had one son who was blind. She dreamed of a well that held water potent to cure. So she took boat with her son following course of her dream and reached Aran. And when she landed she came to the house of my informant’s father and told what had brought her but when those around offered to lead her to the well near by she
declined
all aid saying she saw still her way clear before. She led her son from the boat and going a little up the hill stopped at the well. Then kneeling with the blind child beside her she prayed to God and then bathed his eyes. In moments his face gleamed with joy as he said: “Oh mother look at the beautiful flowers.” Twice since the same story has been told to me with unimportant variations yet ending always with the glad dramatic cry of the young child.
By the time he tidied up this passage for inclusion in
The
Aran
Islands
Synge had realized that “Carolan” was
“an
ceathrar
á
lainn,
”
the four beauties. And in his play
The
Well
of
the
Saints,
there is a strange and disillusioned inversion of the story he was told in Aran: “Did you ever hear tell of a place across a bit of the sea, where there is an island, and the grave of the four beautiful
saints?… There’s a green ferny well, I’m told, behind of that place, and if you put a drop of the water out of it on the eyes of a blind man, you’ll make him see as well as any person is walking the world.” When Martin and Mary Doul, a weather-beaten pair of blind beggars, hear that a saint is going round the countryside curing people with water from this well, they look forward to
seeing
at last the beautiful couple they believe themselves to be; the play begins as an ache of longing for physical beauty. But when the miracle has been accomplished and they see their own
decrepitude
, they quarrel. Then their sight gradually fades away, and, refusing the saint’s offer to cure them again, they withdraw into the world of sounds and their own imagination, which has proved less delusive than that of vision. The energy of the play is perhaps provided by the fusion, in Synge’s creative mind, of the story of the well of the four beauties (many holy wells are
supposed
to be able to cure the blind, but here the idea of personal beauty is associated with the common theme) and of the
experience
of being shown the well by a half-blind man, his guide,
another
Martin.
So this well, at first known only in the islands and in
neighbouring
mainland areas, and then perhaps as far afield as Sligo if there is any truth in the story Synge was told, is now famous throughout the world, through his play, and through his book on Aran. It is necessary, for reasons that will become painfully clear, to describe with care what the literary pilgrim will find here.
The setting is precious in itself. This lap of land, with the
sheltering
hillside curving up from it, seems to attract the spring early; people come here to search for the tiny leaves of shamrock in mid-March, before St. Patrick’s Day. The green slope above is one of the best places to see the limestone bugle, a great rarity, hardly known in Ireland except from the Aran Islands and two points on the mainland opposite the ends of the island chain, in Connemara and the Burren. It is not well known even here, for it blossoms before the botanical tourists come, at the end of April, when it is a neat square pyramid two or three inches high, of
copper-stained or even purplish leaves that hide the intensely blue flowers, as saints hood their heavenly radiance; later it goes slack and is lost among the seedy flush of summer grass.
The church is almost as neighbourly to the houses of Corrúch as they are to each other. A boreen dodges between the cottages on the south of the main road, and as soon as it clears their
back-gardens
and begins to climb towards Na Craga, one can see the gables of the ruin sticking up among the walls of little fields on the right, just a hundred yards away. A stile in the boreen wall admits one to the first field, which is partly of bare crag from which big blocks have been levered out at some period, and partly of bright green, closely grazed turf. Before crossing the next stile, one should diverge a few paces to the left, and look at a small slab of limestone built into the bottom of the field-wall; it has an oval hollow in its upper surface, half covered by the stones above, and usually there is a little water lodged in it. This is the first of the three holy wells that people “doing the rounds” here used to visit, but whether this
bullán
is a natural formation or the work of hands I cannot tell. From the stile here the path lies along the top of a low, thick wall, the remaining fragment of a cashel that
encircled
the monks’ little settlement long before all these other walls existed. Twenty steps further along the way is a small
upright
blackthorn bush, and at its foot among ferns is a round of sky sunk deep into the ground—another holy well, very obscure but not forgotten by at least some of those who perform the
turas
to the church on
Lá
Mhuire,
the Feast of the Assumption, and other holy days. This is not
the
well of the four beauties, which is behind the church, but nevertheless it is of this well that I hear the story, very much as Synge heard it a century ago, of the mother who brought her blind child here in hope of a cure; they both searched for this secretive well, and it was the child who found it first.