Another classic is Maurice O’Sullivan’s Twenty Years A-Growing about his island boyhood. In the early years of the 20th century, scholars flocked to the island to learn Irish and to collect folklore, but their most significant undertaking was to encourage the local islanders to record their own experiences in their own words, and the results are works that have become classics of Irish and world literature, including Peig Sayers’ autobiography and later reflections. With my friends, I shared a cab to the newly built Blasket Centre, a marvelous collection of historical data, local art works, literature, and audiovisual material to provide the background you need to fully appreciate a trip to the island. I travel Europe without a car, and found the Dingle Peninsula easy to navigate.
Easily accessible if the weather holds – you must telephone the ferry at 9:30 in the morning to check that it is running – the Great Blasket was the highlight of my week on the Dingle Peninsula, County Kerry, Ireland. The site is administered by the Office of Public Works of Ireland as a National Monument. The Great Blasket is now deserted, its one village in ruins. In An Old Woman’s Reflections, Sayers (1873-1958) is looking out on a sea as “quiet and shining” as that before me now in 2019 and is recounting the pleasures and griefs of her life on this same island all those years before. A first stop wherever I travel is to a bookstore to buy works by local authors, which is how I came to be reading Peig Sayers while I was sitting on a grassy knoll on the Great Blasket Island in southwestern Ireland.
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