Ireland's Aran Islands, Hiding in Plain Sight

Just as in the days of J.M. Synge, who wrote his celebrated plays there, the Arans can feel like a place lost in time.

'The last time I saw Bridin Concannon, she was walking toward me along the narrow road on the westernmost edge of the island of Inishmaan, off the west coast of Ireland.

“Were you out at Synge’s Chair?” I called out as she approached.

The sun behind her hung, unmasked by clouds, low and long in the Irish early summer sky.

”I was,” she said. Her voice was strong, clear — the way one’s voice can be when exhilarated. ”I’ll start writing a play soon.”

We both laughed loudly, and strode past one another. She was headed back toward the village and I toward the cliffs over the North Atlantic, to a perch of limestone that the author frequented during his time here, a spot known locally as Synge’s Chair.

The Irish playwright J.M. Synge (1871-1909) first came to the Aran Islands in the summer of 1898 looking for inspiration and to learn the Irish language. Over the next several years he would return again and again, growing more connected to the people and the wind-and- sea-battered land they inhabited.

Synge’s most famous work, “Playboy of the Western World” was inspired by a story he heard while on the islands, and caused riots in Dublin when it was first staged in 1906. The foremost playwright of the Irish Renaissance — a movement inspired by strong political Nationalism and a revival of Celtic traditions — Synge was co-founder of the Abbey, also known as the National Theatre of Ireland. All six of his plays are either set in or heavily influenced by his time in Aran.

The three remote Aran Islands of Inishmore, Inishmaan and Inisheer hide in plain sight in the mouth of Galway Bay. They are still predominantly Irish-speaking, insular and, as even in Synge’s era, considered a place lost in time.

It was the poet William Butler Yeats who suggested that Synge come to these islands. “Go to Aran,” Yeats told his friend. “Live there as if you were one of the people themselves; express a life that has never found expression.”'>>>

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/10/travel/aran-islands-ireland-jm-synge.html?