Setting Foot on the Shores of Connemara Read Online Free

several times. The landing is on a wide shelving beach, giving the island a welcoming aspect; as the currach nosed into the sand two men grasped me by the elbows and flew me ashore. When I think of boat-days on Inis Meáin’s dismal shore I remember a dog on the rocks howling at the breakers crashing in out of the fog; Inis Oírr’s boat-day, however, I see as a sort of garden-party, a talkative gathering on a brilliant expanse of smooth sand watching the trawler or the steamer beating to and fro offshore, and the currachs bounding in over a festive sea. White houses scattered in a wide arc around the foreshore , and behind them a bright craggy hill bearing a picturesque ruined castle – a gleam of sunshine on all this transports one for a moment to the Mediterranean. But beyond the skyline begins the same grey criss-cross of walls and scraggy fields, slowly declining to a storm-battered shore. A monument to the power of the sea, there is the sixty-or seventy-yard-long hulk of the Plassy, a freighter that struck a notorious rock off the east coast of the island a few years ago and eventually drifted ashore. Successive storms have lifted her higher and higher and now she stands bolt-upright on the storm beach several yards above normal high tides, and appears to be sailing across dry land. Her hull is broken open and one can step into the hold; her cargo for this motionless voyage is huge boulders.
    Behind the livelier aspects of Inis Oírr as compared with InisMeáin – the better-stocked shops and less spartan lodgings, the animation brought by children from mainland schools who spend a summer month here learning Irish – there is the same sad wasting-away of a community losing its lifeblood through emigration of the young. The girls go first; it is easier for them to get jobs in hotels and shops. Not long before my visit the socially conscious young curate had written an appeal to the authorities to do something about this desperate situation, instancing the fact that there was just one girl of marriageable age left, to twenty-six young men. I fell into conversation with an island girl soon after my arrival, and asked ‘Are you she?’ No, she was not; she was just home for a holiday from her job in Galway, and anyway, she said, ‘I couldn’t marry any of those lads; they’re all my first cousins!’ An exaggeration no doubt, but one that points up the problems facing a dwindling community. This year the curate has to report that there are no marriageable girls at all in Inis Oírr.
    The islanders tend to mistrust the offices of the outside world, on the whole with good cause, and as this was my first visit to Inis Oírr I felt it more than ever necessary to explain to everyone what I was up to. Maybe I imagined an initial reserve, but in any case it dissolved as news of my activities got round, and my explorations were interspersed with hundreds of conversational encounters, from the barrel-shaped old salt directing four men stretching canvas over the framework of a currach in his boatyard on the foreshore, to the lighthouse keepers in their isolated quarters at the back of the island, from Seán an Siopa (Seán of the shop), the unofficial king of the island, sitting massively by his fireside and rolling forth grand diplomatic utterances with his eyes shut, to the blue-robed zealots, the ‘Danes’ (Mary’s Followers of the Cross, they call themselves), who questioned me closely about the times of mass in the big island.
    Then it was time for me to leave the islands to their motionless voyage and stony cargoes, and go to London, where I would have space to piece together my sketches, notes and sodden OS sheets. A motorboat was to take me across to the Clare coast, but as Joe the boatman lingered in the pub watching a football match on television , and the sky darkened, I became more and more doubtful about this first step of the journey. I had seen the little fibreglass boat battering about in the waves against