Free Stones of Aran by Tim Robinson Page B

“the Danes,” the Vikings whose seaborne raids made the mediaeval monks fear calm weather. Who indeed could have built such monstrous nests of stone, and especially on such a wind-racked, spray-blasted extremity of the habitable world as this, but remote ancestral beings, half man and half force of nature, or else mysterious foreign pirates so rapacious that only stormy weather gave respite from their fiercer storms?
    Archaeologists are rightly tentative in all they have to say aboutthe origins, dates and purposes of such cashels, which are perhaps only miscalled “forts.” In general it is agreed that they were built by a Celtic people, a cattle-raising society with a warrior aristocracy of whose life-style the Irish heroic legends give us a glorified view. Some cashels date from the Iron Age and perhaps most from early historic times, while a few were certainly inhabited in mediaeval times and one or two to within living memory. Aran’s two coastal examples, Dúchathair and Dún Aonghasa, both have the chevaux-de-frise (as the defensive bands of set stones are called, after the Frisians, who having no horses used a similar device of spikes against cavalry attacks), and this feature may indicate that they are some centuries earlier than the two inland forts and perhaps date from the Early Iron Age, a few centuries BC. But their purpose, for all their purposeful air, remains obscure.
    Dún Aonghasa, four miles to the west, will allow me to amplify these suppositions and their evidences, but in leaving Dúchathair, and in the dearth of sounder information, I will pass on a theory I heard from a Cill Rónáin farmer about the chevaux-de-frise . This was, he tells me, a defence not against men but against hordes of wild pigs that infested the land in those days—his evidence for these is the vast numbers of stones lying everywhere which can only have been rooted up by pigs, and the name of a certain area of the island, Creig na Muc, the crag of the pigs, where no pigs have been kept in island memory. The stones of the chevaux- de- frise , he points out, are set just far enough apart for the inhabitants of the dún to run in amongst them when hard-pressed by the pigs, which themselves would have been too fat to follow. So, mighty residences of stone fall bit by bit into the sea, the myths of huge cloudy lords quit them, and the irrepressible if shrunken folk-mind repopulates them, even before archaeology has done so, with normal-sized mortals devising witty solutions to pig-sized problems, just like their original true inhabitants, whoever they were.

STYLES OF FLIGHT
    The sea makes a ferocious attack on the peninsula of Dúchathair, and may after a few more centuries leave a remnant of the fort isolated on a sea-stack, for it is cutting through the neck of the headland from the bay on its west, eating out colossal overhangs from which one can look dizzily down at breakers crawling among giant debris of past cliff-falls. In the last century there were traces of another fort on the headland on the other side of this bay; it was described as having a wall six foot seven inches thick and enclosing a stone hut eighteen foot six across. Nothing can be made out now of either fort or hut among the tumbled slabs of the last of the storm beach, which ceases here as the cliffs beyond the next bay are unscalable by the waves of any storm.
    The headland of the vanished fort is Binn an Phrúntaigh, the cliff face of the prúntach or young black-backed gull. No doubt that species does nest here, and I often see one go drifting by, alarming the lesser gulls, for it is a huge bird and a nest-robber. But the most familiar gull on this particular cliff is the mild little kittiwake. An aerial survey of sea-birds in 1970 estimated the nesting population of kittiwakes in Árainn at eight hundred and twenty pairs. In spring one can watch them here assembling on the ledges below and greeting each other with