Another Life: Waiting for footfall on the wild Atlantic islands

Now that its wiggly road signs have stopped shuddering in the storms, the Wild Atlantic Way could be launched on an impressively successful year. Along its 2,500km of coastline, through nine counties, its map is bristling with “discovery points” and “signature experiences” and the brave new ventures of local tourism entrepreneurs.

Some of them were celebrated yesterday on Inishbofin, off Co Galway, by Ecotourism Ireland. ’Bofin itself is quite a model for ecotourist enterprise, with a choice of “official” looped walks, two Green Coast awarded beaches, a dive centre, an equestrian centre, bicycle hire and even cups of Fairtrade tea or coffee, at the ecofriendly community centre, which you can drink at tables made of recycled pallets.

The island is already a precious refuge for corncrakes and rock doves, and at yesterday’s gathering the Dolphin Hotel was receiving the first silver award for birdwatching. This was for hosting expert guided tours by the Belfast ornithologist Anthony McGeehan.

The award was from Ecotourism Ireland, a networking and awareness-training group set up by Fáilte Ireland. It also makes awards in gold and bronze, depending on the brilliance of ideas for turning tourists on to conservation and making it pay.

I do worry about the islands, though: not the inhabited ones but those long left to seals and breeding seabirds. Some of them have given me great times, cast up alone or with a huggable other, or helping to net birds for ringing among the lichens and sea pinks. With the organ tones of Atlantic swells and seabird chorus echoing all around, an uninhabited island is quite a “signature experience” – one that many people would treasure, even when taken out in boatloads with packed picnic lunch and camera.

The recent surrender of Skellig Michael to filming sequences for Star Wars showed where official priorities lie. But this brief and controversial episode probably left little serious mark on the island's natural ecosystem. It's the wear and tear of tourist footfall, summer after summer, that I see threatening unique island nesting grounds so essential to the seabirds of the northeast Atlantic.

On the east coast volunteers from BirdWatch Ireland stand guard over the beach-nesting little terns of Co Wicklow and the rare roseate terns of Rockabill, in Co Dublin. On the west’s uninhabited islands the wildlife is openly vulnerable.

It’s one thing to sail at a safe distance to view nesting guillemots, razorbills and fulmars crowding the ledges of island cliffs; it’s quite another to roam about on the fragile surface, frightening Arctic terns and ringed plovers off their nests, treading on near-invisible eggs and chicks or trampling the dark burrows among the sea pinks where young puffins, petrels and shearwaters wait for their parents to bring food from the sea.

Servicing “wild island” tours will seem a natural bonus for hard-pressed fishermen, but the licensing of their boats for passengers offers no control of where they land. Moreover, the Wild Atlantic Way is also attracting an increasing number of cars with boats strapped to the roofs or cradled in trailers.

Uninhabited islands and islets, near and far, account for most of the extraordinary total of more than 570 visited by a kayaking Dublin solicitor, David Walsh, and assessed for landing places, tidal hazards, camping locations and sources, if any, of drinking water. His encyclopaedic guide Oileáin, updated in 2014, includes even the remote and bleak lump of Rockall, up which he scrambled in 2007. He found nothing but ocean to look at from the summit, "giving an interesting sense of vulnerability".

National rights to Rockall, which sits in the Atlantic 400km northwest of Co Donegal, may be in question, but he points out that every centimetre of even an uninhabited island is privately owned. “You are there at the sufferance of the landowner,” he says. “And there is always a landowner.”

Although many have long moved to the nearby coast, leaving a ruined family cabin to grow a cloak of lichen, they may still land sheep there by currach on a calm day to graze for the summer. One or two, quite mindlessly, have cast away a goat or two to chew an island bare.

Others have lost all concern with a property long abandoned and lost in the mist. But distant ownership may complicate the development of island boat trips and the sharing of cash therefrom. More islands now have summer holiday homes, their splendid, nature-loving solitude increasingly at risk from invasion.

Some of the best, of course, have their own, near-impregnable defences. Little Skellig, viewed from its famous neighbour, is white peaked with breeding gannets – one of the largest breeding colonies in Europe – and their guano.

“It is possible,” says Walsh, “though difficult and certainly pointless, to effect a landing there. Nobody is going anywhere in this vertical world.” For those who persist, he says, “Best wear a wide-brimmed hat and don’t look up.”

Michael Viney's Reflections on Another Life, a selection of columns from the past four decades, is available from irishtimes.com/ irishtimesbooks