Galway and Inishmore

Galway is a very nice city. There isn't heaps in the way of tourist attractions in the city itself, but it makes a great hub to travel from, and it's nice to just walk around it. As such I spent yesterday after I arrived walking around, visiting a few more pubs, and today I took a tour to the nearby Aran Islands, specifically Inis Mór (or Inishmore) the largest of the three.
I mentioned in my Cliffs of Moher post how I was the only idiot wearing short sleeves. Today, again, I left my jumper in the Hostel. Seriously, what is wrong with me? This is Ireland! I do it like I have something to prove. What, or to whom remains a mystery. Upon arrival at the port for the ferry I saw threatening dark clouds all around me and cursed myself. In this case I happened to have been lucky - the weather fined up magnificently later on. This was also my first ferry of my Europe trip, and I have quite a few left to go. I just hope they're not all as crouded as this one, because most of them will take considerably longer than the 45 minutes it took to get to Inis Mór.

This is how the whole of Inishmore would have looked
before human settlement.

The island is similar in makeup to the burren - it's completely karst, so the broken limestone is abundant. My options for exploring it upon arrival were guided bus tour for €10, or bike hire for the same price. As the weather had not yet shown any promise and I am terminally lazy, guess which one I picked?
The bus seats were cramped. I mean cramped. Luckily I had nobody sitting next to me, because the only way I could sit is sideways. But the tour guide was funny and informative, so it was a good tour.
The first thing that struck me was his accent. Inis Mór is one of the few places left that still speaks Irish Gaelic regularly. The island only got electricity (and hence television) in the 1970s, and before that almost nobody spoke English, so Gaelic is still predominant. The guide, whilst understandable, had a very different accent, though still clearly Irish, than I had heard so far. It's hard to explain,  but it did sound like the accent of someone who usually speaks another language.

The fisherman and his son

The island only has a population of about 900 or so, but as it was one of the few places in Ireland that the potato blight barely effected, during and after the famine it had as many as 3000 people, then dropping again after a Tuberculosis epidemic. Now the number one industry, with tourism only coming second, is fishing. I saw one fisherman and his son at work, and I had to admire them. These were real fishermen, using the style of boat that has been typical here for over a hundred years and only minimal equipment. The tourguide spoke with the father in Gaelic, but the fisherman was only able to speak a few broken words of English to the tourists. Funny how an island, once the place to be in Ireland, is now one of the most remote and untouched. However, compared to how it was before human settlement it's practically a metropolis.
The landscape is as such barren. The perforated limestone is like a sieve for water and practically nothing can grow there. And yet, wherever there's a hellish speck of land that only wants to kill you, there's some loony who wants to live there. So people managed to somehow make it farmable. They did so by,  first of all, clearing the ground of loose rocks and building low walls for small paddocks. Then they hauled massive amounts of sand and seaweed from the shore to fill in the fields. Then they planted potatoes, because they apparently put up with anything, and after one season they do a pretty good job of turning that muck into workable soil. It seems to have worked too, because there's a lot of green here.

The main feature of the island is definitely the fort Dun Aengus. The first fortress was built on the edge of the frighteningly high and steep cliffs in pre-celtic times, about 2500 years ago at least. As fortresses usually are, it was repurposed a number of times by the different people who have lived there. Now it's just a ruin. But for views that'll make you want to lie down until the world stops spinning, it's second to none. The cliffs are nearly 100 metres high, and there is no guardrail or anything. Surprisingly no tourists have gone over in over 10 years.

Also interesting were the Seven Churches. Just what they sound like - it's a complex of ruined places of worship with a tumbling graveyard all round. Through a mixture of being as far from invading Vikings as possible and a need to prove their faith almost to the point of masochism, Monks of the medieval period loved building churches and monasaries in the most unlivable and nasty places in the british isles. Hence seven churches. Then Oliver Cromwell came along and spoiled all their fun, but that's another story.