Articles > Omey Island

A long line of cars was heading out at walking pace across the sand. In front of the steadily crawling column drove a shiny black hearse. Sitting on the graveyard wall on Omey Island, hands deep in pockets and collars raised against the blasting wind, we watched them slowly drawing nearer across the tidal causeway.

'That would be the schoolteacher's mother from Claddaghduff,' said Michael Gibbons. 'Strange thing: this is one of the few places in Ireland where people are brought from the mainland to be buried on an island. It's usually the other way round. But Omey Island has a special reputation as a sacred place, you know; the cemetery's been in use for literally thousands of years.'

This westernmost tip of County Galway, its small walled fields full of rushy bog and granite boulders, has always been a harsh place to scratch a living. Back in the 1830s, before the Great Famine, there were nearly ten times as many people in Connemara as live there now. Those peasants who did not emigrate existed in extreme poverty. In a society where death was an everyday occurrence, the whole community mourned with the bereaved.

The friends and relations of the Claddaghduff schoolteacher's mother had gathered on this blustery mid-winter morning to pay their last respects the old-fashioned way. We saw the coffin hoisted high, its brass handles winking in the sun, and carried through the graveyard at the head of a long procession of silent mourners, heads bowed, shoulders hunched. When things had been decently completed this side of the causeway, they would return to the mainland and find a decent hotel for a bit of a party, to honour death and celebrate life.

I couldn't have asked for better walking companions than Michael Gibbons, John Brittain and their two ecstatic dogs. Michael, who runs the Connemara Walking Centre in Clifden, is an expert field archaeologist and a passionate lover of his native Connemara. John makes a living taking sea anglers out around the offshore reefs and islands. Together they did a thorough job of opening my eyes, ears and mind to the subtle delights of Omey Island.

Once across the causeway, the whole island is open for a walker to explore. In summer the sand-bedded turf of Omey is a spattered mass of wild flowers. Today, with an epic winter storm building out in the Atlantic, the grass and the cream-coloured sands were raked and combed with fingers of wind. This was genuine West of Ireland wind - wind you could lean against, real solid stuff full of salt and sand grains.

'Can you see what's special about this stone?' asked Michael. He held out a chunk of granite. 'See the red stain? And it's brittle, look.' He broke the stone into powdery chunks. "It's been burned - it was a cooking stone for the old inhabitants.'

In the cliffs, a layer of cockle and limpet shells showed where the islanders of 800 years before had thrown their dinner scrapings. 'A midden,' said Michael. 'Slim pickings here - it's all shellfish. But we've found bones of bear, deer, horse and wild boar in some of these middens.'

I picked out a limpet shell and fingered its smooth parasol shape. How the Omey islanders, exposed to every gale, endured the west coast winters on a diet of stone-cooked shellfish was hard to imagine. Soon we came to one of their dwellings, an angle of stone wall and part of a floor of compressed ash, brought to light a few years before by a storm that had ripped away the concealing sand. They built their houses low, half-sunk into the body of the island, out of the worst of the weather.

'Bottle-nosed dolphin,' murmured John Brittain. He was bending over a big half-stripped skeleton down on the shore. 'They're always around my boat, squeaking away to each other - a lovely sight I never get tired of. These waters are incredibly rich - dolphins, sharks, seals and so on. Also incredibly dangerous, in among those reefs.'

Out in the open sea, whipped by the wind, waves were bursting over the just-submerged reefs. Spray went sheeting up, to be torn and blown to rags in an instant. We stopped to watch this impressive display, leaning on the wind at the flat summit of a little green hillock.

'The Little Hill of the Women,' supplied Michael. "This is a very early Christian burial site for women.' He bent to tug at something dark yellow that was sticking out of a rabbit hole, and straightened up with a human femur in his hand.

At the top of the island we hunkered down on a sheet of smoothed granite and stared out west to a scatter of offshore islands - Cruagh, Inishturk, Turbot and lonely High Island. Michael and John talked of how they had landed there to explore a beautiful little oratory by a lake, seldom visited now, founded by St Fechin some 1300 years ago.

It was Fechin who established the monastery on Omey Island. His name lives on in the ruined church of Teampull Fechin, crouched in a hollow in the sand and entirely hidden from view. And it must have been in reverence of the saint that the little freshwater spring on Omey was named Tobair Fechin, St Fechin's Well.

The well lay on the northern shore of a narrow sandy bay that cut into the west coast of the island. An elongated enclosure, open at one end, had been built up with granite boulders. Under a simple wooden crucifix a stone niche in the wall held a toy car, a fishing float, a circlet woven of blue wire, a golf ball, an obituary folded inside a plastic envelope - simple, eloquent offerings, thanksgivings or pleas.

The spring itself was a cold pool deep inside a crack in the ground. A round white quartz stone glimmered up through the water. I scooped up a palmful - ice-cold, brackish, with a mineral taste. 'A cure for skin blisters and eruptions,' said Michael. 'Newborn children would be brought here and they'd be dipped in the well.'

Back at the cemetery we crossed the sands, the dogs racing through the seaweed and snarling at each other with mock ferocity. A black tarred currach, the ubiquitous home-built West of Ireland fishing canoe, lay upside down by the lane to Claddaghduff. 'A bit giddy, the currach,' mused John. 'Skids around in any kind of a chop. But a fantastic sea boat once you've got used to it.'

In Sweeney's pub at Claddaghduff we thawed out over hot whiskeys. It was good to be on the warm side of the windows. Looking out, tumblers in hand, we watched as the waves slid over the causeway, smoothing away our bootprints and the already fading tracks of the funeral cars.

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