“That something is in part what draws travelers to the Aran Islands: it takes an independent character to live perversely on three spits of barren limestone in the north Atlantic, the way they do, in a place where you couldn’t even grow spuds unless you created your own sad scrum soil with a kind of layered-kelp composting. If they were to suddenly offer to braid your hair or be smilingly hustling you onto group tours, it would spoil the effect. You go to the Aran Islands expecting to keep a certain distance from the population.”
— John Jeremiah Sullivan, “My Debt to Ireland”
My mother lived in Ireland for two years, and during that time, I visited the Aran Islands three times. The place is enchanting, but also haunting and savage. The final blip of land before the expanding Atlantic, a land as frozen as it is rocky, where fishermen don’t learn to swim because the water’s too cold anyway. These are some of the pictures I took on Dún Aonghasa. [Nick]
I can’t explain precisely what it was, but Dún Aonghasa and Inis Mor are possibly the most beguilingly haunting places I’ve ever been on earth. Like Sullivan, I read Synge as soon as I got back. (It seems I took this picture from the very same vantage point as that picture up top.)
