Aran Islands: stone walls and spirituality

Later that day I dropped in to the Dun Aonghasa visitors’ centre, which hadn’t been open earlier, and was surprised when I accidentally found that one of the attendants had a keen interest in ecological spirituality – we ended up talking for an embarrassing amount of time about it, I felt rather sorry for the other visitors to the centre, as they were quite ignored! We also discussed some of the challenges of living on Inis Mor – the lack of ferries during the winter, the fact that most of the children of the current inhabitants have all moved off the islands for education and jobs (although it was interesting to see that many of them went into fields related to the sea, such as marine science or engineering, or working on oil rigs), making what I’m sure is already a challenging season for the inhabitants of these rugged islands more challenging still.

The walk back to the ferry was about 7km, and seemed to take a very long time, despite my fascination with the tiny fields in which the Aran Islanders graze their animals. Some of these fields seemed like they were almost too small to hold a cow, however when I learnt more about them it seems they almost work like an ancient form of cell grazing. Like the folk from The Burren, Aran Islanders summer their animals in the lowlands and then move them up the mountains during winter, the boundless supply of rock providing shelter as well as being the material from which all the 5,000-odd kilometres of stone wall which form the fields is made. (Inis Mor, the largest of the islands, is only 14km long and 3.8km wide, which gives you some sense of exactly how much stone wall there is on the island.)