Stones of Aran (59 page)

… and so it goes on in ever more ghoulish detail, ending with the whole village being rewarded with pensions because of their
hospitality
to the corpse of an American millionaire. Again and again during Clara’s stay, James drifted into the kitchen and sat down by the fire in his long-belted raincoat that “lent to him an air of seedy civilization,” and begin his stories of “corpses, cruelty, and spells of witches.” Her last view of him is on the morning of her leaving:

That is James Johnston, caught in the perspective of Lady Vyvyan’s holiday snaps. From another social angle I pick up an auditory trace of him: a merry clattering on the road in the small hours, as he rolls home from the pubs of Cill Rónáin with a fellow roisterer, the painter Charles Lamb over from his studio in Connemara for a spree—a sound that broke the sleep and lodged in the memory
of one of our Oatquarter neighbours when he was a child sixty years or more ago.

Late in his life James married Bridget Coyne, the daughter of a substantial cattle-dealer from Ballybrit near Galway who often visited the island. In 1947 Bridgie opened Kilmurvey House as a guest-house for the first time. James died in 1953, leaving no
offspring
. Bridgie’s second husband was Sonny Hernon, a Cill
Mhuirbhigh
neighbour. Their daughter, Treasa, I first noticed as a skinny little girl with sparkling black eyes,
taking the lead in an Irish-language play in the school at Fearann an Choirce; she soon became one of the little band who used to call in on us on their way home. Sonny I remember as a small, neatly-built man, intent on his work with the cattle, sparing with words. When the attics of Kilmurvey House had to be emptied to make way for more guest-accommodation, the question arose of what to do with heaps of mouldering O’Flaherty papers; “Burn them!” said Sonny, and a lot of stuff that might mortally have delayed my progress to the end of this chapter drifted off in smoke over the crags. Once, when I remarked to another villager how curious it was that the O’Flaherty demesne had become a Cill Mhuirbhigh farm like any other, he grumbled that at least in the old days one could rent a field from Johnston, but now Sonny worked them all himself. Bridgie used to sigh, and say, “He comes in from his work; he has his tea; he goes out again!” But then Sonny changed. “The first I noticed of it,” the neighbour told me later, “was when we were talking about the damage the rabbits do to the fields, and Sonny said, ‘Ah, the rabbits will be here after us!’” Stricken by premature senility, Sonny vanished from the island into hospital, and lay there, null. Treasa abandoned her studies and came home to work in the factory and help her mother with the guest-house. It was a dark time; “My husband is dead,” said Bridgie, “but we still have to visit him!” Sonny’s death was not complete until the end of January in 1980.

But now, returning to the island in 1993, I find the house full of laughter, the accommodation renewed—little bathrooms juggled
into corners of the big old-fashioned bedrooms, decayed
window-frames
replaced, etc.—Treasa’s amiable husband sitting in the kitchen when he is not off with his Cill Ronáin-based trawler, two grandchildren welcoming Bridget into a new phase of life, and the present moment vigorously reasserting itself. The parlour is still the same, with the TV set looking as if it had barged in among Lily O’Flaherty’s Victorian knicknacks and James
Johnston’s
worn-looking ’thirtyish travel books. The ancestral
portraits
that caught Petrie’s attention in 1821 and mine a century and a half later still hang there, all the more impressive for the darkness of age: Patrick O’Flaherty’s uncle Thady (that was his name, says Bridgie), a handsome, rubicund, portly personage, and Thady’s wife, daughter to the “respectable English Catholic” who had a large fortune, exhibiting a glacial expanse of bosom. (If Sir Henry Englefield had his portrait done by Sir Thomas Lawrence—it was shown at the Royal Academy in 1813, when Lawrence was the most sought-after portraitist of London—it was obviously some lesser, provincial, artist who painted his sister and
brother-in-law
?) Thinking about these reminders of the O’Flaherty past, I realize that this room is the setting of Ó Direáin’s late, self-questioning poem, “Neamhionraic gach beo.” Máirtín the Sruthán village lad would of course never have been allowed into this sanctum of gentility, but when he was an established Dublin literary figure, Bridgie tells me, he used to call on the Johnstons. Evidently the well-upholstered hospitality of this room
represented
a seduction, and its antique fixity a reproach, which he had to address in obscure argument with himself:

The idea of an inherent faithlessness between people and things leads the poet on into a troubled personal reflection, which I shall follow out when I come to write about Ó Direáin in his Sruthán setting. For the moment, I borrow from the poem only a sense of this room’s four-square, thick-walled, heavy-curtained snugness, enhanced by the lament of the night wind in the trees outside.

There are many other relics of old times here, notably a portrait of Patrick O’Flaherty himself (perhaps it is only the naivety of provincial portraiture that gives him a nose like a bent
knife-blade
), a studio photograph of James O’Flaherty, solid-cheeked and bearded, as Eminent Victorian, a silhouette of James
Hardiman
. The unidentified subject of another portrait from Patrick’s era is familiarly known as Bob Hope from a rather striking resemblance. Well hidden away are the magnificent
Missale
Roma
num
(1732, from Plantin’s famous printing-house in Antwerp) and the vestments said to have been brought by the O’Flahertys’ priest from Aughnanure. Hanging over the fireplace is an
embroidery
of the O’Flaherty shield and lizard crest. In a few years’ time the new generation will begin to wonder about this lizard and its long tail of history, which they inherit no less inevitably for being
biologically disjunct from it, since an old house is a habitable form of DNA; and then, I hope, the fireside entertainment I have made of it will not come amiss.

At the Second Battle of Moytura the Fomorians deployed a
terrible
weapon against the Tuatha Dé Danann, the single eye of their leader, Balor of the Poisonous Eye. Four men were needed to raise its lid by a polished ring, and its gaze could waste an army. But the god Lugh with a slingshot knocked it through to the back of his skull, so that it looked upon Balor's own supporters and turned twenty-seven of them to stone. Balor, whose name seems to mean “the flashing one,” is associated in mythology with Mizen Head in Cork, with Tory Island off Donegal, and perhaps with Land's End, the ancient Bolerion, in Cornwall; it has been suggested that he was the Celtic god of the setting sun. In the foggy timescape of myth this Second Battle is hard to distinguish from the First, the defeat of the Fir Bolg by the Tuatha Dé Danann. The outcome of this latter was (according to the
pseudohistory
of the
Lebor
Gabála
)
,
the retreat of the Fir Bolg to the western shores, and the building of Dún Aonghasa by their leader Aonghas.

If the south-west is bright, the plateau behind Cill
Mhuirbhigh
looks like a long dark curtain-wall, on which the central cashel of the
dún
is a turret at the farther, Atlantic, end. I have often noticed that from a certain stretch of the main road a tiny rectangle of sky is visible through the gateway of the cashel, so that, as you walk or cycle down to the village from the east, it is as if an eye opens, fixes you for a minute or two, then closes. This look is not baleful, but it is both tremendous and ambiguous. After encountering it, to climb the half-mile hillside from the
village
to the cashel, and pass through that gateway, a slanting
passage
up through the thirteen-foot thickness of the rampart, is to submit to inspection by whatever lies within—which appears, rather intimidatingly, to be nothing.

Dún Aonghasa is so strangely and extremely situated, in
immediate
apposition to the precipice, as to suggest three possibilities: that it addresses itself to the rest of the island, as a last defensive toehold; or to the sea and the long vista of the Clare coast visible from it, as the citadel of some regional power; or to the beyond, as a temple. The first theory was the favourite of the Romantic era, but has long been abandoned as impracticable. The earliest full expression I have come across of the last theory is by W.Y. Evans Wentz, that Casaubon-with-attitude of the Celtic Twilight:

Evans Wentz here is confusing Aonghas of the Fir Bolg with Aonghas of the Tuatha Dé Danann, who is associated with the Neolithic tumulus of Newgrange. Thence it is but a step for him to show that this same cult of “the Celtic Zeus” was practiced in the “druidical temples” of Stonehenge and Carnac, and in one more hop we reach the Great Pyramid, whose main entrance, he tells us, is a passageway oriented to the south-east like that of Newgrange and having its opening under the Great Sphinx, but unfortunately not yet discovered.

Etienne Rynne, the professor of archaeology in University
College,
Galway, has long nursed the idea that not only Dún
Aonghasa
but the other six Aran forts and similar stone structures in
the Burren and elsewhere in western Ireland were ceremonial sites. Unlike Evans Wentz, he advances arguments for thinking so:

Recently an archaeologist of the rising generation, Michael Gibbons, undertook to correct his former professor on this
question
, pointing out that there were noticeable traces of habitation, including hut-foundations, in the western sector of the inner
enclosure
. The controversy caught the attention of journalists, who stepped forward to hold the combatants' coats. An article in
The
Irish
Times
quoted Michael Gibbons as follows:

While Michael Gibbons will allow that the platform of natural rock in the inner enclosure may well have been used for
ceremonies
—traces of rectangular temples have been found in other Iron-Age enclosures—ritual was not the
raison
d'être
of the cashel.

In this same article I was as surprised as Professor Rynne must have been to read that he had “suggested that Dún Aengus was built for ceremonial purposes, such as storm worship.” In hastily mugging up the background to the dispute,
The
Irish
Times
columnist
had evidently noticed a passing thought of mine from
Pilgrimage,
quoted by Professor Rynne as a literary ornament to one of his articles on the
d
ú
n:
“I would rather believe the place was built for the worship of storms, to which it is well adapted, than to impress the neighbours.” Having escaped from literature through science into journalism, this notion is now breeding in the wild; in Aran's newly opened Heritage Centre, under a
picture
of Dún Aonghasa the visitor can read that “some believe it was built for the worship of storms.” Well, every idea has its day, and although I doubt if my little literary flourish would have
impressed
the Fir Bolg (though why not, if indeed Bolgios was a god of lightning, as O'Rahilly suggested fifty years ago?), it could come about that when religion returns to its roots Dún Aonghasa will be the official seat of communion with the sky's disinterested violence.

Meanwhile, and for the first time, a proper archaeological
investigation
of the
d
ú
n
has begun, and facts are being troweled up and sieved out that may amount to evidence for one or other of the rival suppositions as to its purpose, or even bury the entire debate. This excavation is part of the Discovery Programme, a national—indeed a nationalistic—archaeological project
initiated
by the then Taoiseach Charles Haughey in 1991, the aims of which are “1. To work towards a coherent and comprehensive
picture
of human life on this island from earliest times,” and “2. To formulate the results in ways that can be communicated both to experts and to the general public.” In pursuance of this
programme
the Late Bronze Age and Early Iron Age was selected as the “core period” for intensive research (perhaps it was felt that “life on this island” offered a more coherent picture then than it has done since), and a critical topic within that period was
identified:

So, in 1992, Dún Aonghasa was invested by a team of eighteen or twenty young archaeologists—graduates, student volunteers, local recruits—under the director of the Western Stone Forts Project, Claire Cotter. During their third season I came out to the island to see what they were turning up. It was a foggy, almost rainy day, and the path that wanders up to the
d
ú
n
across one layer of crag after another was slippery. The decrepit outermost rampart, rambling across the hillside, has a stile in it like any field-wall. A hundred and fifty yards beyond it, the path climbs through the zone of thousands of stone spikes, towards a narrow opening in the second or middle rampart, which is tall enough—well over head-height—to impose a sense of enclosure on the quarter-acre of rising ground between it and the ponderous
rain-blackened
bulk of the central cashel. (This middle rampart has a terrace around its inner face—which shows, I think, that terraces are not necessarily connected with the viewing of spectacles, for which the rough slanting ground within is quite unsuitable.) I found some of the archaeological tribe in a little hut here, and asked them to take me to their leader. We went up through the low gateway into the half-oval of the inner enclosure. Beyond the cliff-edge nothing was visible except shifting dampness. A high wire fence cut off the western half of the enclosure and a few
tourists
were peering through the mesh at the work in progress
behind
it. “How old is this place?” one of them called out in an Italian accent to a youth going by with a bucket of soil, who
replied
(in conformity with Article 2 of the aims of the Discovery Programme quoted above), “We don't know.” I was admitted by a door marked “private” and presented to Claire (big Aran sweater and Viking ponytail), who laid down her trowel and showed me around the site.

I had always assumed that the interior of the cashel was so near to being a naked crag that it promised archaeology very little, but in fact there is a surface layer a foot or so deep in the western sector, in the lee of the rampart. The turf had been peeled off an area about twenty yards wide all along the base of the western curve of the wall, except for two narrow strips at right-angles to each other that crossed the bared rock like the axes of a graph. Anoraked forms were kneeling here and there, mapping small scatters of flat stones, brushing soil from crevices, picking out dozens of minute objects and putting them away in little screws of silver foil.
Coordinate
geometry reigned: regularly spaced parallel wires stretched across the site, the ground was sprigged with numbered dockets, people were treading cautiously to and fro with rulers,
tape-measures
and metre-square wooden frames. Beneath this
rigorous
network, Claire persuaded me to see certain configurations of stone as areas of paving and foundations of huts. The earliest of the huts is represented by an arc of low slabs set edge to edge, the basis of either a stone or a wooden building about sixteen feet in diameter. A small trough, floored and walled with flags, was a cooking-place in which water would have been heated by
dropping
in hot stones. The blackish specks being laboriously collected out of the soil were bits of charcoal, which would all be sent away to be analyzed; the wood of hazel, oak, alder, Scots pine and
willow
or poplar had been identified. Much of the deposit around the hut-sites is of food debris: limpet and periwinkle shells, fishbones, seabird bones—the settlement must have been extremely smelly—and large amounts of cow and sheep bones, but very little pig, and, what is unusual for a habitation site, no remains of dogs.