“Go to the Aran Islands,” as WB Yeats once told his friend, the contemporary Irish writer and poet JM Synge, who in the late 19th century was ensconced in Paris. “Live there as if you were one of the people on the beach.” Synge took up his advice, arriving first on Inishmore (Árainn), the largest of the islands – which sit off west coast of Ireland, jutting out into the Atlantic – and the only one then connected with the mainland, by steamer from Galway. In his collection of journal entries, published in 1907 as the book The Aran Islands, he describes travelling onwards to Inishmaan (Inis Meáin), the middle of the three isles. And as his Gaelic begins to improve, he can feel civilisation slipping away from him (and he’s not entirely displeased about this turn of events).
