Great Blasket's delights are simple, such as walking and swimming, but you can't escape memories of a vanished people, writes LORRAINE COURTNEY
AN ANCIENT people living at the end of the earth. Beyond you drop off the edge of the world. The double hump of An Blascaod Mór, the Great Blasket, is the biggest island in the fragmented archipelago off the desolate grandeur of Slea Head, in Co Kerry. "Seen from above you would think them sea-monsters of an antique world languidly lifting time-worn backs above the restless and transitory waves," wrote the scholar Robin Flower in The Western Island.
Nobody has lived on the Great Blasket, which is inaccessible for great swathes of the year, for more than half a century. The death of a local boy, Seainín Ó Cearna, in 1946 from meningitis helped finally to break islanders’ will. Just months later the Great Blasket was again isolated by a storm that lasted for days. It prompted islanders to send a notorious telegram to the taoiseach: “de valera dublin – stormbound distress send food nothing to eat – blaskets”. Dev sent a boatload of food, reportedly packed a few bottles of warming spirits and appointed a commission to find a solution for the island. In November 1953, after five and a half years of government deliberation and repeated pleas from islanders, this stark, treeless beauty was evacuated.
At the turn of the last century scholars flocked to study the island, where the people spoke a form of Irish not heard elsewhere for centuries and gathered by firelight to hear stories that had been passed down through generations.
JM Synge visited in 1905, followed by students of Gaelic such as George Thomson, who discovered an oral culture of such vitality “it was as though Homer had come alive”. Pilgrims still call to the place that spawned such a staggering collection of literature.
These tragicomedies of a brutal life are triumphs of determination to master the written word, to leave a record, as Tomás Ó Criomhthain wrote in the closing lines of An tOileánach (The Islandman), "of what life was like in my time and the neighbours that lived with me for the likes of us will never be again". His autobiography is a picture of island life before the modern world penetrated, diluted and ultimately dissolved it.
Muiris Ó Súilleabháin, of the next generation, wrote in Fiche Bliain ag Fás (Twenty Years A-Growing)of what it was like to leave the island behind forever. Peig Sayers's memory was stuffed full of stories, myths and local tales. To one collector alone she passed on 375 tales.
Perhaps the most powerful hymn to the Great Blasket is a work by another woman – Eibhlís Ní Shúilleabháin. Ní Shúilleabháin is chronicling a world and a culture in death's throes in Letters from the Great Blasket. They're her correspondence with Londoner George Chambers over a 20-year period, written in blundering yet elegiac English, her second language. "My dear there is no place like home," Eibhlís wrote in 1931. "The very day I'll have to leave it won't be a pleasant day for me. I think my dear heart will break that day."
Words say a lot about ways of thinking. Throughout the literature of the Blaskets, the writers speak of being “in” the island. From the island they always went “out” to the mainland; they came home “into” the island. The Great Blasket was the centre of their universe.
Later, in February 1940, Ní Shúilleabháin writes of a harsh life: “Meat and food and flour are all gone up in prices and they with other hardships of Islands together leave no hope at all for Islanders. Indeed, can’t you see that the Island is bare with only one child and three at school with no hope or promising of any other but just a face telling you from day to day that this Island will be with none at all but rabbits some fine evening and it is not fit for any other nature, Islanders see nothing before them these days”.
Her prose reveals an island encircled by implacable seas that is very different to the summer visitor’s experience. It’s an island that is loved. An island that is feared. An island that ultimately must be abandoned.
There's evidence that the island had been inhabited since the Iron Age. Mounds of stone known as the Bright Dwellings lie scattered on the plain behind the Cró, the highest point on the island, which stretches for almost a kilometre. A prehistoric cliff fort stands on Sliabh na Dúna. In the 14th century the names Brasch and Blaset were recorded on Italian sea maps; Flower suggests the name springs from the Norse word brasker, meaning "a dangerous place". The island was leased to the Ferriter family in about 1290 by the earl of Desmond. The annual rent was two hawks.
The ruins of a Martello tower stand above the road taking you to the back of the island. The tower was operational until about 1815, when the French threat receded, although it was severely damaged by lightning in the 1930s. In the lower village the tiers of stone cottages stand with their gables to the sea. Above them, in the upper village, built in 1909 by the Congested Districts Board, the houses are two-storey and face the mainland.
Here among the empty shells of the houses were the venues of the dramas, courtships, weddings, wakes and disputes. Eibhlís Ní Shúilleabháin writes of Christmas rituals where “we went from house to house all around the village and here they have a custom of giving people a half glass of whiskey or a half glass of wine . . . We had great fun drinking it and letting on that we were drunk”.
Familiar events and incidents cling to the paths and rocky inlets. From its literature the Great Blasket is an instantly recognised place – a poignant one of vanished people and forgotten stories. Today their island is home only to cackling gulls, storm petrels, puffins, fulmars and guillemots. The seas are alive with dolphins, whales and porpoises.
The island’s delights are simple: tramping the many footpaths, trying to spot a seal, plunging into the turquoise waters of Trá Bhán. Tracks remain that were once used to haul fertilising seaweeds and mussel shells up from Trá Bhán to the pastures and to bring home from Cnoc the peat that was the islanders’ fuel.
Stone walls separate the land into family patches. The islanders had names for all the fields. They fished for mackerel, crayfish and lobster from naomhóg, the three- and four-man boats they built of lattice covered with tarred canvas.
Two ferry companies operate cruises round the sublime Blasket archipelago. You can sail by Beginish (the little island), the magnificent “cathedral rocks” of Inish na Bró and two Spanish-armada wreck sites. And finally there’s An Tearacht, a pinnacle of rock with a lighthouse: Europe’s most westerly beam.
Beyond the horizon are the shores of North America. These are the shores that seduced so many islanders with dreams of riches. Many succumbed, and now more islanders and their descendants live in the Hungry Hill borough of Springfield, Massachusetts, than in Ireland.
The islander Seán Faeilí Ó Catháin once wrote of the departed and lost at sea: “The old people are probably still fishing out there except you can’t see them anymore.” It’s a beautiful notion, so appropriate on this haunting and haunted island.
** Lorraine Courtney was a guest of Fáilte Ireland
How to get there
Darryl Broe’s Blasket Island Ferries (066-9156422) leaves Dún Chaoin every hour from 10.30am between April and September. The last return sailing is at 5pm (€20 adults; €10 children). The company also offers an ecotour of the Blasket archipelago, with the prospect of seeing minke and humpback whales, common and bottlenose dolphins, basking sharks and seals.
Mick Sheeran’s Blasket Islands Ferry (066-9154864, www.blasketislands.ie) also sails each hour from Dún Chaoin, weather permitting, from April to October (returns €25 adults; €15 children; families €50). The company also offers ecocruises, to experience the raw nature of the Blasket archipelago. Offshore pelagic trips to the edge of the continental shelf – for serious whale and bird watchers – are by special arrangement.
Where to stay
If you are seduced by the island’s charms, you can bring a tent to pitch on the island.
Benners Hotel. Main Street, An Daingean, 066-9151638, www.dingle benners.com. Exudes timeless charm. From €60pps a night.
Milltown House. An Daingean, 066-9151372, www.milltownhousedingle.com. The place where the actor Robert Mitchum bunked while in town to film Ryan’s Daughter. Elegant and cosy with a conservatory overlooking the bay. From €60pps.
Where to go
The Blascaod Centre. Dún Chaoin, 066-9156444, www.heritageireland.ie. Occupies a controversial eyesore in magnificent Dún Chaoin. But, once inside, the centre is excellent, with interactive touch screens, information panels, videos and exhibitions on traditional fishing and farming methods, daily life, art and Blasket literature. Staff are very friendly and enlightening on all things Blasket. Entry costs €4 for adults, €10 for a family.