It is said that, in the summer, the Aran Islands are overrun by masses of day trippers. But you could still, on the busiest day, find peace, air perfumed with the odours of countless wild plants, to say nothing of the breeze from the Atlantic, and peace and heart's content without too much trouble, if you know your way around, especially on the big island, Tim Robinson, in his introduction to the Penguin edition, 1992, of Synge's The Aran Islands, informs us that there are about a thousand miles of dry-stone field boundaries on the three islands, so that most of the terrain is a mosaic of fractions of acres. "This apparently manic manipulation of walls has its purposes, in shielding stock and crops from the high winds of the oceanic coast, in facilitating the close control of grazing - so that the cow has to eat up all the grass, not just the jucier sorts, before it is allowed into fresh pasture - and in freeing the ground from the litter of stone."
So there are many places where you can, without disturbing the landholder, settle your back into the corner of a little field and feel far from the crowd. And on the western side of the island, there are tracks not of ten penetrated by the day-visitor, where you amble along, half-hypnotised or intoxicated by the ozone and the crash and sizzle of waves on the rocks. Anyone staying for a few days will be tempted to fish in that great bay known as Blind Sound. And there is the fascinating Poll na bPeist, an almost perfect swimming-bath-shaped hole into which the sea gushes from below.
Tim Robinson also tells us that nowadays farming "on the tiny scale permitted by Aran's craggy terrain is not a paying proposition, and the hazel scrub is invading abandoned fields. One of the features that catches the visitor's eye is the struggle of treelets which are flattened as they push up through the cracks in flat pavements of limestone and spread horizontally rather than being allowed to grow towards the sky. You have to be very blase not to be amazed by the formations around Dun Aengus with its chevaux de frise.
If you haven't been there, it's near the place where the boy Mickeleen in Robert Flaherty's great film Man of Aran, sat on the edge of the cliff, his long fishing-line (was it two or three hundred feet long?) held between his toes as he hauled fish up from the Atlantic. Oh for Aran this year; to see it all again.