Gooseberry jam was the best thing. Followed by rhubarb jam. We ate this by the bucketful, on acres of soda bread, at 10pm every night after our two-mile walk home from the céilí. It was 1966 and we were 12, writes Éilís Ní Dhuibhne

Nobody had heard of diets, or anorexia, though they would all too soon. The girls from Derry did not talk about the Troubles but about their bobby socks, their flip- flops and, mostly, their mothers. Their clothes were much nicer than ours, and they had more of them and more pocket money, and they looked smarter in every way. They were bad at Irish and good at singing.

The Irish college was a little college in a little valley in a little Donegal Gaeltacht: all the Gaeltacht is marginalised, in what was once called by ethnographers "relict zones". And this was more relict than most. Glenvar. It was a heavenly place.

The days were full of activity. The headmaster believed that the secret of a successful holiday for children was to keep them busy. He was expressing dismay at how he had seen students treated in some other Irish college (so there was competition between them, in a Craggy Island way, like the Priests' Talent Competition). "It was raining. They were all sitting there in the hall, doing nothing. If they were even knitting!" Keep them busy was his motto.

Busy one was. Classes in the morning, rounded off by singing, games or swimming in the afternoon, dancing at night. All punctuated by the endless plodding along the country roads to class, to lunch, to games, to the céilí. The walk seemed cruel torture at the beginning; students bragged and moaned about the huge distances they were forced to trek. They calculated distances obsessively as they straggled along. Twenty miles a day, some said, a thousand miles a week. Just to get your tea. By week two, one could cope with it without more than perfunctory grumbling, and by the end of the course, walking was one of life's great pleasures.

There was no traffic in Glenvar then. Now, in other Gaeltachts, I see the lines of students making their way along the roads, pushed into the ditches on boreens that have been colonised by speeding cars. For us, the road, like the whole countryside, was ours alone.

The walks, the connection with nature, is my abiding memory of it. We were too young to experience Irish college as a sexual rite of passage, or as an introduction to drinking, or smoking, or singing pop songs, as it can be. The nearest pub was five miles and eight years away for most of us.

Nobody smoked (except possibly some of the Derry ones). We danced with boys but we wouldn't have considered talking to them. Scara Brae was probably singing Beatles songs on the beaches of wild and licentious Gweedore, where the students were real teenagers, but on our little beach all I remember is a girl from Monaghan singing hymns, carried away by the joy of it all. "Show-off," we thought - a judgment we made about the slightest stepping out of line - but we admired her lovely soprano.

We broke rules, but in a Wordsworthian way. We sneaked off to the river or the beach when nobody was looking, and indulged in wild fantasies of exploration, hacking our way downstream in the "Big Burn" as the local river was not very originally named, imagining we were in the jungle (we were quite imaginative).

I read now that immersion in nature is something which modern children do not experience, to their psychological detriment. It wasn't on the curriculum but it was a key benefit of Irish college. Literal immersion - in the water, up to your neck or at least your knees. The boys spent their free time standing in the burn fishing - a stocky Belfast boy called Alastair was famous for it. He resented every second spent away from the water. Even his bean a'tí regretted that he was forced to waste his time learning Irish and dancing, when he had discovered his true vocation in the river that flowed through her meadow. She facilitated him as much as possible. He was allowed to keep a sort of eel aquarium in the kitchen where lucky people were invited to marvel at the huge creatures coiled like disgruntled cobras in an old bathtub.

We girls habituated another section of the stream, the part that flowed fast downhill under a canopy of fuchsia and bramble. We liked the secret green dimness of these places where you could happen upon waterfalls, deep dark pools, mystery. Luckily we never linked the eels with this bit of the river, blithely forgetting that they must have come from somewhere before they arrived in the shallows where Alastair waited midstream, his face grimly expectant, his sleeves rolled up.

I notice I have not said anything about the point of it all, Irish. But one learned quite a lot. In our case, a taste of the marginalised dialect, Donegal Irish. Fosta and bómáinte and falsa and goitse. And we heard, somehow, in the shop and in the air, burn and wean and scon and brae, since this was the Ulster Scots as well as the Ulster Gaelic region. Also Derry English, Belfast English and Monaghan English. And that, as well as the dozens of songs from Abair Amhráin. Caide Sin Don Te Sin was one we liked. Like us, the characters in the songs spent most of their time messing about in rivers or woods.

But the most significant language one learned was the one without words, the language of the river and the grass. We didn't realise we were learning it. Alastair listened for eels. What do they speak? We listened for water rushing, a coloured bird rustling in the leaves.

One grew, possibly not quite up, but somewhere in that direction. It usually started off with heartbreaking homesickness and a deep desire to get away, back to Mammy and civilisation. Some succumbed - and this was felt by all to be vaguely tragic. As it was. Because once you stuck it out, as almost everyone did, you found it became not so bad, and then it became great. And you found yourself, your independence. You found out that going away to a new place was an enjoyable thing to do. You discovered you had the power to move from one environment to another, from one language to another, and survive. You could survive without the ones at home.

That was the best thing about Irish college - after the gooseberry jam.