“Go to the Aran Islands,” as WB Yeats once told his friend and 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).

“JM Synge [was] one of Ireland’s most famous playwrights,” says Marie-Thérèse de Blácam, who, along with her husband, Ruairí, runs the Inis Meáin Knitting Company. Of the three, Synge’s association with Inis Meáin is the strongest, she notes. “He spent much more time here than the other Aran Islands as it was always known as the most cultural. Irish music, poetry and storytelling have always been associated with the Aran Islands, and that richness of culture remains within the island community.”

Like Synge, Ruairí’s father, Tarlach de Blácam, first arrived here in the early 1970s with aspirations to develop his writing. “Tarlach was a graduate in Celtic languages from Trinity College Dublin and had gone to Inis Meáin in the late 1960s, like the previous scholars, to immerse himself in the language and culture of the island,” Marie-Thérèse says.

Ruairí’s mother, Áine Ní Chonghaile, had herself grown up on Inis Meáin. “When the pair married in 1973, they were determined to make their home on the island, which called for a spirit of independence, resourcefulness and innovation due to its remote and isolated location. They became involved in community development, including the island co-op to help provide jobs for islanders to try to prevent them from emigrating.”

Rather than writing, the lore and language of the island took on a rather different form. In 1976, with limited resources – including a lack of running water and electricity – and just six knitting machines, the couple founded the Inis Meáin Knitting Company as a means of sustaining permanent employment on the island and preserving its knowledge and cultural heritage.

Fifty years on, the company, as well as the culture of the island, is celebrated in a specially commissioned short film. “Martin Hayes, the musician in the film, is a musical genius and close family friend, particularly of Ruairí’s late mother, who sadly passed away in February this year,” Marie-Thérèse de Blácam says. “She dedicated much of her life to Irish traditional music in various ways and Martin is a complete master of the fiddle.”

Synge also features, with a well-thumbed edition of The Aran Islands seen on screen. “JM Synge is always an inspiration and the house scenes are shot in Synge’s house. We wanted to allude to the island’s rich culture through several touchpoints of the film, but equally to the living landscape of the island, which is extraordinary and informs our designs as much as the rich textile history and culture of Inis Meáin.

“Inis Meáin Knitting Company remains the only knitting factory ever established on any of the Aran Islands,” Marie-Thérèse says. “Hand-knitters in the Aran Islands are now very few and far between and almost non-existent in the younger generation. Therefore, almost the only sweaters that can be said with any certainty to be made in the Aran Islands are made by Inis Meáin Knitting Company.”

This thread can be followed back generations, to before Synge landed here. “Many of our designs have their roots in island life [and] workwear,” Marie-Thérèse says. “So, many of the same elements or functions reoccur in collections through the decades.Right now, we’re working on some oversized Fair Isles that are quite similar to designs we did in the 1980s.”

“The simplicity and unity of the dress increases in another way the local air of beauty,” as Synge noted in 1911. The history of this community is, very aptly, woven into its knitting.