Stones of Aran Read Online Free Page B

make explicit the nature of the rock; the geometry that could be stepped over and disregarded underfoot is erected into barriers before one’s face.
    Of course almost the only visitors who do stray from the boreens, the walled paths between the fields, are those with some botanical, archaeological or geological drive, and in the scientific literature there are many complaints about these walls. H.C. Hart, who made the first careful botanical survey of the islands in 1869, writes feelingly on the subject:
    These barricades are erected with no consideration for the shins of scientific explorers. It seems unfair to kick them down, as the natives do in the most reckless manner, whether crossing their own or their neighbours’ lands. If you adopt the alternative of climbing, which is often an operation of considerable difficulty, it is most probable that your descent will be followed by an avalanche of loose stones—still, as the wall falls from you, this is safer than to kick it down in front, where there is a great risk of the stones falling towards and laming you. I found the safest plan was to climb up the wall with the utmost delicacy, balance yourself on the top, and then jump. It will be seen, however, that the frequent recurrence of such jumps for a long day’s work is a mode of progression that may prove both wearisome and slow.
    A few years later the botanist Nathaniel Colgan took a bolder line:
    My first day’s work among these stone dikes was so tedious and disheartening that on the following days I engaged a stout native boy who proved very useful, rather as a dilapidator than as a guide and porter. He carried my camera and vasculum, and cheerfully threw down with a push of his shoulder any uncommonly difficult or dangerous wall that happened to lie in our path. I should have hesitated to do this for myself; but the young islander, with an adroit touch of flattery, gave me to understand that though the natives would be loath to take such a short method with the walls for their own convenience, they would never dream of objecting to its use on behalf of a distinguished stranger.
    These imperial modes reveal a blindness to the “native” and his ways. To cross a wall without bruising one’s shins or jolting one’s spine, one should look for stones that run right through the wall and stick out on either side, and step up and over on these as on a stile, refraining from leaning out from the wall and clutching at the topmost stones to lever oneself upright, but keeping one’s centre of gravity as close to the wall and as low over its top as possible. Araners learn this as part of learning to walk. I have seen an Aran father stand back, watchful but not interfering, as a toddler heads up a six-foot wall. If that child does not leave the island he or she will grow up able to cross walls with such fluency one cannot see how it is done. I remember an old man leading me across his land; before my eyes he repeatedly made the transition from being on the near side of a wall to being on the far side with no noticeable intermediate stages, complaining all the while of his rheumatism. A ghost’s proficiency in passing through walls would seem to be only the natural result of such a lifetime’s apprenticeship. But I suspect that that child will leave Na Craga to the old men, and the old men are already leaving it to its ghosts.
    The range of rectangularity held up for inspection by the facets of individual stones in these walls, from dog-eared squares to thin bony oblongs, images the variability of the field-shapes; one could imagine that each wall is a map of the terrain it hides. The flaw in this fantasy is that whereas the partitioning of the land into fields is virtually complete and every square yard is appropriated with what comes to seem like a miserly and obsessive clutch or a scholarly fussiness over definitions, the stones in a wall are usually not tightly packed and admit a modicum of empty space, slippage and