I was in Inishbofin a fortnight ago, for I think what was my fourth time. In April, a gang of us from Inis Meáin had booked a swim and a hike there, and boat-times (four!) necessitated an overnight stay. I stayed for two nights, an improvement on the last time I’d been there – back in 2018, long before I’d laid eyes on Inis Meáin – when I went for two nights and stayed five.
That 2018 trip, for all reasons and none, opened my eyes to ideas of my potential and possibility, what life might be for me. It was in Bofin in 2018 that I got the physical sensations of enchantment and captivation – as complete and palpable as arresting art or perfect lines of poetry – that I’d spend the next few years pursuing.
That pursuit ultimately sent me to Inis Meáin. And now it’s sending me to the next place, wherever that is.
Okay, so, minus all the emotional baggage I’m pelting at Bofin, Bofin is a beautiful place. There’s an obviously active population there, there are three hotels, a hostel that I’m so fond of, an impressive selection of eateries, beautiful walks, and palpable history.
A walk around the west end of the island provides the wild solitude many of us go to islands for; grass that grows no higher than carpet, bemused scraggy sheep up the steep hill on one side and a beach way below on the other, and out west the abandoned island of Inishark and the buildings that were left that October day in 1960. Out on the west end, the elements vie for attention and I found glory in the company of the crashing ocean, a foam-strewn bog and the concrete benches that are court-side seats to the end of human reach.
The East End is a wee idyllic onto itself; perfect for swimming and rambling and thinking and wondering. Its charming line of meticulously renovated artisan cottages (holiday homes most of them, alas) and supreme swimming waters do all the enchanting any of us are looking for.
And yet, all that enchanting wasn’t the most memorable part of the 2018 visit.
In the hostel in 2018, I met a woman with the most glorious tattoo of a cherry blossom tree across the expanse of her back; it was objectively splendid. But I was young and foolish and I asked her, was she not worried she’d regret it? And sound as you like, she told me that at her age and stage, she knew who she was; she trusted her own decisions, based as they were on her own knowledge of herself.
Such assurance had never occurred to me, and to learn it could be was incredibly empowering – especially to one who had so feared regret. She showed me that decisions of mine, based on my knowledge of me, could broker no real regret. I do think regularly of her and her splendid tattoo, though I never saw her again, nor do I remember her name.
That time too in 2018, me and another woman I met at the hostel went off to the Lughnasa bonfire below at the beach. We only had the one bottle of wine between us, so we couldn’t have been drunk if we’d tried to be – which is important context to one of the most memorable moments of my life.
Hours after, when the bonfire was dying and the singing was done, the sun rose and I remember vividly it catching the church on Croagh Patrick in its glint. I remember too the fire-orange of that sun as it rose over the Twelve Bens, and the gradual creep of its golden glow across the water, up the beach, over our toes, until it had washed over all of us. Splendid by itself, no doubt, but the physical sensation it stirred in me opened my eyes to all a landscape could rouse in one; it set me on a course of wondering, searching, appreciating, expressing.
In short, it put me writing.
When I was on Bofin a fortnight ago, I got a text saying – and I quote – ‘Wtf. You’re spending your last weekend on the island on a different island?’ Not an unreasonable statement, to be fair. The event we’d gone for had been cancelled the week previously, but I was drawn to back to Bofin, and good that I was, for it was there that I saw my time on Inis Meáin with purest clarity.
Knowing nobody, having nobody to talk to, I saw what had taken me to Bofin four times before, and later to Inishturk, to Arranmore, to Achill. I saw what had led me to apply for a job on Clare Island, to pop off to Inis Meáin for a few days during COVID, to tell a man on the phone that yes, I’d come out on Thursday on a year’s contract. I saw what had kept me there for four years.
I saw the romance that draws us to islands; the wilderness, the wind to shout into, the dramatic ideas we have of the seafarers’ life, of boats and edges and boundaries, of the relief of human insignificance beside Atlantic might, of strength and fortitude and hardiness, and communities that embody such. I saw a life made more wholesome by necessary simplicity.
I felt the peace there in Bofin that had first lured me there, and the inner alignment that comes to me in vast spaces like the lake’s edge in Chicago, up in the west village, at the front door of the cottage with miles of land before me. I saw how such space, particularly beside the sea, illuminates me and fires up all the ideas I’ve ever and never had.
And I recognised for the first time that I hadn’t gone to – and stayed in – Inis Meáin because I didn’t know what I wanted. I’d gone because I knew what I didn’t want, and there was more courage in that than I’d ever given myself credit for.
Bofin had one last insight for me, and later that evening I got chatting to a lad from Donegal with fluent Irish who’d come to the island to work in Murray’s Bar for the summer. Like I had done when a teaching job had come up in the primary school on Cape Clear, I instinctively considered going for it. I even asked him if the accommodation was included.
But I never heard his answer. Because in those moments of him praising the island and the job, I realised that my island-living chapter is closed, that I was and am done. That any other spell on any other island would only ever be an attempt to recreate all I had in Inis Meáin.
We don’t recreate that which has been most precious.
Some of the photos belong to Aedín Ní Thiarnaigh, who was also inspired by Bofin and wrote about it here in her colún na seachtaine in the Irish Independent.
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