Stones of Aran Read Online Free

plant-communities, neither of which would prosper in fatter conditions. And each contributes to the support of a scavenging fauna. When Synge first stayed in Cill Rónáin in 1898 he walked out to the east end of the island, and on his way back two little girls followed him for a while:
    They spoke with a delicate exotic intonation that was full of charm, and told me with a sort of chant how they guide “ladies and gintlemins” in the summer to all that is worth seeing in their neighbourhood, and sell them pampooties and maidenhair ferns, which are common among the rocks. As we parted they showed me the holes in their own pampooties, or cowskin sandals , and asked me the price of new ones. I told them my purse was empty, and with a few quaint words of blessing they turned away from me and went down to the pier.
    Similar accounts by other visitors make one wonder how the maidenhair survived the Victorian passion for fern-collecting. Fortunately Aran’s human children no longer need to exploit this particular ecological niche, and one can still find its delicate, exotic , charm enfolded in the rocks.

SERMONS IN STONES
    In climbing past the ruined tower and onwards to the crest of the hillside one has to clamber over a few loosely built drystone walls, or diverge from one’s goal to find gaps in them. But when thesummit is attained (a mere hundred and forty feet or so above the shoreline) the eye is totally beset by walls. The plateau that comes into view here, slightly tilted southwards towards the Atlantic cliff-tops, and stretching, with just two interrupting lowlands, for eight miles along the island, is a walled landscape, uniting the monotonous grandeur of the desert with the petty territorialism of suburbia. This uninhabited back or dip-slope of the island escarpment is referred to as Na Craga, the crags, although most of it is less craggy and more grassy than the areas of bare limestone pavement on the terraces along the northern coast. The first section of it stretches away to the west-north-west for over two miles; then, beyond a valley invisible from here, the higher, central , section of the plateau forms a long, straight horizon declining very gently from north to south, blocking off the further half of the island.
    Balancing on top of the nearest sound-looking wall to scan the disconcerting vista, one makes out that the pattern, for all its countless haphazard irregularities, is dominated by walls roughly parallel to that north-south horizon, and since the controlling direction of this volume is westwards, it is clear that progress is going to be problematic. The waist-high or head-high walls are so close-set that from this low viewpoint they hide the ground between them as if the better to conceal their purposes; they constitute an obstacle not merely to the body but to the understanding. The network seems too vast and repetitious to be the product of human intentions; the decisions of an individual brain in this transcendental structure are as the gropings of a coral blob immured in its reef. Usually nobody is to be seen in this desolation; if anything is being done or suffered here the act is hidden in the obliquity of the grille. If labour reveals its presence at all it is by sound, and almost solely by the clank of stone on stone. One hears how, over centuries, this landscape was created by the placing of stone on stone, how it is nowadays barely maintained by replacement of the fallen stone, and how it will lapse into rubble, stone by stone.
    I have tried to reduce this inordinate perspective to arithmetic and geometry. The Ordnance Survey map at six inches to the mile shows the field-boundaries as an eye-tormenting tangle of fine lines. By superimposing a square-inch grid on the map and counting squares and bits of squares, I find that the thickly walled areas of Árainn total ten and a half square miles. (Another one and a half square miles, comprising commonage and big unenclosed crags, may be omitted