On a sunny July Sunday, we parked our van in Magheroarty in North West Donegal and walked down the pier to the small passenger ferry to take us to Tory Island, the most remote inhabited island off the Irish coast.  We were laden down with bags, mainly of rattling provisions (i.e. wine😀) for our three night/four day stay on the island. Although we had read online that there was a shop on Tory, it was recommended to bring as much as possible with us.  As we walked to the boat, Caoimhin kicked his sandal vigorously to release a pebble lodged under his foot – a little too forcefully because the sandal sailed into the air and landed in the water where it bobbed with the seaweed 😮. He ran down the pier steps to where a small  boat was moored, grabbed a hook and managed….eventually… to fish his footwear out of the water just before the ferry departed.

After that excitement, the boat journey was uneventful. We had booked our ferry tickets online the previous week for the 1pm crossing but we could have bought them at the little office on the pier. There was plenty of space on the boat, the inside seating area was virtually empty, most people opting to sit or stand at the railing outside on the deck. The boatman told us that the first sailing in the morning from the Margheroarty pier and the last sailing in the evening from the island were the busy ones as most visitors were day trippers.  

The  fourteen and a half kilometer journey took forty five minutes and luckily for us, the wind was light and the sea was glass-smooth, not always the case.  There was a time in the 1970s when the island was completely cut off for eight long weeks due to continuous storms and tumultuous seas. Some islanders left after that harsh winter to set up home on the mainland, only the hardiest and most resilient can survive out on the very edge of the world.

 The Donegal coast was still visible when we disembarked on the island but the mainland felt faraway, as if we had arrived in a remote timeless place. A couple of men were mending fishing nets in the harbor under the shadow of a Tau Cross,  a large ‘T’  shaped structure made of a single slab of mica slate and a form of crucifix  associated with early  Greek Church.  As mica slate is not  found on the island, the cross must have been made elsewhere and brought to the Island sometime during the 12^th century. Over the years it has become a symbol of indestructibility and it is the custom to pray to it for protection before heading out to sea.

Silhouetted against the blue sky and visible from the harbor was the round tower, all that remains of the monastery founded by St Colmcille in the 6th century. It was evident that a variety of visitors have been coming to Tory since the earliest times, saints and scholars, pirates and adventurers, artists and fishermen. Although we now regard the offshore islands as very isolated places, in an earlier era when transport was by sea, they were actually the centers of commerce and learning where goods and ideas were traded and it was the mainland that was a forbidding densely-forested, barely penetrable place.

Our Airbnb was a stone’s throw from the slipway where the ferry docked in Baile Thiar (West Town), which was convenient for hauling our heavy bag of clinking luggage.  Our large bedroom window looked out both over the sea and the walled graveyard, nice juxtaposition of life and death. Four of us stayed in the rented house and the other five stayed in the Tory Island Hotel (Óstán Thoraí) which was two minutes’ walk away and overlooked both the pier and a sandy beach.

This was the first visit to the island for all nine in our group and we were really lucky with the weather. Locals told us that we had arrived on the first fine day of the year and the sunshine continued during our visit with spectacular sunsets until our last day when clouds rolled in and there was a spattering of rain.

Tory is a small island, about three kilometers long and a kilometer wide flanked by high sea cliffs at the eastern end (Tor Mor) and a lighthouse at the flatter western end. At the last census (2022) the population was 141 but it has a secondary school with a total of five  pupils. An expected intake of four additional pupils in first year this September will be a big boost.  Baile Thiar where we stayed has the largest center of population with the hotel, church, craft shop and a grocery store which  also doubled as the post office. Most other houses are clustered  in Baile Thoir (East Town)with an occasional house dotted around elsewhere.

Tory Island is a paradise for birds and wildlife.  Although it is virtually treeless because of the high winds, there was a myriad of grasses and colorful wildflowers, orchids, heathers and an abundance of biodiversity.  Rabbits scampered in the early morning and evenings, a pair of swans and a raft of ducks swam on the lakes. The human population may be small, but the bird population is huge with large colonies of gulls, terns, pipits and oystercatchers. It is an important breeding ground for corncrakes, from now on I will always associate their distinctive call, so like a creaking door, with Tory.   We could even hear it from our kitchen table and it is a sound which has virtually disappeared from the rest of the country.

At the eastern end of the island, we spent a couple of hours watching hundreds of puffins on the grassy slopes beyond a rock called the Wishing Stone. It seemed to be  flight school  for the young  pufflings, it was hilarious watching the aborted take-offs and the crash landings on the cliff.

After exploring the island on foot, we took to the seas and hired a boat for a trip around the island which departed from the harbour at West Town. Our captain was also the only farmer on the island, rearing  sheep at the eastern end of the island.  He was accompanied by his two young grandsons, one who attended the island  primary school and the other in secondary school. The family spoke Irish together but switched seamlessly to lilting English when chatting to us.

                 The sheer cliffs were even more majestic when seen from the water  with an incredible diversity of coastal erosion features – sea stacks and arches, sea caves and blow-holes and very long, isolated spurs of rock jutting out into the ocean.  From a distance, some rocky features seemed manmade but the granite outcrops are natural, formed by differential weathering of  the granite bedrock. Many of these have local ‘rock’ names (Tór Mór, The Big Key, The Anvil, The Wishing Stone, Balors Fort, Balors Prison, and The Cave, among others). Some of the names refer to the mythological Balor of the Mighty Blows – a one-eyed king whose eye was so evil that it had to be kept covered.

The seas were teeming with bobbing puffins and a few guillemots and razorbills. Earlier in the year (May and June), there were sightings of basking sharks patrolling the coastline for plankton but we didn’t see any on our trip. Although it was a calm day, the seas were surprisingly rough with surging sea-spray as we rounded the western end near the lighthouse, a tiny taste of what it might be like in stormy weather.

Tory has many swim spots apart from the beach at the harbour. On the east of the island at Port an Duin, right at the end of the road, two green-watered beaches frame the narrow land bridge leading out to Balor’s Fort . On the north side of the island near the hut where the artist Derek Hill painted, there is gorgeous Portín Ghlaí, which has steps cut into the hillside for easy access. Swimming every day in different spots  was ‘refreshing’, an euphemism for very cold. The water was beautifully clear, perfect for trying to avoid the jelly fish who also seemed to love the sea around the island

From our Airbnb near the harbour, we watched the rhythm of the island, the comings and goings of visitors and locals, the ferry bringing in people and supplies, practically everything has to be brought from the mainland. We watched crates of beer and coca cola, vegetables and washing powder, being winched from the ferry by a small crane and deposited on the pier. There is no fuel on the island, the land has long been denuded of turf  and there was little evidence of any cultivation. Fishing, except for lobster, was no longer a profitable practice as fish are relatively scare because of over-fishing in the past. Apart from the hotel which did good food at lunch and dinner time, there was the Club which served basic pub food all day- we can vouched for the pizzas which were delicious.

The King of Tory, Patsy Dan Rogers passed away in October 2018, after a long-term illness aged 74 and is buried in the churchyard. He was known to greet most ferries to personally welcome visitors to the island and is still  greatly missed

Tory is a timeless place, it feels bigger than it actually is, further away from the mainland than it actually is, steeped in history and mythology, attracting people looking for contemplation and solitude, music and art, wildlife and nature.

Truly…. Tory Island is a special place

 Slán go fóill,  Toraigh