But isn't there something very like it in Clare? The Burren? A bit, but when you ride along the road from Kilronan, high above the sea, and over there you see Ireland, you know you are in a place you will never forget, that will again and again be in your thoughts. Yes, on a busy summer day, says an old Arainn hand, there may be fifteen hundred visitors or more, to swell the local resident population of some nine hundred. It's not a small island. Tim Robinson tells us it is roughly the shape and size of Manhattan. But the configuration is such, and the interests of most tourists are such, that anyone who knows the terrain can find peace without much trouble.
You can sit behind a wall in a neat field not much bigger than a large indoor living room, and no one would think to look over. Most visitors go for the strands; there is always a stream making for Dun Aengus; but along the cliff faces of the western-facing cliffs and the terraces and lanes and the bare rocks at the sea, you may not see another person until you take the main road back to Kilronan and your boat.
One who had come from middle-Europe to see all that was to be seen of Ireland in a month, was asked some years later what impressed him most. Killarney? The Skelligs? Connemara and its lakes? The Giants Causeway and Antrim Coast? The Mourne Mountains? The River Shannon and its broad flow? The Dublin Horse Show?
He let the questions come. It was none of these. He said simply that he would remember as long as he lived, and he frequently found it in his thoughts, Arainn or Inishmore and the perfect peace and spare beauty of that coast facing into the Atlantic. The grey limestone; the plants poking up through the cracks in it. Here he was content to spend day after day, just looking out over the ocean and, he swore, smelling the grey limestone.
Anyone who can, and doesn't visit that island, he says, doesn't know what Ireland is about. You suspect, too, that in this Central European's mind, the thought of Ultima Thule is not far away. Thule was the name given by the Romans to a fabulous island out there in the Altantic. A never-never land, perhaps, it has been turned into - beckoning, unreachable. Remember the King in Thule in Goethe's Faust. Solid enough you may think, but many are still looking for it.