Inisheer, Aran Islands, Co. Galway, Ireland
Today we visited the Aran Islands in County Galway, Ireland. The islands lie in the middle of Galway Bay and are part of the Gaeltacht, the Irish (Gaelic) speaking region of the west of Ireland. Since students in high school in Ireland must pass their exams in Irish to complete their leaving certificate and graduate, many students come to the Gaeltact in the summers to practice their Irish.
In the morning we sailed past the spectacular Cliffs of Moher, which rise 200 meters from the sea. The shales, siltstones and sandstones that comprise the cliffs are the Irish members of the 300-million-year-old Carboniferous rocks of Britain called the “Coal Measures.” When these rocks were laid down the British Isles and Ireland were located near the equator and the area was a shallow warm sea in which were also deposited the limestones which comprise the Aran Islands to the west. There were large swamps along the coast in what is now Wales and England and so those countries ended up with the coal, which fired the Industrial Revolution. The rocks in what is now Ireland were laid down farther offshore and contained no coal, so Ireland remained largely an agricultural country throughout the 19th and most of the 20th centuries.
We landed on Inisheer, literally “little island,” the smallest of the three Aran Islands. This was the first time we had ever visited this island and we found it quite delightful. The beach was lined with the black hulls of overturned currachs, the traditional leather boats of Ireland. Today they are made of canvas stretched over an ash frame. Above the small village there was a fort built by one of the O’Briens in the 15th century, perhaps to defend them from invading armies. After a walk around the picturesque little village many of us ended up at the local pub for a pint of Guinness before returning to the ship.
