Irish writers have a new colony to flock to: Rathlin Island, where Richard Branson helped restore the Manor House. Paul Perry reports.
Today the ferry is docked. And going nowhere. The winds are up and if you wanted to leave the island, you might be able to persuade Johnny to take you over in his rib (rigid inflatable boat), for a small sum. A rocky ride it would be, too. I've decided once was enough, and am sitting tight to write.
It's the reason I'm here, after all, on Rathlin, Northern Ireland's only inhabited off-shore island, as writer-in-residence, along with Iggy McGovern. Earlier in September, we were greeted off the Caledonian MacBrayne ferry by Rathlin co-op members after a 45-minute trip across the Sea of Moyle, a six-mile stretch of water where the Children of Lir are reported to have taken refuge.
It's not surprising. Myth haunts this place. Myth, history and superstition. We're here for six weeks and are already into week five. I've been sun-burnt, soaked, stranded and enchanted. Our weekly writing workshop is well attended. You're talking about a turn-out of seven or eight people. Some weeks there's more, which is not bad really, considering that the members make up about 10 per cent of the island's population.
The stories are rife. And we're here to encourage the islanders to get it all down on paper. For such a small island, only six miles long, and one mile wide, Rathlin has a lot to offer, not least in the manner of folk-tale and history. It was here that Marconi made the world's first radio transmission across the water from Rathlin to Ballycastle in 1898, from the East lighthouse. The BBC was here recently to interview people on the three missing days in March, after an island calendar was published a few days short. One rumour suggests day-light saving hours are to be done away with on the island. It doesn't take an official edict to realise that island time is altogether different to mainland time.
As Derek Mahon writes in his poem, Rathlin, while here, we're unsure as to "whether the future lies before us or behind". Home for the six weeks has been the Manor House which is run by the National Trust, a recently renovated Edwardian building once owned by the Gauge family. And of course there's a story connected with its renovation. Richard Branson, whose hot-air balloon crashed into the sea off Rathlin in 1987 after its record-breaking cross-Atlantic flight, was rescued from the sea a few miles northwest of Bull Point. He later returned and presented the Rathlin Island Trust with £25,000 towards the renovation of the Manor House.
Each room is different. Each one has its own ghost. One woman said to me, "I don't mind the ghosts. I just hate it when they walk behind me." Branson is just one of many famous visitors to the island. History has it that Robert the Bruce hid out here in 1306. He spent the time watching a spider in a cave that now bears his name. Inspired by the spider's efforts to bridge its web across the mouth of the cave, Bruce returned to Scotland, where he defeated the English at the Battle of Bannockburn and regained the Scottish throne.
But it's the island's own folklore which sustains me. One man has claimed not only to have seen a UFO, but to have repaired it with the help of diesel. At a night at McCuaigs, the island's only pub, I saw relations of the Gauge family, who were here to celebrate a christening, mingle with a troupe of 20 gay men on a walking holiday. In the corner stood some of the locals, with ferrymen and farmers and divers. A curious mix.
I got talking to a couple of the divers. Many of them come to explore the wrecks which haunt the island's waters. One diver asks me if I dive. I say no. He wants to know why. I say safety. "But it is a safe pastime," he says, shaking a little. He's had the bends five times. When I hold up my hands, he protests, "four weren't my fault."
The most famous wreck off the island is the HMS Drake, the flagship of the British Navy during the first World War, which was torpedoed by a German U-Boot and sank in 1917. A buoy marks the spot. You can see it from Church Bay, where holiday homes are now being built, with a mixed reaction from the locals. From the bay, you can also see the remains of the kelp-store. It's a place which up until the 1920s was used to dry seaweed. At one time, there were 150 kelp kilns on Rathlin. Kelp was used in the linen industry and as a fertiliser, and the 19th-century kelp-store represents an important part of the island's economic and social history.
Beneath the kelp-store is a seal colony. There are 12, 16 at time basking and barking, curious and majestic observers of the tourists, walkers, writers, and camera crews. Today it's an RTÉ documentary on photography. Tomorrow, who knows. On a fair day, you can see the Mull of Kintyre, or the Mull, as people here call it, and another Scottish island called Islay. On any other day, there are the three lighthouses, the windmills, rusted anchors, lobster pots, golden hares bounding through the gorse, yellow-headed gannets diving into the water, and thousands of sea-birds at Ireland's largest bird sanctuary, though the puffins had gone by the time we arrived.
There's so much to consider and write about. So much so, that what I had intended to do here remains unfinished. But I'll be leaving with so much more. Things that aren't easily forgotten. Like the fact that in one day in the 1840s, nearly 500 people left in search of an easier life across the Atlantic, when the famine threatened the existence of many rural communities throughout Ireland. A commemorative stone has been erected to their memory high above Church Bay.
It's not the only monument on the island. This year a large granite writer's chair looking out over the bay, with an inscription from Seamus Heaney, was unveiled by the Ballycastle writers' group. There were gale force winds at the ceremony to unveil the chair, whose creators also make grave-stones, the reason, perhaps, why I heard one woman say she'd be afraid to sit in it.
Someone asks if I'll be back to visit. I know I will. But as for the writer's chair, I'm not so sure.
Paul Perry's book, The Drowning of the Saints is published by Salmon Publishing, www.salmonpoetry.com (£12 in UK).