the aran islands
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By Williard Pate
To anyone walking along the Cliffs of Moher on Ireland's western shore, the Aran Islands rise like a mirage out of the sea. Three grey-white oversized stepping stones barely distinguishable from the mist, they beckon across the five miles of water that some ancient geological rumblings and upheavals slashed between them and the rugged mainland.
To approach the Islands from the Cliffs is forbidden except
through the imagination; but on all but the most inclement of days, boats and planes
travel with speedy regularity the 30 miles between them and Galway to the north. 
That was not always the case. When the Irish playwright John Millington Synge first visited the Islands around the turn of the century, he was dependent on the Galway steamer, which sailed with the tide several times weekly if weather permitted. And a few years before Synge's visit, the only passage was on Galway hookers, single-masted sailboats that fished the waters off the islands and brought turf (which we learned in grade school to call peat) and other supplies from the mainland. The hookers were slow and sailed only in fair weather, so they were hardly a reliable passenger service.
Born to affluent parents in what is now a suburb of Dublin, Synge studied at Trinity College before traveling to the Continent to pursue a literary career. But while in Paris he met the great Irish poet William Butler Yeats, who, he later claimed, urged him to find his subject matter in the remote western regions of his own country. Actually, Synge already had something of a family connection with the islands, for his uncle had been a Protestant minister there in the 1850s.
In any case, at six o'clock one misty morning in the summer of 1898, Synge's steamer left the quay in Galway, and a little over three hours later landed at the pier in Kilronan, the largest village on Inishmore, the largest of the three islands. A few days later, Synge left Inishmore to settle into a room in a thatched cottage on Inishmaan, the middle island. That room was to be his home for the next few summers.
In his summers on Inishmaan (with occasional trips back to Inishmore or over to Inisheer, the smallest of the islands and the one closest to the mainland) Synge listened to tales told around the turf fire burning on the kitchen hearth, witnessed the rituals of life and burial, and walked the landscape of stone. One published result was The Aran Islands, a sympathetic but unromanticized portrait of a rugged people eking out their triumphs in a rugged world. Another was the one-act play Riders to the Sea, later turned into an opera by Ralph Vaughan Williams.
With Riders to the Sea Synge translated the struggles of the islanders into myth: Nora has lost a husband and six fisherman sons to the all-powerful sea, the giver of livelihood and the destroyer of life. She, her two daughters, and the other Island women mourn their loss, but accept it as their lot in the larger cycle of fate.
Synge undoubtedly made the Aran Islands famous in literary circles. And certainly his Aran Islands is one of the most accessible records of life there almost a hundred years ago. But Synge was neither the first nor the last visitor to the Islands. Before and after him came the geologists to measure the layers of limestone set down millions of years before, the archaeologists to sift through the stones of prehistoric forts, the naturalists to note the myriad species of flora and fauna, and the poets to make authentic their dreams of antiquity.
Poets, naturalists, historians, linguists, geologists and archaeologists still explore the Islands. But the bulk of visitors now are tourists disembarking from boats, with names like Rose of Aran or Queen of Aran, that have raced each other across Galway Bay.
Such an influx of tourism and money has changed, is changing and will continue to change the Islands. But change is nothing new. After all, a hundred years ago even Synge left Kilronan on Inishmore to live on Inishmaan because the Galway hookers had sailed into Kilronan with too much prosperity and too much of the English language: "I have decided to move on to Inishmaan, where Gaelic is more generally used, and the life is perhaps the most primitive that is left in Europe."
Most of the tourists, especially those out for a day excursion, visit Inishmore, where the Galway hookers of Synge's day are long gone-- as is, according to the locals, the fishing industry itself. Men who perhaps used to go down to the sea now line the pier to form a noisy fleet of weather-carved faces hawking island tours via donkey cart. Ten pounds will buy an hour or two of the donkey's clopping pace and the guide's loquaciousness. For those more inclined to longer expeditions or solitude, a couple of shops just minutes away offer row upon row of beat-up bicycles which rent for two or three pounds a day. And there is always the possibility of walking.
Whether on foot, bicycle or donkey hoof, anyone leaving the pier goes immediately into Kilronan, a crossroads collection of assorted tourist shops that sell T-shirts, sweatshirts, hamburgers, fish and chips, tea and biscuits, beer, steaks and authentic island crafts. Kilronan is Inishmore's, indeed all of Aran's, most visible monument to a modicum of prosperity. But it is not the only one. New bungalows, some of them comfortable guest houses, dot the roadways in all directions on all three of the Islands. And a few automobiles now vie with the bicycles and donkey carts for space on the narrow roads.
The romantic undoubtedly decries the new (except perhaps inside the guest house) and searches for the picturesque as representative of the past. Certainly the picturesque is there in the whitewashed thatched cottage, the old woman knitting a white sweater in her sunlit doorway, the turf fire in the tearoom. And on a crisp midsummer day, when puffs of white clouds meander through the blue sky and ripples barely break the surface of the sea, a simple paradise seems still to exist-- at least outside of Kilronan.
But the clouds can turn fierce. And all the elemental forces that have crossed the north Atlantic untamed by intervening landfall can crash with spectacular might into the stony ground of Aran.
Even today, life in that rough world can be hard. A hundred years ago-- when the Galway steamer crossed the bay infrequently; when the fickle sea offered the only livelihood; when potatoes, planted in tiny plots reclaimed from the stone by hauling kelp from the water's edge, could turn black from the blight; when the English landlord could turn the tenant outdoors-- to live in that world could be cruel.
Yes, life for the natives has changed with the arrival of the
tourists. But the landscape itself has changed little. In his poem "Easter
1916," Yeats wrote of "a terrible beauty" in Ireland. He was referring to
the spirit of the patriots who fought against the English in what has come to be known as
the Easter uprising, but "terrible beauty" describes the landscape of Aran as
well: jagged cliffs pounded by the seal delicate yellow cowslips sprouting from the rivers
of pocked stone, mile after mile after mile of stones gathered to make walls going
nowhere, pockets of daisies growing in the tiny fields, hundreds of gulls screeching into
the wind.
Perhaps the most spectacular site on all of Aran is Dun Aengus, the prehistoric fort crowning the tallest cliffs of Inishmore. Prehistoric structures are part of the landscape on all the islands, but by virtue of its location, Dun Aengus is the most famous and, for the tourist on the quick trip out from Galway, usually the culmination of the visit-- the must-see spot, like the Winged Victory in the Louvre. And like the Winged Victory, Dun Aengus has the majesty to overwhelm, to demand that the guidebook be cast aside in the awe of the moment itself.
Consisting of three semicircular terraced stone walls built to the edge of the cliff that rises 270 feet from the sea below, the Dun is shrouded in mystery. Its origin is unknown; its function is unknown. Perhaps it was built as some shrine to the ancient gods. Certainly that would be appropriate, for there where land and sea and the aspirations of humankind come together, even a hundred or so chattering tourists climbing over the stones must, for a moment at least, feel the paradox of being simultaneously dwarfed and rendered ecstatic.
In Synge's day, the Galway steamer traveled sometimes to Inishmaan and Inisheer as well as to the larger Inishmore. Today tourist boats come relatively frequently even to these smaller islands, but their disembarking passengers are far fewer than on Inishmore. And while prosperity has visited these islands-- the descendants of Synge's hosts have built a sturdy bungalow behind the old thatched cottage-- they seem less invaded, quieter, more coherent. That's especially true of Inishmaan. Although vestiges of the old dress and customs do remain, along with the picturesque (and often uninhabited) thatched cottages, life there is certainly no longer the "primitive" life that Synge described. Yet it does seem uncluttered by the comings and goings of the rest of the world-- almost as if time stopped on Sunday and never gave the hustle and bustle of Monday morning a chance to start.
Inishmaan and Inisheer have been protected to some extent by their size. Nowhere near the eight-mile length and the two- mile width of Inishmore, neither of the other islands can accommodate visiting hoards. In addition, neither has what might be termed a "real" harbor to dock larger vessels-- or more than one vessel at a time, for that matter. Boats tie up at short slips built from the rocky shore into the sea, unload their passengers and supplies in frenzied haste, and then pull away into the safer, deeper water. And on those days when the sea is in a rage, no boats can dock at all.
Undoubtedly the curse and blessing of tourism will continue to creep into the crevices of all three of the Islands. And the information superhighway, with its offering of instant access to everything from menus to movies, will probably build its inescapable bridges as well. But for now, Inishmaan, Inisheer and even Inishmore retain their individuality. They are not the mirage they appear to be from the Cliffs of Moher; they are as solid as the stones of their shores and fields. Nor are they museums to the past, although the past still lingers there. And they are worth a journey-- or even a quick trip across Galway Bay.
SOURCE OR ABOVE ARTICLE: http://alpha.furman.edu/admin/univrel/mag_fall_94/islands.html