As the morning mist thins , Sherkin Island comes into view from the deck of the small ferry, Yoker Swan. Children in wet suits flanked by their parents are waiting on the slipway by the pier for their friends to arrive for water safety week.
As the vessel pulls into berth, deck hand Kieran O’Driscoll says, notwithstanding the full ferry this morning with 52 on board, it has been quiet so far this summer, with July’s poor weather making for a slow start to the holiday season. However, things are starting to pick up.
Sherkin promotes itself as Ireland’s most accessible island, lying just 4km off Baltimore in Roaringwater Bay in west Cork. Anyone on board the Yoker Swan wanting to argue the point would hardly have time to kick things off as the ferry pulls in to dock just 10 minutes after leaving the mainland.
Inis Arcain, the Isle of the Piglet, as Gaeilge, Sherkin was the ancestral home of the O’Driscoll clan and there are still more than a generous sprinkling of O’Driscolls among the island’s 110 permanent inhabitants, a population that swells to 150 or more during the summer season.
The O’Driscoll’s role in the development of the island is readily evident. The ruins of a 15th-century friary, built by chieftain Fineen O’Driscoll, is perched on a high vantage point, making for a striking sight as visitors make their way up the steep incline to the crest of the hill.
There they can read about the history of the friary and how the O’Driscolls, noted seafarers and pirates, had attacked Waterford city and later impounded a Portuguese ship bound for Waterford only for the Deise to attack the island and burn down the friary in 1583.
Thankfully, such terror and turmoil is well in the past and Sherkin today is a haven of peace and serenity – as evidenced by the fact that some local had left their bicycle without a lock or chain resting by the friary wall to be collected later in the day when they returned from the mainland.
In the arts centre, Maria O’Driscoll is not surprised by the unlocked bike. “Sure, a lot of people on the island still leave the keys in their cars – it’s that sort of place. Anyway, where would you be going if you were to steal a car here?” she asks with a smile.
Maria is chatting with photographer and boat builder, Nigel Towse, a native of Bognor on the English south coast. He reveals that he first came to Ireland to play traditional Irish music and moved to Sherkin more than 30 years ago – effortlessly squeezing a few notes from his accordion to prove the point.
His photos of old boats are part of a joint exhibition running in the centre, also featuring paintings by Sherkin artist John Simpson. But Towse becomes truly animated when he talks about his boat, The Hannorah – a Heir Island lobster boat built in 1892 which he lovingly restored in 2002 and regularly takes out into the bay.
It’s not for everyone. Do a winter here and if you are still madly in love with it, happy days
— Mark Murphy
“She’s a lovely boat. I grew up on the sea at Bognor so I spend a lot of time sailing and, of course, even though there is a good ferry service to Baltimore, I’m not dependent on it. I do a lot of fishing but one thing I’ve noticed this year, with the warming of the water, is the mackerel have disappeared.”
While several islanders have their own boats to make the short trip across to Baltimore or Turk Head, getting around the island, which is 5km long and 2½km wide, to see its fine beaches is probably best achieved a velo – and thankfully bicycles can be hired on the island.
Sean O’Neill, a local farmer and builder, runs a small shop selling ice creams and snacks, from where he also operates a bike hire business. A full day’s hire costs €15. It offers an ideal way to explore the quiet montbretia fringed boreens that radiate out from the crossroads outside his shop.
O’Neill reckons Sherkin has huge potential and while it is possible to live on the island and commute to work on the mainland, creating jobs on there would be a big advance, but requires an entrepreneurial spirit and a willingness to innovate and adapt.
“There’s relatively good broadband service so people can work remotely,” he says. “There’s no real restriction now with the quality of internet. You get a few working remotely on the island, not an enormous amount, but certainly it has potential. We need to get more jobs and families living on the island.”
For some people, Sherkin was best known for the Sherkin Island Marine Station, founded in 1975 by Matt Murphy and his late wife, Eileen. Located on the northwest of the island, the couple and their family used the station to gather data on marine life along the coastline from Cork Harbour to Bantry Bay.
The project ceased in 2015 and Murphy is now retired and working on an archive of data collected over the years. However, his family remains active in island life and his son, Mark, who used to run the former Islanders Rest Hotel, now home to 57 Ukrainian refugees, says many people have “a romantic notion” about island life.
“But it’s not for everyone,” he adds. “Do a winter here and if you are still madly in love with it, happy days. For me, Sherkin is a great place to live and rear kids as they have the outdoors, but as they get older, they tend to socialise more on the mainland.
I know population numbers can fluctuate, but once something goes, it never comes back
— Herman O’Driscoll
“A breakwater with marina facilities would improve access. We’ve been pushing hard for it for years and hopefully it will come on stream because there are strong surges at the pier in winter and people with boats have to move them with any gale from the north around to the southeast.”
Among the many beaches on the island is the sheltered Silver Strand. Although the skies were a rather leaden grey last Tuesday, it did not deter Herman O’Driscoll, his wife Liz Owens and their daughters, Orla and Aoibhin and their friend, Sean Hegarty from taking a dip.
Herman’s family are known as ‘the Strand O’Driscolls’ and although now living in Cork city, he and his family are regular visitors to the home place, with Liz reporting that, since they started swimming in March, the water temperatures have been noticeably warmer this year than in times past.
Herman says life on the island has changed over the decades. He recalled how as a youngster they would drive cattle over to the pier and on to an old sand boat for shipment to the mainland. Now, he adds, farmers have their animals collected by a small lorry that comes over on the ferry.
“A lot of small farmers would have been self-sufficient, doing a bit of farming and a bit of fishing. It’s all dry cattle now and there are only four or five big farmers but, back in the day, there would have been a lot more farmers, and they would have been milking cows for butter and for calves.
“We’ve lost a lot over the years,” he adds. “The closure of the post-office was a big loss, it was a wonderful focal point for people collecting their pensions and the closure of the school in 2016 was another loss. I know population numbers can fluctuate, but once something goes, it never comes back.”
But Sherkin Islanders are resilient and creative folk, as they proved during the Covid-19 pandemic when, to keep their collective spirits up, they embarked on a novel project – as an inquiry about the orange and blue bunting found hanging on gateways and hedges around the island revealed.
“They’re the haiku,” says Sue Cahalane, who explains that a woman involved in the BA Visual Arts Programme on the island, Tess Leak, introduced locals to the traditional Japanese poem of 17 syllables arranged in lines of five, seven and five and usually evoking images of the natural world.
“We were pretty taken with it and we set up a group with about eight people and then when the pandemic struck, we had a genius idea to set up a What’sApp group for it and it grew to about 24 people and we started sending each other haiku. Now we often message each other in haiku.”
No visit to the island is complete without a visit to its only pub – the Jolly Roger, named because of the island’s historic associations with piracy. It has been run for the last eight years by Deirdre Murphy Youell, whose late mother, Bridie O’Driscoll, was from Sherkin.
“I’ve never run a pub anywhere else but running a pub on an island is like living on an island,” the former librarian says. “You have a few added extras on both sides but Sherkin is special because we are so close and connected to the mainland and yet we are still disconnected which is great.”
She says: “Okay, there are added costs. When I go shopping it costs me more because it’s more labour intensive because stuff has to be put on and taken off at the ferry, but I’ll take all of that because of all the advantages here. We really do live in a postcard, a stunningly beautiful place.”
Ireland’s Islands Series
Tomorrow: Part Six - Jade Wilson visits Inis Meáin
