Isolated islands

over the cliffs to their deaths.

Traditionally, the island cottages were built facing north or south with the hearth ends built into the hillsides for extra protection. It was important that the kitchen space gave ‘‘room enough to dance or wake a corpse’’. Although there might be a few stoneflags in the kitchen, most of the cottages had earth floors, the damp reduced by spreading sand across them up to twice a day.

The descriptions of day-to-day life are imbued with a sense of backbreaking toil that was needed to survive here and the spectre of the ever-present perils of the sea that regularly claimed island men fishing to feed their families. Isolation meant unimaginable efforts when someone on the island was sick, for example. After a sea crossing there was a 20-kilometre walk to the nearest doctor (and a mere 8km to the closest priest).

A walk around the cottages on a summer’s day is to be drawn into the romance of island life: convivial nights sharing stories with members of a tight-knit community; long warm evenings fishing, sounds of singing and dancing coming from the cottages.

We walked around a track high on the island’s flanks, the hills of Kerry shimmering in the distance, the rugged cliffs of Inishvickillane, owned by former Irish president Charles Haughey to the south.

The hills were splashed with magenta heather, a solitary blackfaced sheep bleated mournfully from a hillock among the peat. Storm petrels from the Dead Man swooped high overhead. I hankered for an island childhood; of barefoot clambers around rockpools, running wild on the hills; nights in cottages fragrant with turf fires.

But on my second visit the mist followed us ashore and the island became damp, the views to the mainland and the other islands, even of the sea itself, were lost in the curtain of grey. The fog closed us off, shut us away from the rest of the world, pressed on us claustrophobically.

Then I could appreciate why many islanders, the young ones especially, began to dream, not just of mainland Ireland a few kilometres away but the continent that lay beyond the fog, far to the west across the Atlantic.

And today there is no-one left and just a few weeks ago one of only seven remaining native Blasket Islanders died. Mike Sheian Tom O Cearna was 94; he’d campaigned to have the government resettle the remaining villagers during the late 1940s after his brother died of meningitis and stormy seas prevented a doctor from coming to his aid.

Mike O Cearna wanted a better life for the remaining islanders but right up to his death he’d also campaigned for the heritage of their island life be treasured forever. And every visitor who steps gingerly ashore on the slippery, seaweedy rocks of Great Blasket soon understands why.