Chasing my past through Ireland’s western isles
Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.
In an old family album, there is photograph of my father and me, standing by a donkey loaded with peat. I must have been six. I was in short trousers. It was a family holiday on a rare trip home to Ireland. My father is smiling. I can see how happy he is. On the back of the photograph, in fading pencil, is written “Valentia Island”.
When I was a child, growing up in Canada, Ireland was the absence in our lives. Tales of the sisters at Glen Farm and the shop at the top of the hill, of the Ballygowan Halt, the manse in Ahoghill, and the wet summers at Portstewart were the stories of the dinner table. Every fortnight, the Irish papers arrived, despatched by my grandparents, so after dinner my parents would sit reading about the news of the agricultural show in Donegal or the construction works on the Malone Road, as if they still lived there. And in many senses, they did.
I was young when we left Ireland to emigrate, and my own memories of home were illusive. Sometimes I wondered if I remembered Ireland at all or if I merely invented it. I spent hours with the old photograph albums, peering at landscapes more intimate, more beautiful, and far more romantic than those of southwestern Ontario. Ireland had become my lost world. I absorbed my parents’ nostalgia as less fortunate children might absorb parental anxiety or anger. Homesickness is an Irish disease. I caught it from my parents.
And so when I was 20, I set off to get my own Ireland. I came to Valentia, the island of the photograph, the island I did not remember. I rented a cottage. For six months, I walked and cycled the length and breadth of this little world. I clambered over the rocks beneath the lighthouse where the waves threatened to engulf me. I went to sea with the fishermen and drank with them in the evenings in the island pub. I wrote short stories, mercifully unpublished, from a desk by a window in my little cottage, overlooking the channel, watching the cloud shadows sail across the mainland mountains towards Doulus Head. I could not have been happier. At the end of my stay, in the dying days of that distant autumn, I was heartbroken to leave, for London and for real life.
I have carried those memories of Valentia with me as my parents carried memories of the Antrim Coast and the villages of County Down. And now, decades on, I wanted to return, to rediscover not just the island I had loved, but all those western islands. All travel is a kind of quest, though what you are looking for and what you find rarely coincide. I probably hoped, travelling to Valentia in October, that I might glimpse my young self coming round a bend in the Glanleam road. But in the end, it was really Ireland itself that I was chasing across Kerry and Galway.
The seas off the west coast of Ireland are scattered with islands whose remoteness lends them both romance and a curious authority. For generations of Irish writers and artists, they became repositories of identity, some essence of uncontaminated Irishness. The opening of Yeats’ famous poem captures this notion of an island paradise — “I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree.” A host of writers and intellectuals arose and went to the Aran Islands — Lady Gregory, Patrick Pearse, Eoin MacNeil, Frederick Burton, William Wilde, Oscar’s father, and most notably, JM Synge, who went to Inis Meáin at Yeats’s urging.
Brooding among waves, Inis Meáin is a stark elemental place armoured with rock. Winds whistle and moan through the dry stone walls enclosing fields of limestone where sheep graze among wildflowers and boulders. A relentless sea batters the shores. There are barely a hundred houses scattered along the narrow lanes of the island, served by one pub, one shop and one church. The island is ruled by its temperamental weather, sweeping off the Atlantic, a constant drama, veering from tempest to benign beauty in a moment.
I was happy in the turning weather. I walked the island lanes. Cattle lifted their heads to watch me pass, peering over their stone walls. Upturned boats, or currachs, lay in the fields near the shore, waiting for summer, their black shiny backs like hibernating beetles. On the empty beach that runs round Ceann Gainimh there were no footprints other than my own, just the cuneiform markings of sandpipers’ feet, making their way from the dunes to the lap of the waves. From the clifftops at Aill an Fhéir, I listened to the sea booming far below. Troops of gannets were diving into the black waves and lighthouses winked in the gathering dusk on the coast of Galway.
One evening, I fell in with a man out for an evening stroll. In the falling light, his face was indistinct, a strange spectral effect. We talked of the weather of course, and then of the modern world, and how recently it had arrived here. He remembered the first car to come to the island, in 1962. It broke down soon afterwards and no one knew how to fix it. Unimpressed with the internal combustion engine, it was another seven years before anyone risked investing in another.
At our backs was the ancient world. The silhouette of the great ringfort of Dún Conor rose against the night sky. Thought to date back to the Bronze or Iron Age, though no-one is really sure, it is one of the grandest buildings in the west of Ireland, its curving dry stone walls 20ft thick in places. The islanders traditionally believed it was inhabited by a cavalcade of spirits, by sprites and banshees and fairies, who fly about the island to unsettle the plans of humans. I would say there are a few that are still believing that, the man laughed.
On the way back to my lodgings, I stopped in at the pub, which hummed with the sibilant susurrus of Gaelic. A man sang a traditional air so beautiful, it left me tearful. Afterwards the room was silent but for the wind banging at the door. Travel makes one modest, Flaubert wrote. We see what a tiny place we occupy in the world. On these islands, they have learnt that modesty without leaving home. The islanders are dwarfed by the elements. It has given them the gift of humility.
At Dunquin on Slea Head, at the western end of the Dingle Peninsula, a small boat slipped into a narrow cleft in the rocks. Timing my stride between the swells, I skipped aboard. This precarious little harbour, impossible in anything but calm weather, is the Blasket Islands’ only link to the outside world.
A hundred years ago, a stream of nervous linguists climbed into currachs in this harbour to brave the crossing to the islands. The isolation of the Blaskets — only a couple of miles offshore — meant that the Irish spoken here was pure and uncontaminated by English. This influx of linguists created the strange impression among the islanders that the whole of the outside world was obsessed with the learning of their language.
The largest of the six islands, the Great Blasket, described as “wallowing like a whale in the darkening sea surrounded by its 12 young”, was inhabited by a couple of hundred islanders for over three centuries. They lived on fishing, they grew potatoes, they grazed their sheep and cattle on the rich island grass. Often they were cut off from the mainland for weeks at a time. It was not uncommon for islanders to succumb to illness due to the difficulty of getting a doctor across the channel. The islanders’ own tragedies at sea in their small currachs were a recurring theme, as were falls from the spectacular cliffs when children tried to gather the eggs of sea birds.
With little other entertainment, the Blasket islanders had a strong oral tradition, and the literary visitors persuaded some of the islanders to write their memoirs, to record their lives on the island. Thus began an extraordinary canon of Gaelic books from the Blaskets. The memoirs of Tomas O’Crohan, Maurice O’Sullivan, and Peig Sayers are still in print, still much loved, and still central to any study of Gaelic literature. Robin Flower, who translated some of these works, said of Peig Sayers, “her words could be written down as they leave her lips, and they would have the effect of literature”. The irony of the remote Blaskets, inhabited by a couple of hundred people with little schooling among them, is that books became their greatest export.
Today the Blaskets are empty. From the quay I followed a grass lane through the abandoned village. By 1953, emigration had shrunk the population to only 22 people, and the government offered them houses on the mainland. In a stormy November of that year, they climbed into their boats and left the island forever. Today Great Blasket is an island of ghosts.
Most of the old cottages have fallen into ruin but three have been maintained and are available to visitors to stay the night, provided they bring their own food. My little house, at the top of the ruined village, was the kind of white-washed cottage that appears on Irish postcards, the kind of house I had dreamt of as a boy — rough flagstones, a cast-iron stove, fireside armchairs, a comfy bed beneath the eaves, a view of the ocean and the mountains of the mainland through the half door. When dusk came, I ate dinner outside overlooking the channel beneath a tall sky of stars as constellations sank towards the ocean.
On the beach below, where the men of the island used to play hurling, running in and out of the sea after the ball, was a colony of grey seals. They made a sound like low keening that drifted up to the house from the shore below. With the waves, this mournful calling was the only sound on the empty island. By candlelight, I read Tomas O’Crohan’s account of life here. “I have done my best to set down the character of the people about me”, he wrote, “… so that some record of us might live after us, for the like of us will never be again.”
Though I had not been back to Valentia for almost 40 years, it had the comforting familiarity of home, which is how I thought of it. The old Royal Hotel still presided over the waterfront in Knightstown, a grand dame unashamed of her old-fashioned manners. Other than an added espresso machine, the pub at the top of the town seemed unchanged. The lighthouse still stood over a tumult of crashing waves with long views across to the Dingle Peninsula and deep into the mountains of Kerry. Far out on the horizon stood the reassuring pyramid silhouette of Skellig Michel where, 1,500 years ago, early Christian monks read Cicero and Virgil.
On the north side of Valentia, a narrowing road leads down to a small bay. The sheltered topography and the kindness of the Gulf Stream have created a strange microclimate here. There are palms and bamboo and giant ferns. The old trees are clad with lichens and moss. From the depths of the undergrowth comes the sound of unseen streams.
At the end of the lane are the gates to Glanleam House, built by the Knights of Kerry in the 18th century. I remembered an evening party here in the gardens, trays of drinks, voices trailing among the trees, the slow descent of an Irish twilight. A German girl had appeared, coming up over the rocks from the beach below the house, her hair wet and tangled. She was looking for a light for a cigarette. In her stilted English, she asked, “Have you fire?” It turned out I did. The affair lasted a week before she set off for Dingle, but it has lingered, like the island itself, a lifetime.
On my last morning, the whole island glistened with dew, like a new-born world. A westerly had blown through in the night. Whitecaps scudded towards Beginish, shadows raced one another across the mountains of Dingle, and small birds flew up from the heather and tumbled away in the wind.
“We were imbued with the sound of the wind . . . ”, O’Crohan wrote, “beating in our ears every morning, clearing our brains and rinsing the dust from our skulls.”
This is why I had come. I wanted the wind, I wanted that tumultuous humbling weather, I wanted to rinse the dust from my brain, so that I could savour again the strange wild clarity of these islands, and of my time there.
Details
Stanley Stewart was a guest of Tourism Ireland (tourismireland.com). On Inis Meáin, Inis Meáin Restaurant and Suites (inismeain.com) is a stylish creation by one of Ireland’s leading architects with a fine kitchen creating menus of local ingredients; doubles from €1,350 for two nights, including transfers and some meals. The ferry to Inis Meáin takes 50 minutes and departs from Rossaveal; sailings are timed to tie in with bus services from Galway.
On Great Blasket, there are three houses to rent for overnight stays, from €180 per night for two people; see greatblasketisland.net. The same company can arrange the boat from Dunquin, which takes 20 minutes, as well as day trips from Dingle.
On Valentia, the Royal Hotel (royalvalentia.ie) is a grand old establishment at the heart of Knightstown; doubles from about €110. Valentia is linked by bridge to the mainland town of Portmagee, or there is a car ferry between Knightstown and Reenard Point, which takes about 10 minutes.
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