Whiskey Wormhole
Misadventure on Ireland’s Aran Islands, and a geologic anomaly.
One autumn weekend I was invited to accompany our Ireland-abroad college group on a field trip to the famous Aran Islands, a remote archipelago off the west coast.
I had been chastised for spending too little time with the school group from the outset. In my defense, I firmly believed that the best way to assimilate into a new culture was to avoid jogging down Main Street in your college hoodie.
That said, I was not a complete recluse and figured this was a good opportunity to see something new and to quiet my social judges. The Aran Islands are about as remote a location as you can get in the world, and I must admit having Colby’s institutional safety net for support during a visit held appeal.
We took a bus to the Ring of Kerry and hopped on a ferry to Inishmore, the largest of the Aran Islands. The ferry ride was rough, as all sea activity surrounding Ireland seems to be, but before long we arrived at the docks and disembarked. Inishmore has a couple of narrow roads that wind across the island, flanked by farmland separated by endless rows of ancient handmade rock walls.
It seemed the Irish were a determined lot. When the first settlers arrived from the mainland, the island was a rock-strewn and uncultivated wasteland, pounded by the ocean and wind and rain for centuries. It was a farmer’s nightmare, with stones littering the surface every few feet and providing little room to grow food. Undaunted, the settlers simply dug up the rocks and built stone walls to simultaneously mark their plots of land and create a suitable environment for farming. As Andy and Chris and I walked the old roads along this farmland we saw little actual farming, but the landscape was undeniably beautiful.
Cresting a hill, with tired legs, we spotted an old pub with a Guinness sign above the door and decided to recharge with a pint. As I mentioned earlier, few pubs in Ireland have windows in the front, so you have no idea what to expect until you open the door. We had become used to this phenomenon, as usually it worked out fine. For the most part, people were friendly, especially those nursing a pint in the middle of the afternoon.
When I opened the door and stepped inside this pub, however, the old-timers at the bar turned to glare at us in disdain. I guess they were tired of tourists coming around to drink beers and whiskey and ogle their remote lifestyle. Still, we were dying for a beer and needed a rest, so we ignored the angry stares and got ourselves a few pints and sat in the corner.
The men at the bar continued to mumble and stare and after some time turned their backs to us and began a conversation in Gaelic, undoubtedly about the three odd looking Yanks. Few in Ireland still speak the old language and although we knew we were being ridiculed in a native tongue, we considered it a cultural boon to hear some real Gaelic. We drank a few pints and talked about druids and monks amidst a slightly hostile but ancient aural backdrop.
An hour later, once again failing to properly gauge the powers of beer with a six percent alcohol content, the three of us got up and staggered out of the pub into a rare afternoon of sunshine.
Chris headed back to the bed and breakfast for a nap, but Andy and I felt energized and decided to bushwhack through the fields in an effort to glimpse the rugged ocean coastline. We hopped several low-lying rock walls and scrabbled through actual gorse (a word I thought my mother had invented) and some minutes later found ourselves standing in what looked to be a pasture with hundreds of cow patties peppering the ground.
Since we had been hiking in a generally straight line and the island was only a few miles in diameter, Andy figured we must be close to the sea. Our heads were bent toward the ground, tip-toeing around the cow turds when we came face to face with an enormous bull, less than twenty yards away.
“Shit.” I lamented, no longer worried about stepping in dung and searching for the closest rock wall to dive over.
“Is that a bull?” Andy asked in amazement.
“It’s not a rabbit,” I answered, incredulous.
“He looks pissed. What should we do?”
“Run!”
The bull charged and we ran for our lives, directly through a cluster of nettles before diving over an ancient rock wall. Luckily, the bull gave up when we crashed through the nettles, but it took hours for the sting to subside on our forearms and faces.
We dusted ourselves off and looked around, expecting to be in yet another pasture surrounded by rocks, but this time there were only three sides to the rock walls. The fourth edge of the pasture was a cliff and below we heard the pounding of ocean surf.
“Sweet!” I yelled. “We made it.”
“Let’s celebrate!” Andy sang, and whipped out a pint of Paddy, a cheap Irish whiskey and close cousin to paint thinner.
We walked to the edge and were stunned. Fifty feet below us, embedded in the rocky shoreline, was a perfectly rectangular hole cut into the limestone. We stared in awe as the ocean was rising and falling within the straight walls of this geometric impossibility.
“What is that?” Andy whispered.
“Something cut a perfectly square hole in the rock.”
“Why?”
“Beats me. Maybe aliens.”
“Think anyone knows about this?” Andy asked, clearly fogged by the beer and whiskey.
Of course, someone must have known about it, but we were inebriated adventurers and couldn’t help hoping we had discovered something uncharted.
“I’m going down.” I said, not quite sure how I would traverse the cliff face, but determined to get a photograph.
“I don’t know, man,” Andy cautioned, sipping his paint thinner. “Why not just get a shot from here?”
“This is a disposable camera. No zoom.”
The fact was that it was perfectly visible from where we stood on the ledge, and there was no need to climb down, but I was cocky.
“Only take a sec,” I reassured Andy as I lowered myself over the narrow ledge.
Seeing the shoreline was only about ten feet below me, I figured I would easily find a route back up. Neither Andy nor I considered what might be below us, under the ledge as I released my grip and dropped to the rocks below, landing in a shallow tidal pool and stumbling backwards on my ass.
“You all right?” Andy yelled from above.
“I’m fine,” I lied, massaging my ankle. “No problem.”
I got up and hiked over to the rock formation. Since I couldn’t get a shot from the ocean’s point of view (this would have meant getting soaked by the waves’ spray), I took several shots from the other three angles. Satisfied I had what I came for, I turned back to face the cliffs and realized I was in serious trouble.
Andy and I had found the mysterious rectangular hole at what must have been low tide, or at least mid-tide, since the waves were still breaking some distance from the cliffs. What we hadn’t considered was the fact that at high tide, not only did the surf reach the cliff, but also, over the years, it had deeply eroded the rocks at its base.
The erosion cut into the underside of the island to a distance of over twenty feet, in some places more, and as I looked up and down the coast, this disintegration of bedrock seemed to circle the entire island. I had jumped down to the rocks below but now had no way to get back up.
“Shit,” I said aloud to myself, still unable to process how screwed I was.
“What’s wrong?” Andy asked from the ledge above.
“There’s no way back up.”
I explained the situation to Andy who could not believe there wasn’t a spot along the shore where I could clamber back up.
“Go down the coastline and see if you find a way up,” he said. “I’ll go for help. Maybe I can get a rope from some farmer.”
“No!” I yelled. “Don’t leave.”
I knew his going for help made sense but the thought of being left alone for any period of time down there, staring into a cavern under a rocky cliff from the shore of a remote island in the North Atlantic was unacceptable.
“Just stay there,” I repeated. “I’ll be back.”
I left the rectangular hole formation and carefully made my way along shore, stumbling in and out of tidal pools, swearing and muttering to myself.
Spotting a lone boulder further down the coast, wedged into the base of the cliff, I made my way over and tried to climb it. I was making good progress and nearing the cliff ledge when I found the boulder angling me further and further back out toward the sea. Fearing I would fall backwards onto the rocks below I gave up and climbed back down.
“I’m so screwed,” I muttered to myself, panic rising.
I looked back up the shore and could barely make out Andy on the narrow ledge waving his jacket in the air. Hoping he had come up with a plan or heard from someone above who had spotted me, I hiked quickly back to the rectangle.
“Did you find a way up?” he asked.
“No,” I answered, annoyed by the question. “I saw you waving like a monkey and came back.”
“I was trying to get your attention.”
“Why?”
“Because I think the tide is coming in.”
I turned around, and sure enough, the waves that had been swelling up and under the rectangle hole were now crashing over and spilling across the rocks at my feet. Whatever alcohol-induced bravado I had enjoyed earlier vanished.
“Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. What am I going to do?”
“I’ll go get help.”
“No, wait!” I pleaded, still petrified of being left to drown on my own. “I’ve got an idea.”
“What can you do? There’s no way up.”
“If you lie down on the cliff and hang your coat over the ledge, I think I can jump up and grab it. You can pull me back up.”
“Are you crazy? You’ll never make it.”
“I can make it. Let me try.”
Andy was understandably unconvinced by my plan. He knew that I outweighed him by fifty pounds and there was a good chance if I got a hold of his coat he could be pulled over the edge and we would both be slowly pounded to death by waves beneath the cliff.
That said, he wasn’t in love with the idea of leaving me there by myself either, pulverized below the island, so he agreed to give the plan a try.
After a few moments trying to figure out the best path over the uneven rocks and tide pools, I made a running leap for the ledge and Andy’s overhanging jacket. Unfortunately, I took off too early and smacked into the side of the cliff several inches below the ledge, face-first.
If the situation hadn’t been so dire, I’m sure we would have both laughed out loud. It was ridiculous. There was no way to make the jump and protect my face and body at the same time. Still, I had to try and get my fingers around the jacket or onto the ledge no matter what, so I kept at it, flinging myself into the rock face over and over again like a June bug against a screen door.
“This is bad,” I wheezed, catching my breath before another attempt.
“I don’t know, man,” Andy worried. “I don’t think this is going to work.”
I looked up and down the shore, still unable to believe the predicament. My fear turned to anger, however, and refusing to concede to an utterly absurd death, I told Andy to get ready.
“Okay, man. One more try and then I’m going for help,” he said.
“Fine. You just hold on to that damn jacket. Here I come.”
This time I didn’t even look down at the ground, figuring if there was any way I was going to make it, I had to concentrate on the cliff and just pray that my feet found the right path and I avoided rolling my ankle.
I ran as fast as I could and jumped for all I was worth, extending my hands overhead one last time as I pancaked into the wall. Amazingly, my left hand actually grabbed the ledge, and for a moment I stuck to the cliff. Before I could fall back down, I grabbed a sleeve with my other hand and as Andy rolled over with the jacket strapped across his chest, I managed to inch my way up and over the ledge.
We lay side by side, exhausted. My fingers and face were bloodied, but I was safe. We sat on the ledge looking out at the incoming tide, and I took a long pull from the cheap whiskey.
The hike back to town was subdued. We knew I had narrowly avoided disaster. It was well over a mile before we came to the first house — a sobering thought to consider if Andy had run for help in the wrong direction. I did manage to save the camera, however, and we were pleased to have proof of our sighting.
Months later we found a reference to a “rectangular limestone formation” along the shore of Inishmore in a guidebook. It had been named “The Wormhole.”
Clearly, we were not the first to discover it, but there were no markers or signs anywhere, and certainly no warnings about the eroded underbelly of the island.
