Stones of Aran (37 page)

So what we have in Corrúch is a simple type of wedge tomb. The act of classification immediately opens up questions of
distribution
, affinities, origins. All the identifiable megalithic tombs in the Aran Islands are of this type: one in Inis Oírr, reduced to hardly more than a low outline; one collapsed but still impressive, and another so ruinous it is difficult to be sure about, in Inis Meáin; this one, the best-preserved, in Corrúch, and another halfway down the hillside north of Oatquarter. (This last is so obscurely tucked into an overgrown corner of a field, of whose walls its stones form part, that although O'Donovan saw or heard of it in 1839 it was not located until 1980, when I came across it, just too late to include it on my revised map, and right beside a path we had taken a hundred times before on our evening strolls.)
Further afield, there are about seventy wedge tombs in the
Burren
, some of them fifteen or more feet long and very simply
constructed
out of a few enormous slabs. Other notable concentrations of wedge tombs are in Sligo and north-east Mayo, east Clare and west Tipperary, and west Cork. In all there are about five
hundred
in Ireland, and their builders clearly preferred uplands of sandstone or limestone with thin well-drained soil-cover, rather than the danker shale-lands and the lush river valleys. Such areas would have been only lightly wooded and were easily cleared by axe or fire to create grazing land; the wedge-tomb builders were primarily pastoralists rather than tillers of the soil.

Although some twenty-three wedge tombs have been
excavated
in recent years, in only three cases has material been found in them that could be radio-carbon dated and definitely
associated
with the primary period of use of the tomb. A small wedge tomb rather similar to the Corrúch one in the townland of Altar near Schull in Cork was excavated by a team from University College, Cork, in 1989; hardly enough human material to make a handful was found, but among the tiny scraps of cremated bone was one unburned tooth, and this proved to date from between 2316 and 1784
BC
. The consensus is that wedge tombs were being built from about 2500 to 1700 or perhaps 1500
BC
; this means that they span the last centuries of the Neolithic period and the early Bronze Age—a time as progressive as that of the initiation of settlement and tillage in the early Neolithic around 4000
BC
. It is known that copper was mined in Munster and traded throughout Ireland and to Britain; for instance there are
primitive
workings on Mount Gabriel in Cork dating from the end of the Neolithic. Perhaps the tombs should be associated with a brief “Copper Age” preceding the decisive technological advance to the use of bronze, a mixture of copper and tin. (Copper is easily mined and extracted from its ore but is rather soft unless mixed with tin; but tin is
not to be found in Ireland, and in fact there was a trans-European trade in Cornish tin.) But if the wedge-builders were
probably among the earliest metal-workers in Ireland, it seems that the occasional bronze axe-head or copper ingot that has been found in a tomb was placed there as part of a ritual deposit, a
votive
offering, perhaps long after the use of the tomb for burial had ceased, for the Bronze Age adopted a new rite of single burials in small stone-lined pits or cists, as opposed to the grand communal tombs of Neolithic times. But long after the original function of the tombs had been forgotten they preserved something of the numinous, as they do to this day, which suggested other ritual uses for them. Thus the Altar tomb was used as late as
AD
124–224, in the Iron Age, for the deposition of offerings of sea-food. In what we might call our own era some of them served as mass rocks in the seventeenth century, when Catholic priests had to minister to their flocks in secret and celebrate the sacraments in hidden places; hence the name of the townland, Altar, in which the tomb near Schull stands. A lady from the Burren told me that when she was a child the St. John's Eve bonfire was lit on the top of a huge wedge tomb near her house, and she heard the great roof-flag crack; so one could say that this wedge was indeed a druidical fire-altar only fifty years ago. They have also had their secular uses. Several in the Burren were inhabited until late in the last century; I have read of a doctor visiting a woman in childbirth who was living with her family and their cow in a tomb near Kilnaboy. Another one in the Burren, that the Megalithic Survey missed, had a little door fitted and was in use as a goose-pen in the 1960s. All this usage and reusage means that the structures have been repeatedly robbed or refurbished or spring-cleaned, and that whatever happens to be found in them today probably has nothing to do with the original builders.

In the heyday of the Megalithic Survey an attractively clearcut picture of the origins of the wedge-tomb builders emerged. There are in Brittany fifty or so tombs rather similar to the wedge tombs of Ireland, called
allées
couvertes,
and this fact, together with the predominantly western and in particular south-western
distribution
of the Irish wedge tombs suggested that their builders first entered the country from Brittany, occupying the peninsulas of Cork and Kerry, and from there spreading northwards and later eastwards, settling wherever they discovered pasturage to their liking. More recently it has been proposed that the wedge tombs evolved from the Irish court tombs, which are mainly found in the northern half of the country, and spread thence to the south and west. Few archaeologists would be dogmatic on the question nowadays.

One important difference between the
allées
couvertes
and the wedge tombs is that the former generally face east and the latter almost invariably west to south-west. When I took Professor Rynne of UCG to see the wedge tomb in Fearann an Choirce, he climbed up on top of it and delivered an impromptu burlesque lecture, to myself and a stray dog who was accompanying us, on the abiding cultural differences between the laborious Breton peasant, up every morning in time to pay his respects to the rising sun, and the convivial Irishman rolling home rejoicing in the glow of sunset. Undoubtedly the west had some significance for the wedge-tomb builders which it did not for those of the earlier types of megalithic tomb; Newgrange, with its long passage and burial-chamber briefly probed by the rising sun at the winter
solstice
, represents some belief perhaps of the identity of death and rebirth, but the west does not enter into it; court tombs, which were evidently the sites of funerary ceremonial, are often aligned to the north, and portal tombs to the east. But it is this people who, whether they came from Brittany or from Britain through northern Ireland, eventually colonized the west, turned their gaze to the horizon under which all the lights of the sky disappear, the threshold of a region into which no human can penetrate, in this life at least. Perhaps only those who move on until they live on the western edge of the world can feel this dire fascination of the forbidden compass-bearing. The Celts of the Iron Age, or at least those of them who, having wandered or been driven out of the
depths of Eurasia, arrived at the ocean wall, situated their Tír na nÓg, their land of youth, beyond the Atlantic horizon.
Aftercomers
, even the most recent blow-ins like myself, even if we know nothing of the beliefs and rituals of the wedge-folk, feel the pull of magnetic west in our bones. America counts for nothing in this European mind-set; America is only what Columbus thought to find, the nether edge of the farthest East.

Westwardness entrains the drift of this book like a quiet but irresistable undertow. From the Bed of Diarmaid and Gráinne I can look ahead and scan the lowlands I will soon descend into, the waist between Port Mhuirbhigh on the north and the bay at Gort na gCapall on the south, which almost severs the farther, ultra-western, third of the island. Diarmaid and Gráinne
themselves
, sitting here of an evening in a time-dimension oblique to that of history, could see not only the valley but all that has and will happen in it. On the opposite skyline, files of men carry stones to build the ramparts of Dún Aonghasa, and flocks of tourists toil up the hill to admire their work. Lower down, a
rain-soaked
Dublin architect is directing the transformation of a thatched cottage into Kilmurvey House. On the main road
coming
up from Port Mhuirbhigh two saints quarrel over the division of the island; one of them is on horseback and the other has welded the horse's hooves to the ground. Near the southern shore a Beartlaiméid Ó Flaithbheartaigh is founding the village of Gort na gCapall, and his great-great-great-great-grandson, Liam O'Flaherty, is skipping across the crags to Oatquarter School while writing his first story in his head. Archaeologists are fossicking around their bed; the lovers rise with a sigh—they are bigger than anyone we have ever seen, but without the crude,
pitted
skins of giants; they are immaculately beautiful—and begin to make their way towards their next resting-place. But they dare not enter the last third of the island, which is too near to being an island with only one harbour. At all costs they must avoid being trapped against the unclimbable wall of westernness.

Very nearly all of the next townland, Cill Mhuirbhigh or
Kilmurvy
, is visible from the megalithic tomb that looks out across it like an empty eye-socket of the hillside; the nearer boundary is a narrow slot of a gully running across the slope below and about fifty yards west of the tomb, and the farther one, two miles away, is
only just behind the skyline of the opposite rise. The three
villages
in the intervening lowlands are far apart; one can trace their interlinking roads by the lines of telegraph-poles, thin as insects’ legs from here. Fearann an Choirce or Oatquarter—it is the only Aran village to have an English name that is not just the Irish one anglicized,
i.e.
misspelt—begins close by to the north-west, its nearest houses hidden by the last shoulder of the plateau and the further ones coming into view as they straggle down the main road towards the bay. Gort na gCapall is near the south coast in a slight hollow, a very inadequate-seeming shelter against the
Atlantic
, which in certain lights appears from here to rise steeply behind it or even lean over it menacingly. Cill Mhuirbhigh village itself is far off, near the north coast, with Kilmurvey House (which spells itself with an “e”) a little aloof from it, withdrawn into the greyness of the hillside beyond. The terrain embracing these three villages is arranged like a vast amphitheatre facing north and focused on the bay of Port Mhuirbhigh. A crescent of dunes rims the beach, then there comes a broad green arc of big fields belonging to Kilmurvey House, and around that a mosaic of tiny pastures and tillage plots belonging to the smallholders of the townland. A cliff of ten to twenty feet wraps itself with a rugged tenderness around all this good land, and the wide terrace of almost uninterrupted grey rock above it curves like an immense battered horseshoe from Cill Mhuirbhigh village, south to Gort na gCapall and then north again to Fearann an Choirce. Above that is another cliff and an even wider horseshoe terrace, this one of craggy land a little more hospitable than the one below and
therefore criss-crossed by walls, with the Atlantic taking a bite out of it on the south. Finally a tumble of tip-tilted fields at one’s feet here on the east, answering to a similar slope closing the vista to the west.

The end of the terrace below the tomb and overlooking the village of Oatquarter is called An Scairbh, the rough place. And since I was for a dozen years a besotted Oatquarterite, courting moods that echoed well off stone, I know the modalities of its roughness intimately. I used to browse from field to field here as if leafing through a well-loved anthology, or find myself caught
wordless
in the middle of a page by the disappearance of a
questionmark
, a lizard’s tail, into the margin. If the text frequently held me up with obscurities, long practice gave me great fluency in its grammar, though perhaps memory flatters in showing me
drifting
across this terrain as little impeded by stones and thorns as a cloud-shadow. So now, although I could return to Corrúch by the boreens and follow the main road to the village, I prefer to work my way down to it across An Scairbh, from the point this
itinerary
has reached, despite the weird impracticability of the route.

Just a hundred yards west of the Bed of Diarmaid and Gráinne—a hundred yards that involves crossing five field-walls and the little ravine of the townland boundary—is An Dún Beag, the small fort. Its rampart is reduced to a knee-high bank with a more recent field-wall on top of it, enclosing an oval space about seventy yards long and half that across, divided into three fields full of rank grass and brambles. Given its strategic, even
precarious
, perch on the brink of the steep slope falling north and west from it, this was no mere cattle-yard. I am told that it had a
chevaux-de-frise
of stone spikes on this slope until the Dirranes, the principal family of the village below, took them to build walls; how long ago this is supposed to have happened I do not know, but none of the nineteenth-century antiquarians noted any such feature.

A few fields below the fort is a big stony, brambly mound that
looks like a collapsed
clochán
, from the vicinity of which a narrow many-elbowed path makes a relatively sensible north-westward descent to the village. But that is not the route I am taking;
instead
I scramble down south-westwards from the
dún
and drop into a steep-sided ravine full of chest-high hazel scrub. When one of the villagers first told me that there was a wood a mile long on this hillside I was incredulous, but it is true, or nearly true; the area of scrub is only ten or fifteen feet wide, but it is half a mile long at least and was probably once longer. It fills the ravine, which runs southwards, with the jointing of the underlying rock, until interrupted by an embankment where Bóthar na gCrag
descends
from the uplands. This wood is called simply and uniquely An Choill, the wood. According to J.T. O’Flaherty, among the many reminders of druidism on Aran are “evident vestiges of oak groves.” That was an antiquarian’s fantasy even in his time. Even in the days of the magnificent oak-forests of Celtic Europe, where the dim, lofty, sacred grove, the
nemeton,
prefigured the Gothic cathedrals, in Aran the druids would have had to make do with the equivalent of a little provincial chapel, difficult to stand straight in and with not much oak in its composition; and for centuries even that much woodland has been reduced to a second childhood. I once inveigled M into this toy forest, to savour an Alice-in-Wonderland experience: crouching in it one can look along mossy glades lit with exquisite pale lilac flowers of
wood-sorrel
, and then by straightening up, grow through the canopy to giant stature and see far over the treetops.

There was in fact a giant here once, whose gory legend I took down from old Seán Gillan. He was an O’Flaherty called Pádraic Mór (Big Patrick), who went on the run after the Cromwellian army took the castle of Aircín in 1651, and lived in a cave, or
perhaps
a cleft with a few flags laid across it, in this ravine, and
became
known as Fathach na Coille, the giant of the wood. One day his brother came to warn him that the English soldiers had discovered his whereabouts, and the two of them went to live in
another cave in a little cliff above the turlough at Gort na gCapall village. Pádraic, although a peacable man, was a great fighter, whereas his brother, in Séan’s words, was only
réasúnta
(
reasonable
). One day the brother went out to milk the goat, and met an English soldier. “I’m a soldier as well as you!” said the brother, and they began to fight. The Englishman had a sword of Swedish iron and an armoured vest against which the Irishman’s sword bent like a snake, so that he had repeatedly to step back and put his foot on it to straighten it out. Finally he wounded the
Englishman
in the belly, but the dying soldier seized him by the head and thrust it into the wound, and stifled him in his bowels. A month later, at Christmas, the English soldiers came across Pádraic’s footprints in the snow and followed them back to his lair. Pádraic heard the men’s footsteps on the flag above his cave, and counted nine of them, and killed them as they appeared one by one in the mouth of the cave. Eventually though he was captured by a force of three hundred soldiers, taken as a prisoner to Caisleán Aircín, and there hanged—
“agus
sin
an
deireadh
a
bhí
aige!”
(“and that was the end of him!”).

Have I got the horrible details right? Seán’s Irish I found
difficult
to follow, so I took the precaution of writing the tale out in English as I had understood it, for him to read and check; later he told me that my version was correct, but I cannot find it now, and there are some obscurities in what notes I can unearth—a pike with a hook for pulling a man off a horse entered into it somehow, and whether it was the brother who smothered the soldier in his bowels or vice versa I am not sure. The two or three other
islanders
who had heard something of Pádraic Mór always referred me to Seán, the last of the story-tellers; but Seán is now dead and I fear that what I have put down here is as much as survives of this legend. Is it only a legend? Very likely there were O’Flaherty
fugitives
on the island after the defeat of 1651, but the incident of the sword that bent like a snake (I remember Seán’s vigorous mimicry in describing it) sounds like an echo from the Bronze Age, from that mysterious Copper Age of the wedge-tomb builders, even.
The Giant of the Wood may have been an outlaw from history for three thousand years before Pádraic Mór joined him in the
greenwood
shade.

Extricating oneself from An Choill is a matter of working along the clifflet forming its western rim to find some
combination
of fallen stone and tree-roots and matted ferns by which one can clamber up, and then locating the beginning of a path, about five hundred yards south of the
dún,
that wriggles through the network of field walls, first west and then south. Bóithrín na Coille, the boreen of the wood, is only about three feet wide, and in any particular year whether it is reasonably passable or arched over by briars that have to be negotiated one by one depends on whether or not Pádraic Dan Phatch of Gort na gCapall has cattle in one of the fields it serves, for no one else comes this way.
Instead
of following it south until it escapes into the wider Bóthar na gCrag, I shall take a minute branch off it to the west, which curls down into a nook of the scarp below it. Perfectly named An Poll i’ bhFolach, the hole in hiding, in a chill April this sheltery spot is always a week or two more optimistic about the coming of spring than its surroundings. A gleam of water catches the eye; look behind you halfway down the path, and you see the
spring-well
of Clochán an Airgid with all its attendant flowers that I described, pages back. No, that is impossible, even in a labyrinth; this well faces west, the other east. And indeed on a second look this one is more like the Well of the Four Beauties behind the ruined chapel at Corrúch. The scarp in which these wells are formed is the common factor; on a map it outlines each of the upland areas of the three Arans like a contour. Its profile varies little along its length: the land rises in distinct stages from the flat bare crag at its foot, first in two sharp steps, each of them a
limestone
stratum about four feet thick, then the clay-band that
conducts
water to this and to many other springs, and above that a rough hillside not so clearly stratified. This sequence—pavement, two steps, clay-band, hillslope—is instantly recognizable once it has been pointed out (as Conor MacDermot of the Geological
Survey pointed it out to me when he was mapping the Aran and Burren limestones), and one meets it again and again, giving a family resemblance to places one would never otherwise have
associated
with each other, such as the hillside below the second rampart of Dún Aonghasa and that below Túr Mháirtín. The clay-band has the resounding name of the Asbian-Brigantian contact, from the two subdivisions of the Lower Carboniferous respectively below and above it, which can be identified by their fossil contents and rock-chemistry in other parts of Ireland and Britain, the Asbian being so called from Little Asby Scar in
Cumbria
where it is particularly well exposed, and the Brigantian from the ancient territory of the North British tribe, the Brigantes. The transition from one type of deposit to the other corresponds to a change in the Carboniferous ocean dated at 330 million years before the present, and the presence of clay at this level shows that at that time this was dry land, and for long enough for overlying rocks to be rendered down into soil. So, that glint, catching the attention in the obscurity of “the hole in hiding,” is the cutting edge of a vast discrimination in earth-history.

The path down to the well—hardly more than a sequence of steps worn into the scarp face—exists for and because of people fetching water to cattle in the fields above; similarly a little path leads out of the walled oasis of green around the well, down the two limestone steps and out onto the open crag, for the
convenience
of people with cattle in some small fields under the scarp; these two paths then make a secretive shortcut from An Choill, in Brigantia as it were, to An Scairbh, in Asbia, which is no part of their purpose. One alights from this bramble-frought
time-tumbling
past the 330-million BP mark onto a superb limestone pavement, the best in the islands, so smooth and with such wide intervals between its grykes that a set could be danced on it
without
fear of broken ankles. Low walls, easily stepped over, divide it into a few areas which, after the poky topography one has fought through above, have the breadth of agoras, piazzas, civic spaces suitable for decorous and convivial rites—utterly deserted,
though; one is far off any usual route to anywhere usual here. Often, wandering back home from a walk on the cliffs, M and I used to rest on the crag nearest the well, the level emptyness of which is enhanced by one single powerful presence, a roundish granite boulder four or five feet high. We would lie starwise on the pavement by it and close our eyes and let the sun or the breeze or even the first drops of a rain-shower explore our faces. After a few minutes our shoulder-blades would have fused with the
limestone
and we would be whirled along by the earth’s turning, the dynamo that generates all our little norths and souths and easts and wests.

But I soon tire of transcendental flight and start poking about again, questioning the ground I stand on. This remarkable
boulder
, for instance; it looks as if it were put there to make a point, for it stands like a sculpture on a little pedestal, a natural swelling of the limestone floor. Since there are no other such swellings on this exceptionally level and smooth pavement, this one must be due to the presence of the boulder; it must represent the thickness of limestone that has been dissolved off the rest of the pavement by rain since the boulder arrived to shelter this one spot. In fact the diverted rainwater spilling off the rim of the boulder has excavated a moat a few inches deep all around the pedestal,
accentuating
it and making it difficult to judge its exact height; however, the bottom of the boulder appears to be about eight inches above the general level of the pavement. There are quite a few “perched boulders,” as such glacial erratics are called, in Aran (but this one is the best), and several have pedestals of that order of height. Hence, in the fifteen thousand years since the melting away of the glaciers that brought them across from granite
Connemara
, eight inches has been lost off the limestone of Aran. That is
an average rate of attrition smaller than the current rate for the Burren, where scientists deduce from the concentration of dissolved calcium carbonate in stream-water that the relief of the area is being lowered by a twentieth of a millimeter per annum.
Perhaps
that high figure betrays the pollution of our contemporary
world, spreading even into this ocean-washed desert. But the
process
is not a uniform planing-down of the surface; run-off is
directed
by unevennesses and irregularities, which themselves are exacerbated by these currents, so that channels grow and coalesce, fissures widen, solidity is sapped and rock is rendered down to rubble. The polish and perfection this crag has attained to, a
reflection
of the petrology of a particular stratum, is a passing phase in its descent to obliteration.