Stones of Aran Read Online Free PDF Page B

field-path continues the line of the road eastward, across smooth turf in which hosts of rabbits are digging sandpits, to the exact spot I have in mind. Here one can sit among the wild pansies and Lady’s bedstraw with the low rocky shore at one’s feet, and get one’s bearings. Behind and to the left is level ground of sandy fields, and dunes in the distance . To the right the land rises in stony slopes to the ruins of an ancient watch tower on the skyline. A mile and a half ahead across the sound is Inis Meáin; the third island, Inis Oírr, is hiddenbehind it, but the hills of the Burren in County Clare appear beyond , a dozen miles away. Since the three islands and that north-western corner of Clare were once continuous—before the millions of years of weathering, the glaciers of the Ice Ages and the inexhaustible waves cut the sea-ways between them—the land-forms visible out there, a little abstracted as they are by distance, can be seen as images of Árainn itself in the context of its geological past, and it is valuable to read them thus before going on to clamber among the details and complexities of the way ahead, so that an otherwise inchoate mass of impressions may find an ordering and a clarification.
    Since this opposing, western face of Inis Meáin is cliffed it is in fact like a cross-section of Árainn. The highest land lies across the centre, and from there to the south the skyline declines evenly to sea level, giving the southern half of the island the appearance of a long dark wedge driven in between sky and sea. The cliffs’ ledges and the great platforms of rock along their feet all have the same slant as the skyline, so that the island is visibly made up of a small number of thick parallel layers slightly canted to the south. But if this is an image of Árainn, it is from a time before its southern range of cliffs was formed, for Inis Meáin’s coast is low on the south and stands well out beyond the general line of Árainn’s Atlantic cliffs. Why the ocean has been able to cut back just one of the three islands into south-facing cliffs is a question to which certain features of the extreme western tip of Árainn may suggest an answer—but that is as yet a dozen miles of walking and a hundred pages of reading ahead.
    While the profile of Inis Meáin’s southern half is simple to the point of monotony, that of the northern half has a wild vigour recalling one’s experience of that strange island; it hops and jumps down from the central heights, and then reaches the north in two long strides with a sharp fall between them. The land is enlivened by these little scarps; the houses are in their shelter, the wells at their feet, the boreens wind up and down them. Árainn is the same except that the aprons of bare rock below the terraces thatcarry the villages are not so wide; here, as in Inis Meáin and Inis Oírr, the terrain south of the ridge-line is uninhabited, severe, disconcertingly open to non-human immensities, while the northern flank of the island is at least raggedly shawled with the human presence. In fact over parts of the north the fabric of history is so closely woven that it can be as oppressive as the more elemental spaciousness of the south, and for all their beauty neither landscape is a forgiving one.
    This side-view of Inis Meáin shows the formation of the terraces with diagrammatic clarity: first the topmost of the great beds of limestone slanting up gently from the south is broken off short by a north-facing scarp; the next layer continues a little farther north before being similarly ended, the next runs still farther north to form another tread of the stair, and so on. There are five such terraces, with three less distinct ones below them, and they can be traced the length of the island chain and indeed matched with similar terraces in the hills of the Burren—at least the geologist can match them, by means of slight variations in the composition of the limestone and in