To begin at the beginning.
Beginish.
A low grassy island forefront to The Great Blasket. One of its piles of rock was discernable as the shell of a cottage. In two accounts, visiting Englishmen spent summers there, fishing for lobsters.
It still feels like the likely refuge for a solitary, but had probably supported a few families on its scrap of land in the days when Blasket had over two hundred souls living onshore..
The Great Blasket.
A name that catches the island's simple grandeur. A statement of defiance. A three mile long spine of grass and heather, dropping away in sheer cliffs to a deep blue sea. On the landward, eastern end, the slope shapes to an open and generous saucer of cultivable land. Below that a fine beach, the White Strand.. Between was where the village stood, now mostly in ruin. Instead of potatoes there is now pasture.
We walked there, courted by three hares, and distracted by sweet field mushrooms. On the strand below a litter of rocks disintegrated as we approached into an encampment of seals.
The inflatable that had brought us in was now tied back onto the Blasket Princess and headed back to Dunquin across a splashy sea.
We had a day on the Blasket.
I had been reluctant to go.
As you get older, you treat dreams gently in case they shatter. The Blasket has harboured key dreams of mine ever since I had read Maurice O'Sullivan's "Twenty Years A'Growing " ever so long ago.
From Eigg and Mull to The Great Blasket, this year has been a lesson in Islandhood for me.
I am not alone in caching my dreams there.
Just as America was a Land of Hopes and Dreams to an exhausted and hungry Dingleman, so the Emerald Isles lure many an American as their cultural inheritance. "Next Parish America" is another name for the Blaskets.
Islands are a metaphor for us all. An abandoned island holds an even stronger potency.
On The Isle of Harris, there seemed to be an overbearing fascination with St Kilda. An islander's island.
As if the reality of modern island life, with its mixed feelings of denial and old closeness is fed by reference to simpler times.
The last of a diminishing population left St Kilda in 1930.
Their morale was gone. They became an oddity to be visited by rich schooners, and felt increasingly isolated.
Just before they left the Blasket for good, the people there had appealed for help from the Irish government after a long spell of bad weather. They were testing the tribal ties of a new Ireland. Support didn't come.
The St Kildans' sent out their first 'mailboat' appeal for help in 1873. A home-madetoy wooden boat enclosed the message.
Both Peoples' had been depleted by emigration and were increasingly dependent on outside resources. Tobacco had long linked Blasket to the mainland economy, but then tea and sugar and countless other comforts that creep in make that connection feel vital.
That stuff of Civilization.
If only they could have hung on another fifty years. That dress rehearsal for Armageddon, the 60's would have fed them a few wild souls. Green tourism would have treated their lifestyle and produce with respectful fascination. The EU would have showered both islands with grant aid.
Perhaps we are better off with an empty canvas of fields and ruins to project our own versions of past and future onto.
