freelance writer
travel ° culture ° conservation ° outdoors ° lifestyle ° adventure
"Shelby is a versatile and highly dependable author who speaks the language of adventure fluently and writes it even better."  Patrick Kinsella Editor-in-chief Outer Edge (Australia) |
 Ambling on AranWhat Ireland summer 2004 As I disembarked from the ferry that had brought me from Rossaveal in County Galway to Inis Mor, the largest of the three Aran Islands, I scoffed inwardly at the tourists who beelined straight to the market to buy an Aran sweater. The Aran Islands are wind-skimmed limestone islands that poke up from the Atlantic on the west coast of Ireland. Fish and sweaters are the island's main exports. If you're looking for the latter, there's a huge store located next to the ferry port, imaginatively named The Aran Sweater Market. Among the aisles of thick, cozy knitwear are several displays that explain the history and construction of the Aran sweater and the evolution and significance of their traditional patterns. Cunningly, the building isn't heated, so bundle up beforehand or be prepared to shell out at least €70 for a sweater that was machine-knit on the mainland and shipped to Inis Mor. You can't blame the islanders for outsourcing, though. As the woman behind the counter pointed out, "Even if every person on this island knitted sweaters for twelve hours a day, every day, we still couldn't meet the demand." Hand-knit, locally-made sweaters with certificates of authenticity start around €120. She couldn't tell me exactly how many Aran sweaters are sold every year, but they are shipped all over the world, so odds are the total number sold is many times more than the island's 750 residents could possibly make. Inis Mor is eleven miles long and three miles wide. In the summer it swarms with up to 2500 visitors a day, most of whom stay for only eight hours - the amount of time between the arrival of the morning ferry and the departure of the evening ferry - and see the island's main attractions from a bicycle or minibus tour. I was there in spring and planned to stay a few days. I wanted to see the island in an unconventional way, so I dumped my backpack at one of the few hostels, grabbed a map, and started walking. Landscape-wise, Inis Mor is like Connemara: a rocky, sloping, cottage-dotted patchwork of pastures and stone walls and bramble hedges. There are a few gravel roads and, for ambience, the odd shaggy pony. The grass is so green it looks fake. Karma kicked in immediately. I had mentally mocked the sweater-buying tourists, but after an hour of trudging on the long hilly road, rain and muddy puddles soaking me, wind plastering my cold, sopping clothes to my skin, telling myself that this was more 'authentic' than a minibus tour wasn't cutting it anymore. I would have traded a kidney for one of those sweaters, or, for that matter, for one of those unauthentic minibuses to pull up and offer me a ride. When I reached the top of a hill, I heard a reedy wailing, like someone blowing over an open bottle. For a moment I thought of banshees. It was a bleak, eerie sound that seemed even bleaker when I realized what was causing it: the wind whistling through the gaps in the thousands of miles of stone walls that segment the island. Before I got carried away with the desolate romance of physical discomfort and the lonely wail of wind through stone, a decidedly unromantic red hatchback surmounted the hill and pulled over beside me. The window rolled down a few inches. A whiskery man in a tweed hat peered out like a turtle reluctant to leave its shell. "Looks like you need a ride." Oh yes I did. "I'd love one, thanks." I walked round to the passenger side and climbed in. The car smelled like one of those pine-tree-shaped air fresheners. The man was headed to Kilronan, the town near the ferry port. I hadn't intended to go there, but the car was warm, the conversation was pleasant, and - did I mention the car was warm? We chatted about - what else? - the weather. "We had a good snowstorm once," he boasted. Further inquiry revealed that the "good snowstorm" had blanketed the island in three whole inches of the white stuff that melted in an hour. I managed to stifle a smirk. I come from Minnesota, in the northern part of the midwestern United States, where a "good snowstorm" dumps three feet of snow that stick around for six months. He seemed to sense that I wasn't impressed. "It was good for the kids," he added. Then, as if to remind me that I was warm and drying off because of his kindness, he said, "Oh, look, it's pissin' rain again." Inis Mor, like the other two Aran Islands, is a Gaeltacht area, meaning that the local people speak Gaelic. But the man in the tweed hat, and every other local I encountered, also spoke English. There are several hostels on the island. The manager of Hostel Kilronan, an Aussie who looks like the musician Beck, told me in a conspiratorial whisper that I should be sure to get to Dun Duchathair, the Black Fort. "It's twenty times better than Dun Aengus. But don't tell anyone. During the summer, there's a thousand people at Dun Aengus and four or five at the Fort." Dun Aengus is Inis Mor's big draw. It's an Iron Age stone fort set on a hilltop. Access is limited; you have to pass through a very small museum that has cool sound effects - a recording of the howling wind - on continuous loop. Admission is €1 for students. There's a cute cafe next door. There's no coffee to be had at Dun Duchathair, another Iron Age semi-circular stone fort. Located on the west coast of the island, it perches on a promontory that juts into the ocean like an aristocrat's chin. Flanking the fort on both sides, crumbling, sea-gnawed, hundred-meter black cliffs stretch to the horizon. The wind screams unimpeded off the Atlantic. Far down, wave after wave shatters on the slick rock. The impact makes a low, resounding boom, so low it's almost inaudible. On my second night, I stayed at a small, convivial hostel called Mainistir House, about a 30-minute walk from the ferry port. I asked the hostel owner/master chef Joel d'Anjou, who had lived here for twenty years, how he and other locals felt about tourists invading their island every summer. "People here appreciate and respect tourism," he said. "Besides that and fishing, we have no other resources. There might be a slight weariness by the end of the summer, but no resentment." "Resentment?" "Well, you get a lot of stupid questions, like 'Is this an island?' and 'What time does the nine o'clock ferry leave?'." At the Aran Islands, as at other iconic tourist destinations, balancing cultural integrity and economic necessity is clearly a challenge. "We recently blocked construction of a golf course," d'Anjou said. "We don't want to turn into a resort. At the same time, though, we don't want to be a 'heritage park,' with thatched huts and people dressed as leprechauns dancing at the crossroads." |