If it was wild, wild in Connemara, what must it have been on Aran? Would the waves have sent their spray up as far as the walls of Dun Aengus? Aran, you may think is no fit place for the stranger in winter storm time. But about ten years ago or so, a Frenchman arrived on the big island and stayed in a house at Kilmurvey. The nephew of the man of the house kept up a refrain, as long as he stayed there, "What an idea, coming here in the middle of winter storms when, at the end of May, we have 35 varieties of orchids and anemonies and 19 sorts of bee. . And now, there's nothing, nothing at all." The Frenchman didn't tell him that the idea of being on the island wasn't his own. (He was a journalist, on assignment.) The uncle and nephew were worried, he saw. Even when he showed them a copy of the magazine he worked for, they were still perplexed. The nephew kept on grumbling about 35 species of flowers in May. He hadn't, the journalist wrote, learned to sell the wind.
And, by the way, wrote the scribe, he himself loved the storms and the North and the winter. And the air. He writes, more or less: "Everything good that I could say of the air one breathes here, in this wild weather, with its flavour of wild fennel and its sea spray in suspension, would be short of truth. It releases you, tones you up, intoxicates, unburdens, frees in your mind animal spirits. . . it combines the virtues of champagne, of cocaine, of caffeine, of the transports of love, and the Tourism Office is wrong to forget this in its prospectus." The poor man was sick for much of his time on the island, but he certainly gave some a new view of the place. One Nicolas Bouvier.
And we're here because a page in the current quarterly Ar]chaeology Ireland gives an account of a conference on "The Archaeology of Islands", held in the Royal Hospital, Kilmainham on November 14th last. The magazine tells us that "perceived by the 20th century eye as separate, self-contained, resourceful and cut off, islands contain evidence of human life from the Mesolithic period right through to today. Islanders needed to be resourceful." And from Claire Cotter of the Discovery programme, who spoke on the Aran Islands and gave an excellent overview of the 180 islands of the west coast with evidence of human activity, through excellent speakers on Clare Island, to Lambay, St Kilda, Lindisfarne, the Isle of Man, Rathlin and Newfoundland, the whole, speeches and photographic evidence, surely cries out to be available in book form. And all that bracing air. Y