Stones of Aran by Tim Robinson Page A

have been fondly reproduced for me time and time again, portray him as a curious, rheumy-eyed, twisted little cat of a man who could make a comedy out of the stuff of nightmares—of getting his head stuck when trying to squeeze under an overhang, so that he could move neither forward nor backwards, or of having to crawl backwards along a ledge too narrow to turn in, pulling a bagful of peregrine falcon fledglings after him. There was a court case over one of these chicks which Micilín Sara had sold to some visitor instead of to the agent who had commissioned him to get them; I have had Micilín’s Aran-Irish oaths and witty interjections from the dock rehearsed to me often enough, but they are still as incomprehensible to me as no doubt they were to the judge in the case. Another story records what were nearly his last words, when he was saved from death by a companion called Conneely. Micilín had jumped down on top of a cormorant perched on a ledge that sloped outward and was slippery with droppings, and found himself sliding towards the brink astride the great flapping bird. Thinking he was riding to his death he cried out, “Give my blessing to all the old neighbours who live down on the Creig!”; but Conneely, who was a huge strong fellow, put out a long arm and dragged him back by the hair. His farewell seems oddly formal for such an occasion, butthen, as the man who told me the tale explained, “Micilín Sara was like a king among the people of Baile na Creige!”
    It seems that early in this century the islanders got permission to catch the seabirds with nets lowered from the clifftops, and the cliffman’s skills were no longer needed. The smaller nets were worked from above by three or four men, but to manage the larger ones another team had to be positioned in currachs at the foot of the cliff. An expedition would be made only once or twice in the season, between the arrival of the birds around St. Patrick’s Day in March and their departure near the Feast of Our Lady in August. The net would be lowered past each of the ledges in turn, its bottom edge kept well in against the cliff as the tendency of the birds was to fly downwards from the ledges. However, it often happened that the birds merely cowered back into the ledges when they saw the net, and this difficulty was overcome by a local invention , the dorú drárs, a pair of white báinín drawers on the end of a fishing-line or dorú, which would be lowered beside the net and jerked at the right moment so that the drawers flapped against the cliff and flushed the birds from their retreat.
    Even the netting was given up perhaps fifty years ago, and the cliff no longer plays much of a part in the islanders’ lives. In fact most of them shun that side of the island, and sometimes when a man has to visit his cattle in a field by the cliffs, he will hurry home knowing that his wife will be anxious about him. Over the last eight years I have walked the cliffs hundreds of times, in all weathers and all seasons, and the occasions on which I have met anyone over there are so few that I can remember them all individually —the man fishing with a long line from the cliff west of Dún Aonghasa, another looking out for basking sharks from a sheltered recess above An Pointe Fiáin, a group of Cill Éinne men disconsolately loitering near Dúchathair one holiday weekend when the pubs had run out of beer, and only one or two other such encounters. The last of the ailleadóirí were old when the people from whom I learn of them were young, and their way of life,unlike that of the boatmen and farmers of the last century, has no successor today; like the cliff face itself it is turned away from the existent Aran, and seems to look back into a dateless past.
    One last anecdote, of Micilín Sara’s father from whom he inherited his calling, preserves all the comic, mediaeval eeriness of that life. One dark