Thatcher in the rye

The tiny rye fields scattered throughout the Aran Islands have ripened, greeny-gold, in the grey mosaic of limestone walls. The last time they were counted, from the air in 1992, the middle island, Inis Meain, had 38 patches of rye; Inis Mor had 15; Inis Oirr had seven. All told, there could be more than a couple of hectares: perhaps less if someone else has died, or given up on tillage.

Rye - seagal - is grown in rotation with potatoes to provide the islanders with straw for thatch: very tall (1.5-metre), wiry stems, tugged up by hand complete with the roots. In Stones Of Aran: Labyrinth Tim Robinson paints the scene: "The harvester slaps each dornan or fistful against his boot or the wall to knock the soil off it, and the spacious, lazy rhythm of this sound is characteristic of hot July and August days in the fields. It is sweaty and tiring work, and men hate it; the endlessly repeated, quietly vicious slaps sound out against themselves, against the walls that bind their lives."

Today, with few thatched houses inhabited, the rye is grow to roof outbuildings, or to cut for hay. Only outsiders, it seems, regret the passing of thatch on dwellings. As Padraig Standun observes in The Book of Aran, "John Millington Synge, looking across from Inis Mor, saw the houses as a straw rope across the back of Inis Meain. Most island people would associate them with the hard life, remembering the yearly repairs and the fear that the roof would come in on top of them in winter storms".

And yet there are very good reasons for wanting rye to continue in cultivation in the islands, which is why the Heritage Council has just awarded £10,000 to a project submitted by the Inis Meain Co-op. Half of it will go to 10 rye-growing farmers, and £2,000 of it for a study on the possibilities of rye-based products - smoked mackerel on rye sounds good.

The growing of rye goes back for centuries on the islands, and the handcraft and folk-ways surrounding it would alone be enough to qualify as "heritage". But even more interesting, ecologically, are the arable weeds that grow with the crop in Aran's high-walled fields. These are among the final sanctuaries of plants that have virtually disappeared from the weedless grain prairies of mainland Ireland and Europe.

Ten years ago, the bright blue cornflower, once known in 23 of Ireland's counties, was thought to have been extinct here for decades. Vanished, too, was the tall, stout grass known as darnel, Lolium tementulum. Both were listed as extinct in the Irish Red Data Book of rare and threatened plants prepared for the Wildlife Service by Dr Tom Curtis and Dr H.N. McGough of Kew (1988). In the summer of 1987, just as the book was going to press, the two botanists visited Aran and found both species.

Just two cornflower plants were in bloom, in a field of rye in Fearann an Choirce on Inis Mor. Curtis and McGough wouldn't collect them - they just took slides - and no cornflowers have been seen there since. They spotted darnel, first on top of thatched roofs on Inis Meain and then as a common intruder among the growing rye. Finds of smooth brome and bristle oat (or pilcorn), both scarce on the mainland, confirmed the value of Aran's "relictual agricultural practices" in conserving the genes of arable weeds.

In commercial cereal-growing, such weeds have long been banished by seed-cleaning processes and herbicides. Up to about 20 years ago, the Aran islanders were still buying rye seed from merchants in Galway. Then commercial supplies faded away completely in Ireland, so the islanders have saved their own seed from year to year for some two decades. Even when the ears of darnel have been cleaned from the crop at harvest, the plant pops up in the rye fields all over again: as with so many weeds, its seeds lie in the soil, waiting their moment.

Darnel (which the older islanders call roibhleis) contains toxic alkaloids and its presence in flour or bread has been a worry since ancient times: enough of it will make you seem drunken - or dead. Why, then, bother to save it? Because, say Curtis and McGough, it may have pharmaceutical value. Bristle oat, or pilcorn, long spurned as an uneconomic weed, has vanished from almost all of Ireland since the 1950s. But it was once a primitive food crop, even on Aran, and its hardy genes are a potential resource for cereal crops in the future.

Since the discoveries of 1987, the Aran weed communities and traditions of rye cultivation and thatching have been studied by Dr Andrew Bleasdale, an Irish-speaking freelance ecologist who lives in Connemara. His report, a rewarding document, makes a case for conservation on scientific, cultural and social grounds.

"These weeds," he writes, "present a potential source of tourism revenue, if the rye crop is protected, developed and interpreted in a sensitive way." He quotes German authors on the need to conserve Europe's last areas of traditional farming and points to the new market for "eco/ethno tourism" - one which could benefit Inis Meain, in particular "if the appropriate facilities were in place".

There are ironies abroad, however, in the current developments for the islands' rye heritage. One is that if, say, rye bread is to be made from "stone-ground island grain", the crop will have to be sifted, not only of darnel, but any trace of ergot, the toxic fungus infection of rye that has sometimes afflicted the crop in the past. So there could be pressure for just the kind of seed-cleaning, herbicides and fungicides that "relictual agricultural practices" have avoided.

The second irony is that the grants available for thatching roofs don't take the island rye tradition into account. An Inis Mor couple who thatched their new restaurant and B&B, were shocked this summer when the inspector called and denied them their final payment: thatching, it seems, must be done with long-lasting reeds, imported from the Shannon, and not with the traditional rye straw which needs renewing every couple of years.