Today's Picture - Inishmore

While we were in Ireland, we took a boat out to Inishmor, or Inis Mor, one of the Aran Islands. It's a very rocky place, and would be tough to live on. The islands didn't have electricity until the 1970's, and most of the soil there was made the hard way, by hauling sand and seaweed up from the beaches to layer in the fields. And when I said rocky, I wasn't kidding. An aerial survey was done - Inishmor has roughly 7,000 miles of rock walls, all made of native rock, and there's plenty more where that came from. The Arans are a Gaeltacht, one of the regions where Gaelic is still the main language.

We took a minivan tour of the island, given by an islander named Mairtain. (Tourism is a big employer on the island, I guess - lots of independent jaunting car and minivan tours.) We went to the Seven Churches first, because it was rainy, and then to Dun Aengus (or Aonghasa) after the weather cleared a bit. Dun Aengus was amazing. It's a partial ring fort on the edge of a sea cliff (300 feet down to the ocean), and you have to walk up a heck of a hill to get there. The view is unbelievable in all directions, and you can walk right up to the edge of the cliff to look at the sea. I gather that bits of the fort occasionally fall into the ocean, too. Don't know if they've lost any tourists over the edge, but it's pretty windy at the top and there aren't any barricades.

When we were there, there were less than 1,000 people living on the island. The Arans were one of the few places where the population went up during the Potato Famine - the potato blight didn't make it out to the islands, and the population went from 3,000 to 5,000 during that time. The main industries are fishing and tourism, although AT&T has a factory there that employs 35 people to put some sort of chip together. The island is kind of closed off - they don't allow outsiders to build vacation homes there. One of the other Arans did allow outside homes - land prices went through the roof, and either 400 or 4,000 vacation homes were built in one year.

By the way, if you go to Inis Mor, avoid the public restroom facilities at the pier in Kilronan, unless they've been repaired since we were there. The hand dryer only worked about every fourth try, and the plumbing was equally temperamental.