By Kristen
We departed from Rossaveal west of Galway this morning by ferry to visit Inis Mor, the largest of the Aran Islands. The residents (about 800 of them) speak the Irish tongue of Gaelic as well as English; all of the signage outside of the tourist areas at the harbor are entirely in Gaelic. It's a very fast language from what snippets we heard spoken; it seems to flow off the tongue quickly with a sound I can only describe as sounding like it came from the sea.
I'm hard pressed to describe the island without resorting to the words everyone typically uses to describe the Irish coastline: rugged. Barren. Desolate. Rocky. Scrubbed by the sea. All of these commonly-thrown-about words are completely accurate, however, and as we drove around the island in the hands of our day guide Oliver they all leapt immediately to mind. The small houses surrounded by criss-crossed stone walls clung to the ridge of the island and nearly every yard included a handful of cows or a draft horse or pony. Inis Mor's streets are incredibly narrow and there was more than one moment in which we all shut our eyes and cringed as we passed another car or van at top speed!
Our first stop was at Teampall Bheanain, said to be one of the earliest church ruins in the world, as well as one of the smallest--only 6 feet by 8 feet. To get to the site, we had to hike a kilometer or two up into a cow pasture, traversing over stone walls and boulders to reach the ridge and the remains of the tiny church. Below us stretched the east coast of the island and the bay, the surface of the water unsettled and as gray as the misty sky above. We were quite damp by the time we reached the top but excited to see nothing but this wild, barely-touched island all around us.
After our hike up and down the hill, we continued on to the ruins of the lighthouse built at the highest point on the island. While this sounds like the perfect location to build such a structure, the highest point also happens to be at the widest point and with the frequent rain and low-lying clouds the light simply didn't work to do its job and a new light was later built elsewhere. The old lighthouse was only a short distance away from our final stop, a fairly epic traverse along the stony ridge at the center of the island, winding along the cliffs on the western side of the island to the Wormhole and on to Dun Aonghasa.
The Wormhole took our breath away for multiple reasons: not only were we standing just feet from the edge of a cliff drop seemingly hundreds of feet above the rocks and crashing sea, but the wind was high and damp with rain as well. As we peered carefully over the edge of the cliff, we looked down into a perfect rectangle of a hole in the rock, filled by the tide which frothed white at the edges of the rock. This was also a site of the 2012 World Cliff Diving Championship Tour, and we could all see why!
From here, we guided ourselves along the winding edge of the cliff, clambering over the rocks and stone walls and gradually climbing until we could see the majestic face of Dun Aonghasa, the ruins of a defensive fort. The ruins crowned the tallest cliff face along the western edge as far as we could see and as we explored we encountered visitors from all over Europe, America and Asia--pretty amazing on this tiny island at the edge of the rain-washed Atlantic.
We finished our tour of Inis Mor in the famous Aran sweater shops; I was personally very happy to pick up some Donegal wool to knit with at home. Despite the famed fisherman's sweaters that have most of the world talking, very few sheep are kept on the island any longer--most of the farmers only keep cattle and a horse or two. The wool used for the sweaters comes from elsewhere in the mainland of Ireland.
As our ferry headed back towards Ireland, Inis Mor faded behind us back into the mist like a fantastic dream. It's not a place I ever expect to see again, but I am comforted knowing that such a place still exists, where traditional ways and languages and traditions still thrive.
No comments:
Post a Comment