Getting to An Blascaod Mor, even at height of Summer, is a chancy business. In calm weather the boats, An tOileanach Glic and Oilean na nOg, operating from the tiny pier of Faill Mor, come and go all day long. But the calmest of summer days, driving or cycling from Dingle out along the Slea Head road can show an altogether different side in the Sound between the island and the mainland. So if you arrive, all set for a day on the island, and find that the notice on the window of the ticket office, a little box of a garden shed chained to the cliff half way down to the pier, reads "No boat today", pause - before you draw comparisons with other seemingly whimsical notices, "gone fishin"' and the like. That notice carries the weight of a myriad of grim stories, drownings, weeks - even months - of wretched isolation on the island and hardship the like of which will never be felt again.
To get a small taste of that hardship, the crossing should be made by naomhog, the traditional, light, tarred-canvas boat. Still possible to arrange, though not without a few enquiries and a bit of luck. Whatever the means of getting there, it is well worth going, and all the more so after a visit to the Blasket Centre, less than a 10-minute drive from the pier.
The centre, from the outside, has the contours of a sprawling oil depot, but inside it is full of light and very successful in conveying a sense of the islands and their history through a number of different media; film, letters, photographs, personal belongings. And thankfully no wax models, none of those megalithic look-alikes more evocative of Clery's or Arnott's beach wear departments than our distant forebearers.
Here the lives of the various island families are subtly presented, portrayed in their heyday - the focus of a bevy of international scholars at the turn of the century - through to the evacuation in the winter of 1947 and on to Springfield, Massachusetts, where many of them settled. The large scale colour photographs of them there, barbecuing on their decks, stand as a heart-wrenching testament to their adaptability but also a discomforting reminder of the nation's loss.
Brim-full of these emotive images we arrived at Faill Mor, delighted to discover that An tOileanach Glic was on its way, ready on that May bank holiday weekend for the first trip out of the season. And just in case the spell cast by what we had seen in the centre began to wear off, the person to whom I am contentedly married but wished at that point to be totally dissociated from, started to read aloud to our daughter Alice from The Blas- kets by Muiris Mac Conghail; a reading so animated that the German couple and the family from Cork also waiting for the boat clustered around to listen. And there she stood at the edge of the Atlantic, a latter day Peig, regaling the unlikely group with a harrowing account of an Islander's unsuccessful attempt, in viciously rough weather, to bring a corpse to the graveyard on the mainland.
An tOileanach Glic docked a little distance from the island and one by one we were lowered into a bobbing dinghy, no bother to seafaring types but requiring a bit of concentration from land lovers. The island slip, nestling behind the rocks, was at that stage still out of sight. But suddenly, we were in Caladh an Oileain, a tiny home-spun harbour with a steep, zig-zagging path leading up to the first cluster of houses.
There was a sense of triumph in arriving. We had tried before, four years previously, when all of fifth class in Scoil Bhride, Ranelagh, had the good fortune to be brought by their teacher, Lelia Ni Chinneide, to the Ventry area where, for three weeks, they attended a local primary school. We, the visiting parents of a then 10-year-old Matt, arrived at the end of the second week with a trip to An Blascaod Mor top of our list. It was March. Not a chance, we were told categorically.
So there we were safely ashore on the sunniest of sunny days, soon up high enough to catch a glimpse of the long expanse of silvery white sand - An Tra Bhan, down to the left. Hurling matches were "played" there - though "fought" might be the more apposite term - with the teams forcing each other into the sea and broken limbs part and parcel of the sport. Behind, stretching to the highest point of the island, burnished grassland, once a vast patchwork of fields, every one of which had a name.
There were no signs, nothing to mark the one time dwellings of the renowned island writers, Tomas O Criomhthain, Muiris O Suilleabhain and of course Peig Sayers. But here the Mac Conghail book was invaluable, and before long we were wandering through the ghostly settlement, identifying this and that house, tracing the path to the well and imagining the course of lives lived out there until the evacuation over 50 years ago. Maybe the absence of signs and markers was an advantage in conjuring up that world. Certainly it was a welcome antidote to the folksy theme park approach, that Ye Olde kiss-of-death to places of historical interest. If the island gets a make over, which no doubt it will, here's hoping for a light touch.
Peig, the autobiography of Peig Sayers transcribed by her son, was a Leaving Certificate text for several decades. A doggedly cheerful account of life on the island, it suffered the fate of many such school texts, reduced as it was to priomh smaointe, and laboriously translated into English in classrooms throughout the country. Peig had become something of an icon for those who made a great virtue of managing on meagre resources during the Economic War and the Emergency.
However, the poor-but-happy theme did not go down well with subsequent generations, a fact forcibly brought home to me a couple of years back when, after the Leaving Certificate Irish exam, I came across a semiritualistic burning of the book outside a school in Stillorgan. But now no longer a school text, Peig is well on the way to a new lease of life, evident in the recent controversy stirred by Pat Coughlan's feminist analysis of the text. O Criomhthain's An tIolanach and O Suilleabhain's Fiche Blian ag Fas offer what seem like more plausible accounts of Island life. To describe that life as being hard is an understatement. It was well nigh impossible, sustained only by the enduring spirit of co-operation that prevailed, together with the wit and ingenuity of the islanders
Still, travelling back to the mainland on that warm evening, looking back at the cottages stacked like dominoes, it was difficult not to romanticise about island life. And, it has to be admitted, somewhere in there, too, was a vague understanding of the impulse that might lead a person to want to own his own island. But sin sceal eile.
James Ryan' second novel Dismantling Mr Doyle comes out in paperback this month.