Inisheer

The Aran Islands lie within the mouth of Galway Bay. The next day we took the ferry out to Inisheer, the smallest, closest, and most primitive of all the Aran Islands. (Need I mention that not once did I think about ferries in conjunction with our trip?) It was a grey day and the water was a bit choppy.

From our ferry (notice how casually I throw that word around now), Inisheer looked like this.

A little closer it looked like this.

A lot closer, it looked like this. As a matter of fact, this is where we spotted a nice, albeit rough looking man with a horse and cart, who offered to give interested people a tour of the island for a minimal price. Steven and I and a mother and daughter climbed into the cart.

The horse and he looked something like this. I say "something like" because we neglected to get a picture of him. What were we thinking?

We like to think that he had a good working knowledge of the island, but we'll never be sure. He had a thick accent--so thick that we all took turns asking the man questions along the way. Then the questioner had to attempt to decipher his answers for the rest of us. Since his eyes were on the road and not on us, after his explanations we usually just shrugged our incomprehension. At one point, he met another cart driver and spoke to him in Gaelic. He needn't have. We wouldn't have understood anyway.

He showed us the island's trophy shipwreck, the Plassy. In 1960 the Plassy was floundering in a terrible storm when someone on the island spotted it and called the Inisheers to help save those on board. Not one person was lost. A few years later another terrible tempest tossed the ship up onto the island and there it remained.

He showed us a lot of walls. As you can see, they are impressive. Inisheer is famous for its dry-stacked walls--walls that are assembled without mortar. The island is made up entirely of wind-swept rock, so rocky that the natives must make their own dirt. They do this by building walls, piling seaweed into the enclosures, letting it rot, and mixing it with sand.

After all their hard work, you've got to wonder why someone built a castle on the island. Castles are for protection against invaders. Who in the world would want to take over such an inhospitable place? But I digress.

He showed us the view from the top of the island and informed us that there were about 50 cars on the island. To get to...?

The unusual thing is that they had about 50 tractors there. Why? Certainly not for farming. We saw no crops and only a few head of cattle. And, for the rest of the day, Steven and I tried to figure out how the inhabitants support themselves. Nope. Not fishing. No, not from wool shorn from home-grown sheep. And certainly not from the tourist trade.

Although they had some absolutely fascinating ruins (about every 30 feet) none were marked, making it virtually impossible to discern their significance. The picture above is of the world's smallest chapel, Teampall Caomh, located on Inisheer. It was about 7 ft. by 10 ft. and made me claustrophobic even though it had no roof.

Here is another remarkable thing about the church--its ancient carvings are left to the elements. I guess this is because tourism is so terribly new to the island.

Returning to the subject of earning a living, is it possible to support a population of approximately 300 souls in a place with one school, a pub and maybe one hotel? We may never know the answer because, by the time the question formed in our minds, it was time to leave.

To be continued