Free Stones of Aran by Tim Robinson

woe or ruination, which is picturesque and well-suited to such dark and threatening reefs, and perhaps this is the true origin of the word, which is not in the dictionaries.
    I notice that on the Ordnance Survey six-inch map the head of the bay between the creachoileán and the great fort is marked “Barally.” This is the anglicization of barr aille, literally “top of the cliff.” Aran people refer to the whole southern coastline thus; obviously one of the surveyors asked someone on the spot the name of this place and wrote down the answer without checking its extension . A common phrase here for a fruitless endeavour is “ag dul go Barr Aille gan tada,” “going to Barr Aille for nothing,” for the islanders almost never visit these tall cliffs without good reason , and there are many whom no reason at all could bring to this mortal edge of their holding.

DÚCHATHAIR
    From inland the fort of Dúchathair appears a slouching mass dark against the southern sea-spaces; hence, no doubt, its name, from dubh cathair, black fort. It consists of a single wall of immense thickness built of rough, unmortared limestone blocks, which defends the outer hundred yards of a peninsula from landward attack, sheer or overhanging cliffs a hundred feet high making approach from the sea impossible. Two fat buttresses of masonry like that of the wall are the work of the nineteenth-century restorers, and knowing this it is easy to subtract them in the mind’s eye from the grand unity of the whole and indeed to replace the blocks of which they are composed on the top of the wall whence they had fallen. The skyline of the wall is rather slumped, but atits highest, where it crosses a slight hollow running down the centre of the peninsula, the wall presents a twenty-foot face, very even, and slightly inclined inwards. Before the wall an area of crag is closely set with long stones jammed upright into the crevices; many of them have been taken for fencing or are now fallen, but enough remain to show that they would have been a formidable obstacle to a direct storming of the fort. At either end some length of wall has been lost with collapse of the cliffs; what remains is an arc, convex towards the land, about ninety paces in length. There was a gateway at the east near the cliff which fell away more than a hundred and fifty years ago. Until recently one entered the fort by picking one’s way across fallen masonry on the brink of this cliff, but now a gap has been cleared there, for better or for worse, and the wall comes to a neat and stable end a few yards short of the edge.
    The inside of the wall has two terraces running around it, as if for viewing the Atlantic horizon that completes its circle. The remains of a number of stone huts clustered like the cells of a wild bees’ nest cling to the wall’s base in the double shelter of its concavity and the grassy hollow in the middle of the peninsula. Only the bases of their walls remain and these have been tidied up into stout curved arms of stone that embrace half a dozen ideal picnic spots of flowered sward. To seaward the turf is more salt-blasted and intermittent, and the south-western side of the promontory bears a storm beach of jagged flags, among which a few hollows can be read as the sites of a line of stone huts said to have been overwhelmed by the storm beach on “The Night of the Big Wind,” the 5th of January 1839.
    The outer parapet and the two terraces of the big wall are each the top of an individual thickness of it, for it is composed of three contiguous layers one inside another, totalling sixteen to eighteen feet in thickness at the base, and each raised to a different height. A fourth terrace along the base of the central length compensates for the sag in the ground-level there, and all the terraces and the topmost parapet are linked by little flights of steps running directlyup recesses in their inner faces. There is a low aperture under a heavy