Dunquin, and the elusive Blasket Islands
I’d hoped to go out to the Blaskets. But the weather did not permit the boats to make the effort.
Instead, I visited a graveyard where several of the Blasket characters are buried. Deep holes sinking into the graves and crooked old grave stones. Two magpies and rain.
Later I sat at the desk in the B&B Gleann Dearg (room #1) in Dunquin and stared out at the Blaskets–coming and going in the clouds and mist. Like some sort of vision that can’t quite get into focus. Sometimes, you could see the ruined cottages out there. Sometimes the sun would shine there.
One day I would get out there. But it wouldn’t be this trip.
The Blaskets are a group of six islands…at one time, home to over 175 people. Now they are abandoned, evacuated in the 1950s for safety. An entire way of life, ended.
Why are the Blaskets semi-famous? In a span of seven years, a variety of autobiographies and stories came to life from the islands–detailing a fading community and culture. Translated from Irish to English–these were hard lives. Sometimes the three mile journey to mainland Ireland could not be made–and that was still true as I witnessed. There is no electricity, no trees. Only beautiful green slopes and deserted, collapsed stone cottages. Some descriptions I’ve read: “The Great Blasket looks so close you could reach out and touch its field walls and stroke the grass on its muscular mountain slopes. There are other days when the great island shrinks to half the size and withdraws itself far out into the Atlantic, aloof and infinitely untouchable. At all times, this island has an appearance of mysterious self-containment and otherness, totally at odds with the visible relics of human occupation and cultivation.” And in the words of Tomas O’Criomhthain about the culture and community there, “the like of us will not be seen again“.
At the heritage center, a letter said “I was inside with an old widow a few nights ago…well she had three lovely rooms in her house, her children are all in America now and only one son that’s a man here, but not in her house. Imagine her sitting in the corner alone, thinking and looking at her empty house which her grandchildren should be playing and she knows that she will never see her dear ones again…”
The islands were evacuated in 1953. Homes in Dunquin were given to the cast offs. It must have been hard, to look out to sea every day and see their past there on the Great Blasket.
One day… One day I’ll go.