Another Life Michael Viney: The nearest island beyond my study window, a mere couple of kilometres out to sea, has a pleasingly symmetrical, bosomy shape, with a rocky chasm as cleavage.
In a sharp early sun I sometimes lift binoculars and go for an imaginary walk, from the low, black rocks, up broken slopes of grass and bracken, to the bare bluffs confronting the ocean beyond. There could be . . . there could be anything - otters, seals, great skuas, unguessable flotsam.
I've never gone to see.
All around Ireland, but especially off the west coast, there are these alluringly wild, uninhabited islands, some dauntingly remote, some nearer at hand but "impossible" to land on. Frehill Island isn't absolutely impossible, or it would never have had sheep in the days of the currachs: a falling tide reveals a little lagoon among the rocks. "Acceptable as a waystop in calm conditions" is the careful judgment of a book that could mediate a whole new adventure in Ireland's awakening to the sea.
Oileáin is written by a Dublin solicitor, David Walsh, who has spent his summers since 1991 paddling his kayak to almost 300 islands off every coast, landing and camping on most of the uninhabited ones. His guide began as a website for fellow kayakers (www.oileain.org) and has now become a book replete with seductive photographs, notably by Sean Pierce. Some are dramatic, wave-level views of towering cliffs; others, full of sea-pinks, daisies and foam-girt rocks, catch the special exhilaration of sojourns ashore.
The guide covers all the islands, including the 10 per cent that are populated and teeming now with summer visitors, but it's the distant, mysterious isles, long deserted by people or never settled or grazed, that are so powerfully intriguing. Walsh knows the best landing and camping-places and whether there's drinkable water. More importantly, he knows the habits of the local sea and how to navigate it safely. If there's one unmissable message in Oileáin, it's that you don't just unstrap your kayak from the roof of the car, launch it and paddle off hopefully into the waves.
There are new words in the kayaker's shop-talk - "clapotis", for example: "a confused sea state caused by wave systems colliding into each other, usually experienced where waves reflect off a steep shore . . . Unpleasant." A "boomer" is an exceptional wave that suddenly rears up above a reef or shallows. "Surge and scend" is what an Atlantic swell does at a landing place, just as you prepare to leap.
Unremitting surge and scend attends any landing on Fastnet Rock, with its giant lighthouse - a 10 km excursion from Cape Clear Island. "It is a bleak, desolate place," writes Walsh, "Its buildings all shuttered, its paths narrow, its stairs steep." He writes with feeling also about the islands off Doonlaughan, north of Slyne Head: "The whole area outside the islands is strewn with dangerous booming reefs, and shallows of every kind. Here be dragons! Frightening waves tube, for a long way off, to great height and power, in almost any conditions."
Other western islands, just as awesome, come highly recommended, if not always for a landing. The passage through and around The Stags of Broad Haven, off Mayo, "huge, dramatic, pointy-topped rocks usually circled in foam" is "one of the significant Irish sea-kayaking experiences".
If everyone in a small boat had David Walsh's sense and sensibility, one might not have to fear the slow human wear on many of the more accessible islands, left now as the nearest thing Ireland has to wilderness. Seabird colonies are already under pressure from human disruptions of the ocean food chain, and any heavy disturbance of their island nesting grounds in early summer could exact a sad ecological cost (think of the Antarctic penguins, increasingly harassed by ecotourism). I'm inclined to trust canoeists, whose very pursuit compels respect for nature: it's the engines that can spoil their handlers, in this as in so much else.
A tiny canoeist paddling beneath an immense rock arch at Tory Island, off Donegal, is one of the more striking photographs in Oileáin. A puffin perched on the same cliffs also makes a fine cover for Toraigh, a new, bilingual visitor's guide to the island. It is written by Cóilín MacLochlainn, whose personal interest is in the island's birds (corncrakes among them), and expert support is evident in everything from island history and archaeology to photography and art.
Oileáin: A Guide to the Irish Islands is published by Pesda Press (www.pesdapress.com) at 30. Toraigh/Tory Island is published by Comharchumann Toraigh, Email: ccthorai@tinet.ie