Free Stones of Aran by Tim Robinson Page A

lintel in the base of the wall, inside the innermost of the huts built against it, from which a tunnel about two feet high runs directly into the wall. This has only recently been opened up; I was shown it first in 1978, and it is not mentioned in any descriptions of the fort, although a tradition that there had been such a tunnel was recorded around the turn of the century. By the light of my match it appears to be about sixteen feet long; its floor is the bare ground and it is roofed across with long slabs, and when I crawled to the end of it I saw a chink of light above me, so it reaches very nearly to the outer surface of the wall. Such passages are well known in many cashels, but this is the only such structure apart from very small recesses to be found in any of the Aran forts. Like the underground chambers or “souterrains” found in many of the Burren’s cashels, they probably served as storage places and in some cases as shelters or escape routes. This tunnel looks as if it might have been intended as a secret exit or sally-port that could have been knocked through to the outside of the wall should the gate have been forced by an enemy.
    The whole organization of the interior of Dúchathair gives one an immediate impression of resolute, concerted and ingenious application to an imperative purpose. But as one paces and puzzles about it and inquires into its genesis, doubts besiege and overthrow one’s initial certainties. Firstly one learns that the interior was a tumbled wreckage when the restorers set to work in 1880, and as earlier records of it are vague it is not known how much of the present arrangement of terraces and steps is a result of their preconceptions of what a prehistoric fort should be. However, it is likely that the general scheme of a layered wall rising in terraces is correct as this recurs in Aran’s other cashels and in many elsewhere . But how exactly would such terracing be of advantage in defence? It appears that each thickness of such walls is a complete wall in itself, faced with carefully coursed masonry and infilled with loose stone, so that if the outer thickness were pulled down the next would stand unharmed. But any attackers in a position topull down part of the wall would have been able to scale it too, and then would have had the advantage of height in fighting their way down the terraces within. It has also been suggested that the stepped construction was an aid in building, but then the islanders of today who are periodically called in by the Office of Public Works to rebuild a collapsed section of one of the dúns quickly rig up a little hoist to raise the stones directly up the outer face of the wall rather than heave them up from terrace to terrace, and this would not have been beyond the original artisans.
    Perhaps the terracing was adapted to some feature of life within the cashel—but what sort of life could that have been? Since there is no spring in or near it, and given its exposed situation, it can hardly have been inhabited for more than brief periods of danger, or perhaps of ceremony. Even the monks who came to Aran in search of a landscape to scourge the senses lodged themselves in nooks of its milder northern slopes and wrapped at least a fold of cliff about their shoulders against the blast of the ocean. Are these gloomy parapets and gardens of spikes an architecture of fear or of display? Perhaps the people of Dúchathair with its standing army of stone sought to impose upon folk of lesser forts, and were in turn overawed by the spacious outworks of Dún Aonghasa.
    Since none of the dúns has been studied by modern methods (and the same is true for all but a very few of the scores of comparable cashels in Ireland), it is not even known if they were inhabited simultaneously or not. Folk-history ascribes them either to the Fir Bolg, one of the mythical invading races from whom the modern Irishman has come dwindling down, or to