Mystic Isles : Three Wind-swept, Romantic Outposts of Britain and Ireland : Ireland’s Inishmore

For visitors who do not depend upon them for their livelihood, Ireland’s Aran Islands boast a bleak and otherworldly beauty: dizzying cliffs that drop straight to a snarling surf; a bizarre geology of riven limestone beds, with scarcely a tree to be seen; fiercely changeable weather softened by a benevolence of rainbows. And the stones of Aran, of course.

For some inexplicable reason, the three Aran Islands, which lie in a line off Ireland’s west coast at the mouth of Galway Bay, have been inhabited for thousands of years, and all those many generations of inhabitants have left behind a striking record of themselves in the only material they had in natural abundance.

Prehistoric people built neolithic tombs and circular huts called “cashels” out of stones. Iron Age chieftains erected stone “duns,” or so-called ring forts, upon the cliffs. Early Christian mystics used stones in their monuments to God. But that scarcely exhausted the supply. There were still stones enough to be piled into a thousand-mile labyrinth of interconnecting walls, this on islands that, put together, have an area of only about 32 square miles.

At the turn of the century, Irish playwright J.M. Synge spent several summers on Aran, as the three islands--Inishmore (“the big island”), Inishmaan (“the middle island”) and Inisheer (“the eastern island”)--are collectively known. He came, as people do today, to study the Irish language, which was widely spoken and well-preserved because of the islands’ isolation.

But in the process of learning the ancient Gaelic language, Synge became fascinated by the people, who inspired two of his classics, “Playboy of the Western World” and “Riders to the Sea.” To Synge, the Aran islanders were “an old race, worn with sorrow,” and he marveled at their stoic adaptation to a dangerous and hardscrabble existence.

He watched them fish from small hide-covered boats called “curraghs,” because Aran, with a single exception, was (and remains) without harbors that can accommodate large boats. A curragh “floats on the water like a nutshell,” Synge wrote--and with about the same stability. Catches were meager and drownings so common, he reported in “The Aran Islands,” published in 1907, that they were “a slight catastrophe to all except the immediate relatives.”

The islanders also farmed. Yet Aran was so barren that it gives new meaning to the expression “dirt poor”--often, before islanders could even plant a potato, they first had to make the soil to put it in.

Synge watched islanders make up ground one summer on a site where the slabs of sharp, black limestone that dominate the Aran “landscape” were fairly level. They laboriously filled the fissures in the surface rocks with pebbles (so that their precious man-made soil wouldn’t trickle away), while disposing of loose stones by piling them into walls, which doubled as windbreaks.

Once they had the area prepared, they alternated layers of sand, brought in as ballast in ships from the mainland, with layers of seaweed, culled from their own wild shores, and topped them off with a thin covering of soil cadged from some fertile cranny.

Over the centuries this reclamation process resulted in the marvelous maze of stone walls seen on Aran today. Sometimes the walls surround fields no bigger than a studio apartment. Sometimes the fields are bigger, and a few cows or sheep can graze. The fields are shaped around the fissures in the limestone beds and fit together like puzzle pieces, with narrow lanes called “boreens” winding among them.

The walls are built without gates, making them even more boggling to the eye. When an islander wants to enter his field, he just rolls a few stones away, lifting them back into place when he’s finished. Gates would have been an extravagance in a place where wood for a coffin sometimes had to be scavenged from the coffins of these who went before.

The walls also were built without mortar. That way, the fierce winds that sweep Aran could pass freely through chinks without hocking down the stones--but not without making a mournful sound.

Like most visitors to Aran, my friend Judi and I arranged for our trip at the tourist office in the Irish coastal city of Galway. We could have flown or taken a boat, which is about 30 miles from the islands; instead, we chose to be bused to Rossaveal in Connemara, about an hour’s scenic ride west along the shore of Galway Bay, in order to have a shorter passage across the water. The sleek, white Aryan Flyer awaited us at Rossaveal. It is a modern launch that can make the trip to Kilronan, Aran’s sole deep-water harbor on Inishmore, in about 20 minutes. We trooped up its gangplank quickly, eager to get out of the whip of the wind. Yet no sooner were we seated, then we were rounded up and herded off the other side of the boat onto a smaller, slower, older wet tub. Apparently the transport company didn’t think there were enough of us to justify the larger launch.

There was some grumbling as people settled onto the grubby wooden benches drenched in eau de diesel. And the passage through the rollicking, white-capped bay took 70 minutes, not the advertised 20. Most of the passengers, young backpackers, took the switch in stride, though, maybe because they had been offered a free overnight at a hostel on Inishmore.

At Kilronan, as part of the deal we had arranged in Galway City, a van was waiting to take us to our bed and breakfast in Killeany, a small settlement south of the main town. We were the only guests at “Ti Fitz” on that end-of-the-season night, but our hostess, Penny Mahon, bypassed many empty rooms and took us to a bedroom at the top of the house, under the eaves. That seemed a bit odd, but the sloping ceilings made our room cozy, and we had a view of the sea. We quickly dumped our stuff and headed downstairs. In short order, another van delivered rental bikes to our door.

We could have opted for a pony cart and driver, or traveled on shank’s mare--the island is only 10 miles long and two miles across at the widest point, and has lots of marked trails--but we wanted more mobility. Cars are not generally available.

Unfortunately, the ever inconstant October weather (in summer, the odds of warmer conditions turn marginally better) took a turn for the worse. Mist escalated to a drizzle, and the temperature dropped. We peddled back to Kilronan to search its handful of knitwear shops for cheap gloves and hats so we could enjoy our bike tour.

Aran is known for knitwear, especially the elaborately cabled, ivory-colored sweaters sometimes called “Irish knits.” It is said that an Aran mother could identify her drowned son, even if he had been in the water for days, by the pattern of the sweater she had knit him. Today, many sweaters are knit elsewhere and imported to sell to the tourists.

Not without reason had we resigned ourselves to being slightly damp most of the trip. Not without a struggle had we given up on hairdos, finally happy if we could keep the wildest strands on our heads from lashing our eyes. One friend, looking at my snapshots later, said it looked as though Judi and I had spent the whole trip in the wash of a jet engine. That captured our look exactly.

With the help of an excellent map I bought in Kilronan, we first biked, then hiked, to Dun Dubchathair, or the Black Fort. With a romantic name like that, we had to see it. We found not much of the 1st-Century fort left, except a lonely section of wall. The setting, though, atop black and terrifying cliffs with a superb view of Kilronan and the walled and pocked limestone fields of southern Inishmore, was well worth our efforts.

A far more exciting fort was Dun Aengus, a strenuous six-mile pedal north of Kilronan. Along the way we stopped to catch our breath and poke around church ruins from the 12th Century. We also climbed a boreen to battlements we couldn’t quite identify. They may have dated from the reign of the O’Brien clan, which controlled Aran from the 11th to the 16th centuries, exacting tribute from the mainland in exchange for the safe passage of ships. Or they may have been of Elizabethan vintage, since Good Queen Bess, or “Betty of the Pigs,” as the islanders sarcastically called her, claimed Aran as her own, and it remained in British control until the 1920s.

By the time we reached Dun Aengus, it was late afternoon, conditions were back to blowy and gray, and the area was deserted. But solitude and stormy weather suited the place.

A sign in Irish and English asked for our respect for the ancient site, one of the “finest monuments of its kind in all of Europe”; awe was the more natural reaction.

The fort, like Aran’s other duns, sits silhouetted against the clouds at cliffs edge. Unlike the Black Fort, it is well preserved--a semicircle of 20-foot-high, 18-foot-wide, terraced walls pierced by a single entrance. A second, ruined outer wall encompasses 11 acres. The inside of the fort is flat and grassy and then, suddenly, it just isn’t. It stops, and more than 200 feet straight down--that’s a drop the equivalent of a 20-story building--there’s the sea.

One theory has it that Dun Aengus was a full circle once and that the hills sheared away, leaving the present configuration. But even if only half there, Dun Aengus is a wonderfully eerie spot.

The next morning, our boat was to sail at noon, but we “were on the boil early,” as Penny Mahon, our B&B; hostess, noted, and had plenty of time to bike to the south end of Inishmore to see the “puffing holes.”

First, we explored Teaghlach Einne, the seaside ruins of a tiny 8th-Century church and graveyard. The sand is deep enough there for the repose of the dead, and the sea grasses sprout amid tombstones old and new.

It is said that St. Enda is buried at Teaghlach Einne. The son of a 5th-Century Druid chieftain, St. Enda converted to Christianity and used his sword to persuade the islanders to do likewise. He built many churches and monasteries on Aran, establishing it as a place of pilgrimage that held sway for a thousand years.

At road’s end, we leaned our bikes against a wall and set off on foot for the cliffs. We crossed flat, sandy ground fiddled with burrows, where, when we stood motionless, we were able to spot dozens of rabbits. A scene right out of “Watership Down.”

As we climbed toward the cliffs, the wind climbed too. We took shelter in the lee of a stone tower when we were favored with two minutes of rain like driven needles. Then came the caressing sun and the multiple manifestation of rainbows.

From our elevated vantage point, we could look across a channel to the cliffs of Inishmaan, the middle Aran, where the sea, in a chilling display of power, threw spray hundreds of feet skyward. From below us came an ominous, periodic boom as waves crashed inside some unseen cave. Eventually, we spotted one puffing hole, and probably could have spotted more if we weren’t so reluctant to peer over the edge out of fear we’d be blown to our deaths.

The puffing hole did not disappoint. It was a maw-like opening in the floor of a limestone shelf. As the tide surged forward, waves were forced into the hole from below, and, constricted, flew forth in a geyser. As the waves receded, the foaming water slid backward, disappearing down the hole, hissing like a bag full of cats.

We didn’t have time to visit Inisheer and Inishmaan, and I’d like to go back to see them one day. Inisheer has many ruins attesting to the religious piety of its residents. And Inishmaan, the most primitive Aran, has a magnificent ring fort, Dun Chonchuir, to rival Dun Aengus, and, if possible, a wilder and more rocky mien than Inishmore. It was on Inishmaan that Synge spent most of his time, savoring “solitude without loneliness” as he watched the sea from a stone chair on the hills.

The islands are more in the mainstream now, with a thriving tourism industry, yet in a world of increasingly interchangeable places Aran remains, as one writer noted, “more of a place than most places”--and its stones still give witness to the obdurate spirit of a people.

GUIDEBOOK: More on Inishmore, Ireland

Getting there: Boats out of the city of Galway visit Kilronan, Inishmore, year round. Adult fare is about $25; students, $17; children 5 to 17, $10; under 5, free. Call Aran Ferries Teo, local telephone (091) 68903. Reservations are required.

Aer Arann also flies to all three islands year-round from Minna, Inverin, Connemara. A package that includes a bus to the airport from the tourist board, air fare and a night at a bed and breakfast costs about $85. Call Aer Arran, (091) 55480.

In summer, small boats make the hop from the port city of Doolin in County Clare, to Inisheer, the littlest Aran.

Accommodations: Inishmore has about 15 B&Bs;, Inishmaan has one and Inisheer has three. Most operate from May through October, though a couple on Inishmore are open year-round. Prices range from about $20 to $27 per person, double occupancy, with a hearty breakfast included. We paid a little more than $30 for the boat fare and an overnight and breakfast at “Ti Fitz.” Bike rental was about $7 per day.

B&Bs; often will provide dinner at a cost of $17 to $21.

The easiest way to arrange travel and lodging for the Aran Islands is to go through the Irish Tourist Board (Bord Failte) in Galway (Victoria Place, Eyre Square, Galway; (091) 63081. For an administration fee of a few dollars it will make all the arrangements.

For more information: Write the Irish Tourist Board, 757 Third Ave., New York, N.Y. 10017, for free travel brochures, or call (212) 418-0800 or toll free (800) 223-6470.