Huddled around a turf fire in a thatched cottage on Inishmaan, one of the Aran Islands, is an unlikely place to find a select group of Irish actors, writers and scholars on a sunny summer afternoon. But so it was on Saturday when the 300-year-old, carefully restored cottage - which the playwright, John Millington Synge, visited regularly at the turn of the century - was officially opened.
Over the past four years it has been retrieved from a state of dilapidation and will now be open to the public as a museum dedicated to the playwright and his work. It will also incorporate a small Synge reference library and offer accommodation to writers and Synge scholars.
Islanders and guests from home and abroad gathered at the opening to hear of the enormous influence which the island, and the cottage, in particular, had on Synge's writing. The playwright, Brian Friel, who performed the opening, recalled how Synge arrived on Inishmaan for the first time in 1898, on a visit suggested by W.B. Yeats.
When the paths of Synge and Yeats first crossed, Synge had graduated from Trinity College, Dublin, where he learned Irish, and was becoming "a sort of 19th century hippy or dropout". Yeats urged him to go to Aran and find a life not expressed in literature.
The island changed Synge's life and remade him, Mr Friel said. It was there that he heard the stories and the language that provided him with material for such masterpieces as Playboy of the Western World and Riders to the Sea. "He's the man who made Irish theatre and he's a man before whom we all genuflect," Mr Friel said. Others recalled how Synge would sit by the fire in the cottage, now known as Teach Synge, talking to his hosts, Brid and Padin Mac Donnchadha, and playing the fiddle for their neighbours. A great-granddaughter of the MacDonnchadhas, who was born and raised in the cottage and lived there with her parents and 10 brothers and sisters up to 1978, became worried in recent years about the state of the cottage and took it upon herself to have it fully restored.
"As I got older I became more conscious of the importance of the house - not only because of Synge but because of the many other political, scholarly and literary people, such as Padraig Mac Piarais, Eoin Mac Neill, Father Eoghan O Gramhnaigh, Prof Una Ni Fhaircheallaigh and Lady Gregory, who stayed during the Gaelic Revival and to whom the cottage was known as Ollscoil na Gaeilge, and also Eamon de Valera and others who visited later on," explained Ms Treasa Ni Fhatharta, who now lives in London.
"I knew of no other existing building in Ireland which physically represented the meeting of scholars and writers with the peasants of the west, with their ancient language and stories. It was these encounters, after all, which generated the great literary renaissance," she said.
She set about seeking grant assistance for the project, and Udaras na Gaeltachta agreed to supply 50 per cent of the restoration costs if she could find the rest from non-governmental sources.
Many of those who contributed to the restoration fund were present for the official opening, including the actors, Stephen Rea and Brid Brennan; Senator David Norris; playwright John Arden and his wife, Margaretta D'Arcy; newscaster Eileen Dunne and her husband, Macdara O Fatharta, who also grew up in Teach Synge; novelist Tim O'Grady; Prof Nicholas Grene of TCD, organiser of the annual Synge summer school; author Tim Robinson, and the Minister of State, Mr Eamon O Cuiv.