Authors: Tim Robinson
The involuntary pilgrimage that follows perhaps represents an expiation of Ailill’s sin against the Christian community, and the descriptions of some of its stations are allegories as crystalline as those of Bunyan. But mingled with these are dream-like episodes that read like the return of the suppressed matter of Celtic belief, and are both enigmatic and disquieting. It has been suggested that what we have here is the tattered remains of an oral, Celtic, equivalent of the Tibetan or Egyptian Books of the Dead, a chart of the successive states the departed soul passes through. This guide-book to the adequate death touches upon thirty-three
visionary
sites, and only a full list can do justice to them:
An island of ants as large as foals; an island of great birds; an island of a horse with hound’s claws; an island of giant horses running a race; an island in which salmon are hurled by the sea through a stone valve into a house; an island of trees, from which Maol Dúin cuts a rod that bears three apples, each of which sustains him for a fortnight; an island with a beast that can turn its body round inside its skin; an island red with the blood of carnivorous horses that rend each other; an island of fiery swine; an island with a treasure-house guarded by a little cat that leaps right through one of the foster brothers when he tries to take a necklace, and reduces him to ashes; an island with a palisade separating white sheep from black, and a guardian who sometimes moves a sheep from one part to the other, whereupon it changes colour; an island of giant cattle and swine separated by a river of fire; an island with a mill in which is ground “all that men begrudge to one another’; an island of mourners in black, where one of the foster brothers becomes unrecognizable through grief and is left
behind; an island with fences of gold, silver, brass and crystal,
segregating
kings, queens, warriors and maidens; an island with a fortress approached by a glass bridge, where a beautiful maiden seems to have expected their coming, but when they try to woo her for Maol Dúin she puts them off, and they wake next day to find themselves far at sea again; an island of birds that shout; an island with many birds and an anchorite clothed only in his long hair, who had come there sailing on a sod of his native land, which by God’s will had grown by one foot’s breadth and put forth one tree every year since then, the birds being the souls of his kindred awaiting Doomsday; an island with a fountain that yields water and whey on Fridays and Wednesdays, milk on Sunday and certain feast-days, and ale and wine on other feast-days; an island with a forge worked by a giant; a sea of glass of great splendour and beauty; a sea like a transparent cloud, through which they look down on a land in which a monster preys on a herd of oxen; an island where the people shout “It is they!” as if they had expected their coming and feared it; an island with an arch of water like a rainbow full of salmon over it; a silver column rising out of sight, with a silver net hanging from it, from which one of the voyagers brings home a piece to offer on the high altar at
Armagh
; an island on a pedestal with a door at its base; an island of women who try to seduce them into a life of perpetual youth and pleasure, which bores them, so that they leave after three months that seem like three years; an island with trees of intoxicating and
soporific
berries; an island with a hermit and an ancient verminous eagle, which renews itself in a lake; an island of mirth, where the last of the foster brothers is overcome by laughter and has to be left; an island with a revolving rampart of fire, through the doorway of which, when it comes round to them, they glimpse a life of luxury and music; an island where a monk is doing penance for robbing the church, who advises Maol Dúin to forgive his father’s slayers; an island where they see a falcon like the falcons of Ireland, which guides them homewards.
Finally, they come back to the island of the slayer of Ailill,
where their arrival is being discussed at that moment, and are made welcome.
Separation of absolute essences seems to be a theme of this bizarre itinerary. Perhaps Maol Dúin’s voyage takes us behind the scenery of this life, and shows how crudely and arbitrarily it is tacked together out of such opposites and abstractions as black and white, warriors and maidens, laughter and grief, solitude and company. If so, like all visions of the otherworld it is a reductive and delusory account of this one. The wonders Maol Dúin
encountered
are as nothing to those of his native island, if that was indeed Aran; our salmon-leaping rainbows match his,. In fact with a little ingenuity I could show that each of the islands he saw was Aran, approached from a different direction.
Pilgrimage, the ritual of attending to things one by one as we come to them, enacts a necessity forced on us by our limitations, our lowly evolutionary stage of mind. In reality everything is co-present (or at least, and so as not once again to oversimplify, an uncountable number of stories struggle competitively through every event of space-time). Even a pilgrimage narrow-mindedly devoted to the one end is endlessly ambushed and seduced by the labyrinth it winds through, while the most comprehensive course we can chart through the incomprehensible is an evasive
shortcut
. Here, standing in this boring
dún
of Eoghanacht, I am
trampled
down by all that I might have bethought myself to say of it, as by the phantom horses of the streaming mist. But I am the servant of finitude, and must press on.
Two jagged strips of land running from north coast to south
correspond
to two subdivisions of the village of Eoghanacht; each has its boreens running downhill to its share of seaweed in the bay of An Gleannachán, and uphill to a thousand fields of Na
Craga. The eastern section is Ceathrú an Turlaigh, the quarter of the turlough; this was the land contentiously acquired by Patrick O’Flaherty and from which his son James’ stock was driven over the cliffs. In the time of the Johnstons, the two-hundred or so acre holding was sold off for £400 to an islander from Inis Meáin who had returned from America with money. Máirtín Ó
Concheanáinn
was a brother of James Concannon, owner of the Concannon vineyards in California. The curious mansion he built for himself in 1903, like a flat-roofed version of Kilmurvey House, is set back from the road, on the right a little beyond the turning down to the old Ó Direáin cottage. As a child Máirtín Ó Direáin himself used to marvel at this big house next door, which his mother told him was like houses she had seen in America. He also saw with amazement the straw hat worn by a visitor to the house. Later he heard that some of the people staying there spoke Irish; in fact another of the Concannon brothers was Tomás Bán, the famous Gaelic Leaguer, and no doubt he often visited.
The smaller tenants of the village had their land in the western section, Ceathrú an Oicht, which used sometimes to be englished as Breastquarter, and is so called because it lies across the breast of the higher ground to the west. The boundary between the two quarters largely follows a slight notching of the stepped hillside, where erosion has found out a vulnerable major joint of the
north-south
set. This little glen cuts down through a line of low cliffs just above the village, and opens out into a flat space, now
occupied
by the factory, by the roadside. Immediately below the road, to the north, the same geological weakness has reproduced the same topography, a v-shaped recess in the rim of the next terrace, and here the naturally-provided sheltery site between the
divergent
cliffs is occupied by the group of monastic ruins from which the village gets its alternative name, Na Seacht dTeampaill or the Seven Churches.
When I first came to Aran, the factory was merely a large shed of cement-coloured cladding, with a surly generator growling in a kennel beside it, and I was shocked that anyone could have
thought of siting such a construction just here, where the contrast between its deadly greyness and the living grey of old limestone masonry mottled with roundels of lichen was as painful as could be. How did it come about that the most comfortably off
generation
Aran had ever known was responsible for the first ugly
building
the valley of the Seven Churches had seen in the fourteen hundred years of its history? The obvious answers, that that
generation
was by no means prosperous in the perspective of twentieth-century Europe, and that the shed was merely the beginnings of a development that helped to keep the community together throughout the next two decades, are true, but evasive. A proper answer would be a full diagnosis of “our wretched era.”
The number “seven” is an invocation of the magical; there are in fact only two churches here, and the remains of probably eight other monastic buildings. They nest in the lee of the cliffs,
casually
clustered; all are ruins, roofless, some of them much reduced. But still, when one glances down into the site from the road it gives an impression of busyness, of concentration on its interior life; one hears the hum of these hives for the honey of the
invisible
. The many-cornered, uneven and overgrown spaces between them have been used as a graveyard for centuries; by the main church the ground is paved with obscurely lettered slabs, and
everywhere
it is hummocky with burials, so that the digging of a new grave is an anxious matter to the islanders, who hate to
disturb
old bones. The most recent head-stones of Italian marble, the sombre recumbant flags of the last century, and the dumb
boulders
marking infants’ graves, are all in an elegiac huddle with Early Christian stones bearing cryptically abbreviated inscriptions, including the famous “
VII ROMANI
,” romantically supposed to mark the resting-place of seven pilgrims from the Holy City itself, drawn by the echo of Aran’s prayers.
This quiet depository of time is almost in the heart of the
village.
Colie Mhicilín’s cottage is set among the small plots and ragged bare rocky areas above its rim; I often called there in search of local guidance. Colie would edge me out of the kitchen,
which was always billowing with daughters, into his stiff, chilly little “room,” hung with framed certificates for the five-pound and ten-pound prizes he had won at Irish-language festivals, and we would stand awkwardly at the table, looking at my maps or the lists of place-names he used to draw up for me. Then we would step out along the way he took to the cow every day: across a few yards of crag, down steps hardly more than toe-holds in a wrinkle of the scarp-face, along a path where elder-bushes hiding a neglected holy well caught at one’s sleeve, and so between the ruins, with a pause by his wife’s recent grave, to the stile leading out onto the side-road going down through a few big sandy fields to the bay. Sometimes he would stop, to give me one of his short stories
in
extenso,
closing in on me with his watery eyes and
spluttery
breath. One of them was about a weasel looking through a hole in a wall at the goose it intended to kill; acting it out, Colie leaned forward, baring his yellow teeth and fixing his eyes on my throat. Paralyzed in my listening mode, I nearly despaired when he suddenly revised the story: “No, there wasn’t one goose, there were seven!,” and I had to drag his attention back to the problem in hand, the correct identification of the various “saints’ beds” here and there around the monastery.
In the summer seasons of the ‘seventies I used occasionally to find students at work in the Seven Churches, measuring up the old buildings and taking rubbings of the carved stones; they were from University College, Galway, and it is from the report
published
by their director, John Waddell, that I draw most of the archaeological facts I have stirred into the following account of the monastic site. Teampall Bhreacáin, St. Brecán’s church, is the hub of the settlement. This is the largest ancient church in Aran, with a nave and chancel both eighteen feet broad and totalling about forty-two feet in length, separated by a round-headed arch. The arch and the lancet window in the east gable, with its wide internal splay rising to a slightly pointed arched head, are thirteenth-century work, transitional in style between Romanesque and Gothic, formed of smoothly cut stone in silvery contrast to
the harsher and darker masonry of the walls. The round-headed door in the south wall, and the window near it, were probably inserted two or three centuries later, and are contemporary with the altar under the east window and a partition wall dividing off the west end of the nave. Looking at the west gable from inside, one sees that it was made by enlarging an older gable, which, like the north wall, is made of much bigger blocks, including one a good six feet long. On the outside, one of the antae of the original building remains, like a pillar reinforcing the north corner of the gable wall. Clearly the south and east walls of this earlier church were removed, in order to enlarge it into the nave of the present church. There is an inscription on a raised band of stone on the old part of the gable:
OR AR II CANOINN
, “a prayer for two canons” (the
OR
standing for
ORÓIT
). I wonder at the self-abnegation of this anonymous joint plea: do these two individuals need the same prayer?
The other church is small and undivided, and probably dates from the sixteenth century, to judge by the slim, trefoil-headed window-light in its east gable and the doorway in the north wall, over which two undecorated curved bits of stone lean together to form the most basic gothic arch. It is tucked into the corner of the site nearest the road, where the glen narrows into a cleft, and its name, Teampall an Phoill, the church of the hollow, simply
reflects
its situation; no doubt it had a more arcane name once, which is forgotten.
The domestic buildings of the monastery are of similar late medieval date. Five of them stand to a height of several feet, and the foundations of three more are traceable. They mainly have opposite doors in each of their long walls, like traditional
cottages
. One has two little windows with ogee’d heads cut out of single blocks, and another, a window of two trefoil-headed lights, quite simply constructed and chamfered, but richly decorative in its setting in the sober grey stonework. A curious toothy-topped wall zigzagging round the site is largely the creation of the Board of Works, who did some restoration-work here towards the end of
the last century, but one stretch of it, near the stile by which one climbs down into the graveyard from the side-road on the west, is also probably medieval. The blocked-up lintelled doorway in it, Colie tells me, was once tall enough for a horse and rider to pass through; over the years, what with burials and overgrowth, the ground-level has risen.
This, and another length of old wall with a pointed archway, between it and the big church, perhaps formed part of an
enclosure
around a number of “penitential stations” or
leabaí
(literally, “beds”), regarded as saints’ graves, at which pilgrims used to perform their devotions. The nearest of these to the arched entrance is a roughly rectangular, double-bed-sized plot surrounded by a low drystone parapet. It is called Leaba an Spioraid Naoimh, the bed of the Holy Ghost, a dedication that puzzles people, as such “beds” are usually named after their presumed makers or
occupants.
Colie Mhicilín told me he once heard an old man
explaining
to another islander that the Holy Ghost was buried in it (“But that couldn’t be,” added Colie, “for the Holy Ghost is—God!”—with a slight hesitation, looking at me as if for confirmation of this theological conundrum.)
Within living memory both islanders and visitors from the mainland used to sleep in Leaba an Spioraid Naoimh in hope of or to give thanks for spiritual favours, and several cures—crutches thrown away, etc.—are attributed to the practice. An elderly Sruthán villager, Cáit Faherty, told me a story about a
Connemara
family who brought a loaf and a three-pound slab of butter with them, which they left to hand on the parapet overnight. A thief came while they slept, and was on the point of making off with the food, when it was miraculously turned to stone. The two stones are still there, she told me, but not many people know their story, so they are usually thrown aside or tidied away somewhere, and she used to go searching for them and put them back by the bed. The loaf was of the tall, round shape they used to make in pots, and the thief had broken one pound off the lump of butter, which Cáit always fitted together again with the rest. I have never
seen these stones, which may well be lying around somewhere nearby, but they are visible in a photograph of the bed taken by T.H. Mason in the early 1930s. Mason had no Irish, and all he could gather about them, from an old man who had very little English, was that the cylindrical loaf-stone had some
supernatural
power or origin, and this led Mason to speculate, incorrectly, that it was a cursing-stone.
Part of the shaft of a high cross stands at one corner of this bed, and there are other chunks of it lying nearby. It is elaborately carved. On its west face, at the foot, is a square panel in which two serpents, arranged into four symmetrical whorls, bite each other’s heads; above that is a panel of six abstract knots, and above that again, the lower part of a crucifixion, with the two thieves (it is supposed) shown as dangling manikins on either side of Christ’s legs. Originally the cross would have been about seven feet high, with a ring around the intersection of the arms and the shaft, and deep cusps in the angles between them. Like two other crosses, now lying in fragments to the north and the south of the
monastic
site, it is similar in style to the Cill Éinne crosses attributed to a late eleventh-or early twelfth-century school of sculptors
working
both in Aran and Clare. Of the two fragmentary high crosses, one is on the bare craggy level above the monastery and near the main road, in a little enclosure Colie names as Leaba Bhreacáin, and which used to be regarded by the villagers as the saint’s
original
chapel. Just a dozen paces east of it is St. Brecán’s holy well, Tobar Bhreacáin, a natural solution-hollow or
bull
á
n
in the
limestone
, with a little canopy of rough limestone blocks over it that sometimes serves as a hearth for the village’s St. John’s Eve
bonfire.
The bits and pieces of the cross were collected from around the ruins and put together by William Wilde in 1848, and
unfortunately
at some period they were cemented down. This cross was about twelve feet high, with a ringed head, and its visible face is decorated with panels of knots and fret-patterns. The third cross is in a low rectangular enclosure reached by crossing a field northwards from the graveyard. Only the stump is still standing, and
eight substantial bits of the shaft lie beside it, having been
gathered
together by Samuel Ferguson in 1852. It was originally over thirteen feet high, with a small ring, and cusps in the
intersections
of shaft and arms. On what was its eastern face is a figure of Christ (crucified, presumably, but the arms and nub of the cross are missing), with a smaller figure on either side, too rudimentary to be definitely identifiable as the two thieves, or as the Virgin and St. John, or as the usual occupants of this position, the sponge-bearer and the lance-bearer. The rest of the shaft-face and its reverse are carved with panels of plait-work, which here and there degenerates into tangles. These errors, made in the latter stages of what must have been months of work, were no doubt severely criticized, but evidently they were not considered serious enough to lead to the stone’s abandonment, so there they lie, for me to nod at, a monument to a labyrinthographer astray.