Island Keepers: The Dreamlike Life of Great Blasket’s Caretakers
The Great Blasket Island Experience
Imagine waking in the morning to the sound of a gentle breeze and the nearby ebb and flow of the Atlantic Ocean. As you stand there looking out from the half door of your cottage, the waves urge you to begin your morning commute – a stroll down to the beach across a grassy dew-soaked track with yellow and purple heathers tickling your toes. You get down to the white sand, look out across the endless ocean and realize that for the next six months, this all belongs to you.
For the caretakers of the Great Blasket Island, this is life. This remote and romantic piece of land is one of six islands off the southwest coast of Ireland that for years lay uninhabited. While a few took the short ferry trip from Dunquin across the bay to enjoy its natural wonders, staying overnight was almost always out of the question. That has now changed thanks to Billy O’Connor, his partner Alice Hayes, and a curious rotating caretaker role that every year captures the imagination of thousands of applicants looking to escape to a piece of paradise on earth.
“When we first started to rent out the cottages, we had a friend who looked after them for us,” explains Billy, co-owner of the Great Blasket Island Experience. “He was great and so reliable and when he left to pursue his dream of teaching, we really found ourselves stuck. Alice took a chance and put an ad out on Facebook. We thought we’d struggle to find someone but were inundated.”
When the caretaker role was first advertised, the couple received over 23,000 applications, including from countries as far away as Australia and Iran. It helped that the vacancy caused a stir in the media, featuring on major news channels including CNN, CBS and the BBC. The ad explained that successful candidates would spend six months from April to October looking after five rental cottages and the island’s only coffee shop which today still doubles as the caretaker’s residence.
In 2019, the first caretakers took up their role on the island and every year since, thousands of hopefuls, explorers and dreamers apply to be the next custodians.
The Blaskets, as they are more commonly referred to, hold a special and significant place in Irish hearts. Like many islands scattered up and down the Wild Atlantic Way, they were bastions of Irish culture; a window through which writers, linguists and academics could see into the past and experience the life of the Irish peasant. Encouraged by these visitors, many of the locals, including Tomás Ó Criomhthain and Peig Sayers, wrote about life on the island and left behind rich portrayals of a unique heritage that later inspired many of the country’s famous authors.
Records show that in the middle of the 19th century, the islands had 175 residents. Between the devastation of The Great Famine, emigration and the allure of the modern world the population gradually declined. By 1953, it stood at just twenty-two and the decision was taken to relocate those who remained to the mainland.
Over seventy years later, life on the Great Blasket Island is still very much off-grid. When they took it on over ten years ago, Billy and Alice were determined to preserve the way of life and offer visitors an escape from the hustle and bustle of the modern world. Running water comes from a nearby spring, and while heating is provided by a peat-burning stove and you boil your kettle to a whistle on their gas hob, there is no electricity. That means that when night falls, the stars, the moon and the candles in your sitting room are the only lights you’ll see.
“The stars and the turf fire were enough for us,” says one of the island’s most recent custodians, Darren McFadden. “There’s no light pollution out there, so the night sky is amazing. It is so special.”
Darren and his girlfriend, Emma Melay, applied for the caretaker position when it came up last year. Having spent the previous summer on Inisheer in the Aran Islands, they had been bitten by the island bug.
“We were looking for a new adventure,” recalls the 35-year-old. “We knew there were lots of people going for it but we got the interview with Billy and Alice and they offered us the six months. We jumped at it. We had got used to that pace of life and we knew we were never going to get the chance to spend six months on an island as beautiful and remote as The Great Blasket.”
He recalls mornings waking up to a pod of playful dolphins. There were evenings when basking sharks dragged and arched their massive bodies across the ocean as he and Emma looked on in awe from the cliffs. The terns, puffins and other seafaring birds dipping in and out of the ocean provided nearly as much entertainment as the resident colony of seals whose endless comic caper they sat and watched for hours. Darren says he would do it all again in a heartbeat.
“I miss waking up each morning and being surrounded by all of that nature,” he says. “Being able to go for a hike without any effort, or sitting there looking at the seals and the changing sea. Having my coffee at the half-open door and watching the island unfold before me. The Great Blasket Island and all the islands off the coast of our country are an important part of our culture. It was such a privilege to be custodians of it for those six months. I have to say, Billy and Alice were great to work for too. We’ll never forget it.”
While Darren, Emma and the caretakers who have come before them might be at the extreme end of experiential travel, there is little doubt that more and more visitors are seeking unique and sustainable opportunities to immerse themselves in. Irish providers are responding, tapping into the clean, green and sustainable customs and way of life that have always been part of our history and heritage but just never had the label.
“My grandfather and granduncle bought the properties on the island years ago,” says Billy. “It was more of a passion than a business and I inherited not just the properties but the passion to look after them. We want to keep knowledge of the island going. It’s very special. It’s like stepping back in time when you go out there. There aren’t many places like it in the world. We’ve been entrusted with looking after it for the next generation and that means so much to us.”
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