The Gift of the Gab by Alf Alderson

Hop aboard a ferry at rugged little Dunquin Harbour, bob the three miles across the deep blue waters of Blasket Sound, clamber up the rocky harbour steps, and you’re on Great Blasket Island, wandering around the roofless, tumbledown buildings that up until 1953 were the homes that made this the most westerly settlement in Europe.

If you get the kind of clear, sunny summer day I’ve had on both my visits then it’s easy to believe you’ve found an island idyll. But then for each of those sun soaked days on Great Blasket I spent another five looking across from the mainland in the direction of the island to see only a bland white seascape of sea mist and more sea mist.

So you have to be lucky with the weather to visit Great Blasket. But it’s not just the wild seascapes that make the place so remarkable, for before the last islanders gave up the struggle to eke out a living here fifty years ago the place was already famous for producing a dozen or so gifted writers in the first half of the twentieth century. They vividly brought to life their grindingly harsh existence on the edge of Europe, as well as relating hundreds of old folk tales that would almost certainly have otherwise been lost. Some, such as Peig Sayers (‘An Old Woman’s Reflections’, 1939), Muiris O Suilleabain (‘Twenty Years a-Growing’, 1933) and Tomas O Criomhthain (‘The Islandman’, 1937) were translated from their native Irish into several other languages, and when you consider that even at its peak the population of Great Blasket rarely exceeded 150 - and had only the most rudimentary schooling - this is a phenomenal literary output.

The small Irish-speaking fishing community lived in primitive cottages perched above a golden strand on the island’s sheltered north-east shore, and managed without shop, pub, post office or doctor, often being unable to make the journey to the mainland for weeks at a time when big swells were running (in April 1947 they’d been cut off for so long an emergency radio telephone call was made to Irish Premier Eamon de Valera urgently requesting supplies. They arrived two days later by boat from Dingle. Hardly surprising the natives got sick of the place...).

Yet fishing on a sea ‘out there to terrorise us’ as Peig Sayers said, farming the thin soils, and gathering turf are not activities that readily lend themselves to literary outpourings. Indeed, reading ‘The Islandman’ before my first visit to Great Blasket I was struck by the author’s lack of comments on the natural beauty of the place, which is what hits any visitor smack between the eyes. What he does mention in vivid detail though - as do so many of the Blasket writers - is exactly what life was like out here on this 3 ¼ mile-long hump of surf -beaten rock and turf. This makes a visit all the more fascinating because if you take the time to read one or more of the Blasket writers it doesn’t take too much imagination to transport yourself back 75 years or so and realise just how remote the island would have been then. Until your mobile rings, that is, because surprisingly there’s very good reception out here in a place where you may once have had no contact with the ‘outside world’ for days if not weeks.

I did the sensible thing and turned my phone off as I picked my way through the tumbledown remains of the island’s cottages, perched above the gorgeous White Strand where children skipped in and out of the chilly turquoise-blue water, just as they would have done a century ago. A couple of homes remain intact, including that of Peig Sayers, and now serve as a café and hostel in the summer months, but the rest are roofless and collapsing into the earth, although it doesn’t take much imagination to conjure up a bustling village life a la Ryan’s Daughter, which, incidentally, was filmed on the mainland opposite.

If you take one of the morning ferries to Great Blasket there’s plenty of time for the 3.5 mile cliff walk above the island’s north shore to the summit of 281-metre Slievedonagh, then back along the south shore. I even had the dubious pleasure of being briefly accompanied by two gasping American joggers who for reasons best known to themselves had come out here to test their lungs and legs on the most westerly footpaths in Europe.

The views as you wend your way up to the top of Slievedonagh get ever more inspiring – 952-metre Mount Brandon across on the Dingle Peninsula, enshrouded by cloud as usual; the golden strip of Inch Strand way off at the far end of Dingle Bay; Macgillycuddy’s Reeks rising purple into the vivid blue sky in the south-east; and the towering lumps of the Skellig Islands thrusting up out of the ocean to the south, while to the west the choppy blue-green Atlantic stretches across the horizon to North America.

Way below gannets and other sea birds form a regular procession along the lower slopes of the sea cliffs as they head out to their feeding grounds, and I have no doubt that dolphins, porpoise and whales must be seen from time to time (in fact in ‘The Islandman’ there’s a reference to a shark making an unsuccessful lunge at a man who’s legs were dangling over the side of one of the island’s fishing boats).

As you stroll along the upper slopes of the island there’s a sensation of distance and elevation from the ‘real’ world of the mainland, and when you look westwards you can feel in the vastness of the seascape and the ozone tang of the air that there’s an awful lot of nothing out there.

For all it’s beauty to modern eyes Great Blasket must have been a daunting place to live, and you can understand why the inhabitants eventually gave up on it and opted for an easier life in Ireland, Britain or the USA. But I bet they all missed it like hell when they’d gone.

I stayed at Dingle Skellig Hotel (00353 66 915 0200 www.dingleskellig.com) which has a good restaurant and superb views across Dingle Harbour, where you may see Fungie the dolphin swimming and leaping.

More information on the Blasket Islands is available from the Blasket Centre in Dunquin. The building itself is hideous, but the interior has a well-presented exhibition on the lives and literature of the islanders.



Further Information: Dingle Peninsula Tourism www.dingle-peninsula.ie