Visiting islands is
hard to resist. And photographing them also comes easy. We have stayed on two
as we have travelled South and found out a lot about a third at an excellent
visitor centre on the mainland.
Inismore (Co.
Galway) is the largest of the Aran Islands and is a big tourist day trip
operation (mostly Americans) with bus tours, horse carts and especially bike
hire companies meeting the ferry boats as they arrive from the mainland. After
the last boat leaves the place is completely quiet. But it was easy to get away
from the crowds on one of the marked walking paths and the landscape -- limestone
pavement; dense network of drystone walls (apparently 10,000Km in total);
cliffs on one side, beaches on the other -- is easy to appreciate. The most
spectacular site, and the focus for most tourists, is the prehistoric ring fort
Dun Aengus, perched right on the cliffs at their highest point, without an
outer wall. The photo below was taken from inside the fort, standing well back
from the edge!
Great Blasket (Co.
Kerry) is now uninhabited. It never had a measured population of more than 200 and
was evacuated in 1953 when it no longer had a school, shop, priest or doctor. The majority of those who left then, as well
as at various earlier periods since the famine of 1840, emigrated to the USA,
rather than to the close-by mainland or other parts of Ireland. Many of them went to Springfield Mass. where
there is still a community which identifies with their Blasket heritage and
origins.
Part of the heritage
is the role of the island in helping to maintain the oral tradition of story-telling
in the Irish language. Because of their isolation the islanders spoke Irish and
entertained each other with stories. This attracted the interest of writers and
scholars from elsewhere in Ireland and GB who visited the island to learn the
language and who in turn encouraged the story-tellers to write about their lives
in Irish. (See below for a small example, translated into English.)
This is all really
well-explained at an excellent heritage museum/visitor centre at Dunquin on the
mainland. See http://blasket.ie/
The headland
pointing towards the Great Blasket (middle of the photo above) is considered
the most Westerly point in Europe, not counting islands, obviously. So this is
a landmark for our trip although as soon as you think at all hard about it, the
edge is hard to define. Ireland is itself an island and so indeed is GB. On our
trip we are choosing to interpret what we mean by the Western edge of Europe in
a flexible way; visiting islands if we want to and skipping stretches of
mainland coast that seem less interesting (or too rainy; or just very slow to
drive along).
More interesting is whether
people feel like they live at the edge, or not. In the past some people risked
a lot to move beyond this edge, to explore westward beyond what they or anyone knew, or
simply to emigrate. Others faced away from the open sea (the Great Blasket
island village faced the mainland) to have some connection with the mainland
and to shelter from the ocean weather, even if in the end many of them crossed
it for “a better life”.
Two images from the
Blasket museum (reproduced without permission) that manage to say a lot.
