🇮🇪 Ireland · West and North
The Aran Islands are three limestone crags planted in the mouth of Galway Bay, off the west of Ireland, and the largest of them, Inis Mór, is one of the most extraordinary places in the country. It is an island made of rock and of walls: thousands of kilometres of dry stone walls grid every inch of ground, drawing an unrepeatable mosaic from the air. Here the old Ireland survives more than anywhere else: the living Gaelic language, the landscape of stone, the Atlantic way of life and a history going back to prehistory.
Its absolute jewel is Dún Aonghasa, a prehistoric fort more than three thousand years old perched on the edge of a vertical cliff nearly 100 metres above the ocean, with no railing at all to protect you from the drop. But Inis Mór is much more: the Worm Hole, a perfect rectangular pool carved by the sea in the rock; the ruins of the Seven Churches from medieval monasticism; white sand beaches such as Kilmurvey; seals surfacing among the rocks; and those endless walls raised by generations of islanders on land they literally had to make by hand.
This guide covers Inis Mór with a practical eye: how to get there by ferry from Rossaveel or Doolin (or by light aircraft from Connemara airport), how to get around without a car on an island where the bicycle rules, how much it costs to enter Dún Aonghasa, what to see beyond the fort and why it is worth sleeping at least one night. A piece of Ireland suspended in time and in the Atlantic.
The history of Inis Mór is written in stone. Its prehistoric forts — Dún Aonghasa the greatest, hanging from a cliff — speak of more than three thousand years of occupation, though their exact function is still debated. In the fifth century, St Enda (Éanna) founded one of Ireland's first monasteries here, and the islands became a celebrated centre of Celtic monasticism, 'Ara na Naomh', Aran of the Saints. Under English rule they were poor, remote land, and their people survived on fishing, a little livestock and an almost impossible agriculture: the island's soil, on top of bare rock, was made by hand by the islanders, mixing sand and seaweed carried up from the sea, a fact as extraordinary as it is true. In the early twentieth century the playwright John Millington Synge spent summers on the islands and immortalised them in his writing, and in 1934 the film-maker Robert Flaherty shot 'Man of Aran', a documentary as famous as it is staged, which dramatised a hard life that in part no longer existed. Depopulation threatened the islands for decades, but Inis Mór holds on today as a stronghold of Irish and a unique destination. The full story is on our history page.
Read the full history ↓The Atlantic west and the north: Galway and its Fourteen Tribes, the Connemara of the famine roads and Kylemore, the Aran Islands as a refuge of the Irish language, the Cliffs of Moher above the karst of the Burren, and the Giant's Causeway, in Northern Ireland (United Kingdom), with its geology and the plantation of Ulster.
Read the history of West and North →No exact prices: a scale from $ (budget) to $$$$$ (luxury), with 2-3 options per category.
Origins, formation and what the sources say.
Long before Ireland existed as we know it, someone raised on the edge of a cliff on Inis Mór one of the most enigmatic constructions of ancient Europe. Dún Aonghasa — three concentric dry stone walls perched on the lip of a precipice almost 100 metres above the Atlantic — has dominated the island for millennia. Excavations have revealed that the site was occupied from around 1100 BC, in the late Bronze Age, and that its great walls were raised and extended through the Iron Age. It is not the only one: Inis Mór and its sister islands are scattered with prehistoric stone forts, such as Dún Dúchathair (the 'black fort'), Dún Eoghanachta and Dún Chonchúir on the neighbouring island.
What were they for? The debate is still open. For a long time they were interpreted as defensive fortresses, and some features support that idea, such as the 'chevaux de frise' at Dún Aonghasa: a field of thousands of stone slabs driven vertically into the ground around the fort to slow attackers, a defensive system very rare in Ireland. But the position on the cliff edge, with no access to the sea or to water, has led others to think they were also ceremonial enclosures, meeting places or symbols of the power of local elites.
The name links the fort to Aonghas, a figure from mythology, and for centuries tradition connected it to the Fir Bolg, a legendary people of Irish prehistory. Whatever its exact function, Dún Aonghasa is today one of the most impressive prehistoric monuments in Europe: a place where human work and the force of the ocean meet in vertiginous fashion.
If the forts speak of prehistory, the brightest chapter in Aran's history begins in the fifth century with one man: St Enda (Éanna). According to tradition, Enda was the son of a king of Ulster and had trained as a warrior, until the influence of his sister, the abbess St Fanchea, led him to renounce violence and power and embrace religious life. After studying at the monastery of Candida Casa, in present-day Scotland, he received around the year 484 some land on Inis Mór from his brother-in-law Aengus, king of Munster, and founded at Killeany (Cill Éinne, 'Enda's church') what is usually considered the first properly Irish monastery.
Enda turned Inis Mór into an entirely monastic island, with a network of communities whose monks imitated the asceticism of the first hermits of the Egyptian desert: days divided between prayer, manual work and sacred study, sleeping on stone or on a little straw, in extreme poverty. The place's reputation for holiness grew until it became one of the great centres of Celtic monasticism and a destination for pilgrimage.
Some of the great figures of the early medieval Irish Church passed through or trained on Aran: St Brendan the Navigator, who received his blessing there for his voyages; St Finnian of Clonard; St Jarlath; and even, according to tradition, St Columba (Colum Cille), who called the island 'the sun of the west'. Such was its prestige that the islands were left forever with the byname 'Ara na Naomh', 'Aran of the Saints'. From that era there remain across the island ruined churches, oratories and crosses, such as the group of the Seven Churches or the tiny Teampall Bheanáin, stone witnesses to an Ireland that was a beacon of faith and learning in early medieval Europe.
After the monastic centuries came harder times. In the Middle Ages the islands were controlled by Gaelic clans such as the O'Briens and the O'Flahertys, who fought over them for their strategic value at the entrance to Galway Bay. In the sixteenth century, as English power advanced, a garrison was established and the islands were absorbed into the colonial system, with the building of Arkin fort, near Killeany, during the Cromwellian period. For most of the inhabitants, however, life remained that of a poor, isolated, Irish-speaking farming and fishing community, on the margins of almost everything.
And it is here that one of the most astonishing — and true — facts about Inis Mór appears: much of the island's soil is not natural but made by human hands. On bare limestone, with hardly any earth, generations of islanders created cultivable plots by carrying up by hand, basket by basket, sand from the beaches and seaweed from the sea, which they mixed and spread over the rock until they formed a thin layer of fertile soil in which to plant potatoes and fodder. Each of the countless tiny fields, surrounded by the characteristic dry stone walls — which at the same time served to clear stones from the ground and give shelter from the wind — is the fruit of that titanic, patient effort.
The result is one of the most singular man-made landscapes in Europe: thousands of kilometres of walls gridding the island and a mosaic of plots built literally by hand. Life was strict subsistence: fishing in fragile 'currachs' (boats of canvas and wood), a few cows, potatoes, some fish and the sea always present, as much a livelihood as a threat. That hardship, and that dignity, would soon become material for artists and writers looking in Aran for an 'authentic' Ireland.
At the end of the nineteenth century, while Ireland was living through an intense cultural and nationalist revival, the Aran Islands went from being a forgotten corner to becoming a symbol. For the intellectuals of the Gaelic Revival — the movement that sought to recover the Gaelic language, legends and identity — Aran was where the 'true' Ireland was still alive: Irish as an everyday language, the old customs, the Atlantic way of life intact.
It was the poet W. B. Yeats who, in 1896, gave a young writer a piece of advice that would change Irish literature: 'Go to the Aran Islands. Live there as if you were one of the people themselves; express a life that has never found expression.' That young man was John Millington Synge. From 1898 onwards, Synge spent several summers on the islands, above all on Inis Meáin, learning Irish, listening to stories and writing everything down. Out of that experience came his book 'The Aran Islands' (1907), halfway between diary and ethnographic study, and some of his most celebrated plays, such as 'Riders to the Sea', a tragedy about an island mother who loses her men one by one to the ocean, drawn directly from the life and death Synge saw on Aran.
The gaze of Synge and the Revival writers fixed forever the image of the islands as a reserve of authenticity and noble hardship. That image had much truth in it, but also something of idealisation: the islanders were specific people, with a difficult life that did not always fit the romantic myth being built around them from Dublin or London. That tension between the real Aran and the imagined Aran would flare up again, years later, with a film.
In 1934, the American film-maker Robert J. Flaherty — a pioneer of documentary and author of 'Nanook of the North' — released 'Man of Aran', a film shot on Inis Mór that took the islands to the whole world. Filmed with spectacular images of a raging sea breaking against the cliffs and of men struggling to survive in a ferocious environment, the film was an international success, won prizes and fixed in the global imagination the idea of Aran as the last stronghold of a heroic humanity facing nature.
There was a problem: much of what you see was staged. Flaherty, true to his method, did not film life as it was but as he imagined it 'must' have been. He gathered people who were not a family and had them play father, mother and son. And, above all, he devoted long, dramatic sequences to hunting basking sharks with harpoons from small boats, a practice the islanders had abandoned some fifty years earlier and which had to be relearned specially for the film, with the help of an expert brought in from outside. Even the seaweed gathering and other tasks were recreated for the camera.
The result is a fascinating paradox: 'Man of Aran' is at once a visual masterpiece of documentary cinema and a largely falsified document, which romanticises and exaggerates the hardship of island life and shows activities that no longer existed. Critics have debated its value for decades: is it a portrait or a fiction disguised as truth? For today's traveller, watching it — it is usually screened at the Ionad Árann centre in Kilronan — is a great way into the mythology of the islands, as long as you keep in mind how much staging there is in every shot. The 'authenticity' of Aran, once again, turned out to be partly constructed by an outsider's gaze.
The twentieth century was, for Aran as for much of rural western Ireland, a time of depopulation. Emigration, above all to the United States and to the cities, gradually emptied islands where life remained hard and opportunities scarce. Many islanders left never to return, and the population, which had been considerable, fell drastically over the decades. The isolation that had preserved the language and the customs also became an economic sentence.
The great change came with better communications and, above all, with tourism. The arrival of regular ferries from Rossaveel and Doolin, the building of the small Connemara airport with its light aircraft, and the growing appeal of a place like Inis Mór — prehistoric forts, stone walls, living Irish, overwhelming landscape — turned the islands into a destination. Today much of the island economy revolves around visitors: hire bikes, minibuses, traps, B&Bs, pubs, seafood restaurants and the shops selling the celebrated Aran sweater, the wool jumper with interlaced stitches born on these islands.
Inis Mór also holds on as one of the great strongholds of the Irish language: it is Gaeltacht, and Irish is still the language of the community, spoken at home, at school and in the pub, though everyone also has English for the visitor. The contemporary challenge is the usual one in such unique places: keeping a real community alive — with young people who stay, services and year-round work — and not turning the island into a set for tourists, while protecting an irreplaceable prehistoric and natural heritage. Anyone who comes to Inis Mór and stays the night, when the last ferry leaves and the island recovers its silence of stone and sea, understands that something ancient and true still beats here.