No 2. The regulars on Inis MeainInis Meain, the middle Aran Island, is the least visited of the three and perhaps the most secretive. From a distance, it seems as if it is swelling out of the sea, unlike the starker and flatter contours of the other two islands. Once ashore, the shoulder-high walls swallow you quickly into their midst.

On Inis Mor and Inis Oirr, when you step off the ferry, you are immediately within sight of shops and pubs. On Inis Meain, where the centre is secreted in a couple of high hollows some 20 minutes' walk from the pier, as Brid Connolly says, you "can step off the boat and disappear into the island".

Brid, who is from Celbridge, Co Kildare, has been renting a summer house on the island with her husband and two children for the past six years. "The island has changed since we started coming here - there's a new pier now, and more businesses - but there's still the same feeling about the place. It's very wild and quiet; a meditative kind of place."

"We visited all the islands, but we got hooked on this one," explain Gerry and Brid Dukes. This is their fifth summer renting a house on the island. "We love the peace of it," says Brid. "Inis Mor is like a cattle market. But you can leave the house here, turn left, and walk to the other side of the island and see nobody."

One of the main attractions of the island for the Dukes is the Irish language, in which they are fluent. Another was its connection with J.M. Synge, who lived in a cottage here for some years. This cottage has just been renovated and was officially opened by Brian Friel last weekend. The Inis Mor poet, Mairtin O Direain, in his poem, Homage to John Millington Synge, writes:

The ways of my people decay.

The sea no longer serves as a wall.

But till Coill Chuain come to Inis Meain

The words you gathered then

Will live on in an alien tongue.

Gerry Dukes lectures in English in Mary Immaculate College, Limerick and is particularly interested in Synge. "Synge is the key to Irish modernist literature," he enthuses. "Look at The Aran Islands. It's all about the borderline between two shifting realities: that of the Irish and English languages.

The Dukes try to stay for three weeks to a month each summer. Brid Dukes is the director of the recently-opened Civic Theatre at Tallaght in Dublin. Inis Meain may be isolated, but its telecommunications are as modern as anywhere on the mainland.

"One of the reasons I can stay out of the office for so long is that the mobile phone coverage on the islands has improved so much," she says. "Otherwise it would be very difficult - probably impossible - for me to be away so long."

Margaret McDonagh's parents, Maura and Sean, both emigrated from Inis Meain as young adults. Margaret lives in Boston, where she was brought up in a family of 10. Since she was 11, she has been coming to visit the island every few years. For the past seven years, she has come every summer for two months.

"I remember when I came first, over 30 years ago as a little girl, I got asked lots of questions by the other children here. What's a television like? What's it like to be in a plane? Are people bigger in America? We used to stay with my grandparents. My grandmothers both wore the red skirts and shawls, they were really beautiful. The older women still wear them to Mass here. One of my grandmothers made a pair of pampooties for my sister when we were little, and I have them now."

The house that Synge lived in on the island belonged to Margaret's great grandfather, Mairtin. "My grandfather was a little boy when Synge came here, and himself and his friends used to follow him around; they all wondered what he was doing." While Synge was on the island, Margaret's great grandfather, Colman, together with two other men, all drowned while out in a curragh. "We think that's where the idea for Riders to the Sea came."

The McDonaghs have another link with the creative history of the Aran Islands: one of Margaret's sisters is married on Inis Mor to the grandson of Maggie Dirrane, who played the Woman in Robert Flaherty's film, Man of Aran.

At the end of the isolated cliffside pathway on the far end of the island, is the celebrated place where Synge used to sit and look out to sea; now marked on maps as "Synge's Chair". It's a typically Irish chair, since it's not a chair at all but a sheltered stone nook, which looks like the beginnings of a beehive hut. Margaret, who is an artist, spends a lot of her time on the island sketching and painting. "I love to go up to Synge's Chair," she says. "I could never get tired of that view."

Dubliners Thomas and Catherine Lowth are standing outside their rented house, which overlooks the tiny airstrip and the blue sea beyond. They have been renting the same house on the island for a fortnight for the past nine years. Their 16-year-old son, Thomas, is flying out on the morning's Aer Arann plane to Inveran to go back to work in Dublin that day.

From the garden, they are able to watch him walk up the plane, and his luggage being loaded. Thomas Snr has a white towel in his hand, which he waves energetically as the plane taxis and takes off. Then he takes out binoculars.

"It's such a clear day today, I could follow the plane all the way to the mainland," he explains. "It's only about a seven-minute flight." Meanwhile, Catherine has retreated to the kitchen to shed a maternal tear.

Until last month, Inis Meain only had one pub, Teach Osta Inis Meain; an intimate place with slanting ceilings and years of layered atmosphere. A 16-bedroom hotel has now opened on the island, painted a striking - some say shocking - pink colour. There is a bar here also. Perhaps sensibly, its interior bears no relation at all to the island's other pub, so islanders and holiday-makers now have a choice of drinking in two very different places.

"We try to spread ourselves between the two bars on our evenings out, so that we're supporting them both," the Lowths explain. "We do the same with the shops; go between them on different days."

The Lowths don't speak Irish, so that element of Inis Meain isn't what keeps them coming back. "We just love the place itself," Thomas says. "The island and the people. We love the walks here. Those puffing holes around the island - they really sit in your mind when you see them."

The island's connection with Synge definitely did not count as an attraction. "I don't know why they all go mad over that man," marvels Catherine. "After all, he only spent a couple of years here!"

"I was expecting coconuts the first time I came," laughs Jeannette Godoy from Guatemala, looking out over the stark, windswept landscape. "I didn't bring the right clothes at all." She came to Inis Meain for the first time last summer to visit her sister, Vilma. Vilma married an islander, Padraig Conneely, seven years ago, and with whom now runs a B&B and restaurant.

Jeannette spent three months here last year, and returned for the same period this year. She says she often thought about Inis Meain in the months she was away. "At home in Guatemala, when I was walking in the city with so many crowds of people and noise, I used to close my eyes sometimes and think of the sea here and the silence. Since I left last year, I have been waiting to come back," she adds. "Everyone should have some place like this to go to; a place to stop where you can hear the sound of silence. You are not the same person leaving here as you were when you arrived."