Piracy and poitin on islands in the mist

It is odd to see a bed one has slept on recorded as a piece of social history, but there it is on the page, its planks rotted and caved in at last. I can feel the damp in the crumbling plaster of the wall, smell the acrid ooze of soot.

The sounds of those nights on the island come back, too. On the calm and starry ones, a soothing furl of waves on the white sand beyond the door; geese calling softly as their flights skimmed the chimney. And on fierce nights in January, storm gusts booming and shuddering in a roof welded from tin and concrete, firelight flickering wildly on the spars slung beneath the rafters.

That was in the 1980s, when I was helping David Cabot in his lifelong study - 40 years this winter - of the great winter flocks of barnacle geese. An empty fisherman's cottage was our shelter and I pick it out now in the photographs and maps of The Inishkeas in Mayo's Lost Islands, by Brian Dornan, just published by Four Courts Press.

Not much seems to have changed. The sand has sifted further in across the hearths of the houses, deserted since the 1930s, and thickets of nettles spread out from their walls. Ruined gables still make a spiky frieze on the lee shores of the islands, north and south, and storm-waves still seethe across at the weak spots. As sea level rises, the ocean will finish the job of carving the Inishkeas into an archipelago.

It is impossible to wander the grassedover lazybeds and clifftops in winter and not wonder what the islands were like in their heyday, when 60 whitewashed cabins held more than 300 people in something close to self-sufficiency. Brian Dornan, archaeologist turned local historian, has researched the past 100 years of the Inishkea community and, in his study of its families, gives scholarly shape to an extraordinary human saga.

The Blaskets and Aran have had such gifted chroniclers that they have dominated the story of the western islands. The Inishkeas lack this kind of witness, and the robust glimpses in William Maxwell's Wild Sports of the West of 1832 are merely tantalising. Dornan has gone to the quillwritten files, the oral folklore records in Irish, the reminiscences of islanders ashore, and what he puts together makes one ache for the indigenous voice of a Peig or a Liam O Flaherty.

Now that we have absorbed the revisionism of scholars such as Kevin Whelan, it comes as no great surprise to find that the modern settlement of the Inishkeas dates only from the late 1700s. That leaves a big gap between them and the medieval monks and early Christian people who minced up dog whelks to make imperial purple dye for an upmarket trade. The idea that remote western villages and islands might hold some kind of continuity with an aboriginal Celtic landscape, and traditions enduring from prehistoric times, seems finally to have died with Estyn Evans, a great but romantic geographer.

What took the later human settlement further and further west was population pressure and good natural resources: seaweed, fish, good island grass - also, in the case of the Inishkeas, the chance to make illicit poitin from barley, with a clear view of any boat approaching. Rather like Whelan's coastal communities in Connemara, the Inishkea settlers entered the 19th century with a healthy cash economy and plenty of bacon smoking in the rafters at Christmas.

From early on, they were a hard bunch, ruled by their own ri or king, rather than their distant Catholic landlords. In the Famine years they took up serious piracy, subduing the crews of becalmed cargo luggers with volleys of stones and hijacking their loads of flour and meal. While the rest of the Mullet region was ravaged by the Famine, the population of the islands went on rising.

Piracy and poitin brought resident coastguards and three RIC constables (a posting even worse than Belmullet). The piracy stopped but the stills kept working, hidden on ropes down sea-caverns between brews. The Inishkeas were still notorious for poitin when Norwegians set up a whaling station there early this century, and the idiosyncrasies of the south islanders (who wouldn't, for example, let their neighbours from the north island anywhere near the jobs on offer) helped sink the whole venture in a reek of rotting blubber.

Their intractable independence and its slow subversion after the Famine is one of Brian Dornan's central themes: "In an age in which the landlord and the priest form the twin foci of the land war and the devotional revolution, Inishkea seems to have held neither in high regard". Their do-ityourself religion, remote from churches, found bizarre expression in a famous veneration of the namhog, a two-foot totem stone, with power over the sea, secreted in a wrapping of red flannel in a niche in one of the houses.

THIS blank and enigmatic slab, which may have been salvaged from among the island's many Early Christian antiquities, figured in T.H. White's Mayo memoir, The Godstone and The Blackymor. Here Dornan ties up a few more fascinating loose ends in as full an account as we are likely now to get. The godstone, alas, did not survive to calm the sudden storm of 1927 that drowned a dozen young fishermen: a tragedy that broke the islands' spirit.

The sea, as one might expect, dominates much of the folklore. The ceaseless ocean swell had its own name, the fag, and there is careful information on the sequence of waves to watch at a currach's launching. The technology of making light with oil from dogfish livers, or candles from rushes and sheep-fat, suggests other sorts of challenge that should really have faced the recent television "castaways".

Wildlife gets brief, utilitarian shrift in Dornan's siftings. Birds fly in only as pests in the barley crop or to provide feathers for mattresses. Seal oil, too precious to burn in lamps, was a healing rub for rheumatism. No hint there of the hundreds of grey seals that breed around the Inishkeas today, or the 2,500 barnacle geese that sojourn there from October to April. Exit the ghost of the Congested Districts Board; enter the Special Area of Conservation.

Mayo's Lost Islands by Brian Dornan is published by Four Courts Press (£40 hb, £19.95 pb)