The Irish mind being what it is (fertile) will always come up with an imaginative explanation when a rational one is not available.
In recent years an islander proposed a new hypothesis regarding the Chevaux de Frise. The man claimed that the limestone stakes
were a defence not against men but against the hordes of wild pigs that infested the island. His evidence for this is the vast
number of stones lying everywhere in abundance and which, according to him, could only have been rooted up by pigs. He bolstered
his argument by reminding us that an area on the island was called, Creig na Muc, The Crag of the Pigs. He further asserted
that the stones of the Chevaux de Frise are set just far enough apart for the inhabitants of the fort to run in amongst them when
hard pressed by the advancing pigs, who couldn’t follow being too fat to squeeze through the spaces. To survive on Inishmore
in those days you had to be smarter than the average pig.
In the 5th century the great Irish monastic movement was founded there
by St. Enda and the island became known as Arainn na Naomh, the Island of Saints, its fame for sanctity and learning drawing flocks
of disciples from all over Europe. The men who studied there under St. Enda spread out over Ireland and Scotland founding the
great monastic settlements, and from those monasteries their disciples spread out across Europe founding hundreds of monasteries and
universities, and bringing the lamp of learning to a continent that was mired in darkness and savagery. Invited to the court
of King Charlemagne in France in the 9th century, these Irish scholars, intellectuals and clerics contributed to the Carolingian
European renaissance, which is often looked at as the origin of Western civilisation. In the ancient ruined churchyard at Killeany
village there are 120 saints buried and St. Enda rests among them.
The little green fields on the islands are the
work of countless generations of men, women and children who cleared the loose stones and piled them up into miles of dry walls.
There are 1,500 miles of dry stone walls in the three islands. When they had cleared the bare granite rock, the crags, they
put down layers of seaweed and sand that they carried on their backs from the shore thus creating the tiny, sparse fields of Aran
that are there to this day. As time and weather eroded the scanty soil countless more loads of sand and seaweed had to be carried
from the shore. The Dublin writer, Sean O’Casey called this process; “Fertilising futility.” If that sounds cynical
it was actually said with affection and even admiration, for the people of Aran have lived with extreme poverty, hunger, fever,
death in the ocean, eviction and emigration. Those are just a few of the persistent curses that have hung over their heads as
they struggled to scratch a living from their piece of rock.
In the late 19th century a confluence of economic conditions
combined with the greed of the landlord had left the islanders in a dreadful state of want. The local priest, Fr. Michael O’Donohue,
had worked tirelessly on behalf of his parishioners, endlessly petitioning British government officials in Dublin to help in setting
up a
