Glimpses of an earlier Ireland

Life moves at a different pace on Tory island. Martin McGinley joins a BBC radio team as they interview the islanders for a special programme - and adjust to Tory time

Maybe Tory Island is a mirror. It's a reminder of that story where the newcomer to a town asks what the local people are like, and gets the reply: what were they like in the last place you were?

When we arrive, the BBC's Ireland correspondent, Kevin Connolly, and his sound man, the genial Australian Bill Maul, are standing in the middle of the road outside the island hotel. They are still slightly green-looking.

A rough journey to Tory is nothing new. William Harkin, who visited in 1892, recalled that some of his group "experienced a most indescribable sensation adown the perpendiculars".

Kevin explains that they are waiting for the island minibus. He adds, in a patient tone, that no one seems to know just when this minibus will come along, and the mobile number for it isn't answering. He has been advised to just stand on the road and wait.

Of course, on Tory Island, this may be quite reasonable advice. The island only really has one road, of something over two miles. It goes from the lighthouse at one end, through the scattering of buildings that is West Town and across the moonscape to the handful of houses that is East Town, before petering out from the effort. It is a beautiful road, one of the few in Ireland that has a torpedo as one of its principal landmarks.

As Kevin and Bill wait to get started, still recovering from the journey from Bunbeg harbour, there is a sense of the gap between Tory, this western outpost, and the corridors of the BBC, buzzing with people whose days are like their programmes and news bulletins, timed to the second.

The meaning of time, indeed the meaning of life, is different here. Time slows on Tory, a sort of reverse proof of Einstein's Theory of Relativity.

We're all on the island to record part of a BBC Radio Four programme on landscape. The programme is Kevin's idea. He wants to talk to my wife, Janet Ross, a painter working in Donegal, as part of his examination of how landscape is increasingly under pressure, changing and disappearing, in the modern world.

Except we're still waiting for the bus . . .

Soon it arrives, with a friendly driver and a laconic co-driver, and we're off to Derek Hill's hut to do the first interview. The bus is new to the island, makes it smaller. I remember interviewing Alan Dukes on a tractor and trailer on my first visit to Tory, while Derek Hill did a fine portrait of President Erskine Childers being conveyed on a cart.

Hill, who died several years ago, certainly had the Tory temperament, although on the face of it he was an unusual character to fall in love with the place. Sometimes described as the last of the gentleman painters, he was from a fairly affluent English background and travelled the world painting portraits and landscapes. He had good friends everywhere, notably among leading artists and the aristocracy. Some say he was responsible for introducing the Queen Mother to the music of Daniel O'Donnell.

Derek is also credited with encouraging the Tory Island school of naïve painting. The story is often told of how islander James Dixon saw Derek at work and said, "I can do better than that". Both are important Irish painters.

The little hut where Derek stayed and worked is high up at the back of the island. Tory is a tilted shelf, never more than about half a mile wide, sloping from magnificent sea cliffs down toward the road, then peering out across Tory Sound to the glory of the Donegal mountains - over in Ireland.

On a good day like today, the island is looking very special. The cliff scenery is breathtaking, the sea constantly smashing against the rocks and thundering along great passages gouged into the land. Everywhere there's a vista of mountain, sea and shore.

The naturalist Robert Lloyd Praeger said in 1917, as he recalled a perilous trip to Tory, "it is strange to find that so desolate and tempestuous a place has been long inhabited". The island does display plenty of evidence of occupation over many centuries - prehistoric monuments and field systems; the distinctive Tau cross, its ancient origins rather obscure; the remains of the religious settlement established by Colmcille, including a round tower, oratories and altars; the distinctive island buildings.

Tory is also an important place for birdlife and fauna. In early summer the globally-threatened corncrakes can keep you awake in your room as they call for lovers in the grasses behind the hotel.

Now that we've secured the bus, the day slots into place. Janet's interview is recorded amid scenic splendour at the hut. Later, Kevin and Bill gain the views of Patsy Dan, the King of Tory, who speaks of the Tory painters and much more besides.

Patsy, a talented artist himself, is one of the island's great ambassadors to the outside world, and an entertaining talker. Getting government interest in Tory, he says, can be like pulling a cat through a stocking.

Tory's greatest asset is certainly its people, inheritors of a rich culture in the Irish language, singing, customs, folklore and music. It takes time and probably a decent command of Irish to fully appreciate it. However, a few hours over drinks in the hotel lounge, or in the co-op bar up the road, can be a reasonable start.

Kevin, used to summing up new locations after a lifetime of travel, remains intrigued by the Tory lifestyle as the day unfolds. "What do the islanders actually do?" he asks from time to time.

Of course, Tory nowadays is thoroughly modern in its approach - not so much about doing as being. About 180 people live on the island all year round, and there's little opportunity for work. So maybe they're just taking a break, finally, after centuries on poor land in the grip of unforgiving seas.

These days the island is helped by state funds, corncrake grants, REPS, people buying Tory Island paintings, and the money left behind by tourists.

From time to time there's the goodwill of those who find something very different and important on Tory. Derek Hill remembered a phone call he got in the early 1980s. "This is Dorothy Thelman from Philadelphia speaking - it's early morning here and you won't know me. I wish to help Tory Island and would like to give them £5,000 - what shall I do with it?"

Thelman's love for Tory led to the book, Stories from Tory Island, in 1989. In the paperback edition more recently, she reflects on the changes on the island - good for the islanders, certainly, but perhaps stealing away some of Tory's other-worldly magic.

It's the question of the western seaboard writ large - what's sustaining, and what's sustainable? What does the future hold for Tory? Whatever the answer, it will require more than a bus to take away that sense of a Tory Island experience, a glimpse of an earlier Ireland sheltering not just from the elements, but from change.

On the ferry next morning, Kevin reflects - "I've finally been to a place where by travelling nine miles by sea, you get a sense of travelling back 3,000 years in time." It's another fine day. As we watch Tory's outline get smaller across a plate-glass sea, it does seem that places, like gods, make their own importance.

Landscape without white bungalow is broadcast on BBC Radio 4, Wed, 11am. The Janet Ross exhibition Disappearing Landscapes continues at the Glebe Gallery, Churchill, Co Donegal, until Sun