Islands of Ireland: Inishbarna, the philosopher’s stone
Here is a perfect rejoinder to anyone who is beginning to test your patience: “Unless a proposition is necessary, it is meaningless and approaching meaning zero.”
The words were written by philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein who lived adjacent to the Co Galway island of Inishbarna in 1948.
The Austrian fetched up here at the end of Ireland’s only fjord, Killary Harbour, to think and to write.
This magnificent setting under the brooding hulk of Connemara’s highest mountain, Mweelrea, and the winding, 25m-deep channel of Killary Harbour was the perfect antidote to this former soldier who had survived the First World War.
Nowadays, the harbour is a hive of activity, with a huge variety of fish caught here — pollack, wrasse, conger, ray, skate, shark, flounder, dabs, and dogfish, to name a few.
Killary’s main industry is shellfish, and acres of mussel, clam, and oyster beds can be seen the 16km length of the harbour.
Pleasure craft cruise from near the lovely village of Leenane to the mouth of the harbour next to Inishbarna.
The island measures 500m by 200m but, in spite of its meagre size, is hilly.
For this reason, a white-tiled beacon was situated on the island aligned with the one on the nearby Donee Island to facilitate safe navigation to the harbour and further to Leenane.
The larger boats take the deeper northern side of the channel, while flat-bottomed boats can take Smuggler’s Gap to the south.
The west of Ireland has attracted many artists and writers over the years — JM Synge and Heinrich Boll to name a couple, but not many philosophers.
Wittgenstein was an analytical philosopher who posited that language is the chief arbiter by which we construct reality.
His Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus has had a huge impact on 20th-century thinking. A Bord Failte plaque on the wall indicates that the philosopher lived and worked in the townland of Rosroe right beside the quay from April 1948 to October 1948.
He went there on the suggestion of an Irish philosophy student whom he had met in Cambridge, Maurice O’Connor Drury.
The writer and artist Richard Wall wrote that Wittgenstein, having experienced war as a soldier, was sceptical of everything modern. He sought a simple life in Killary and found peace there in an area more familiar with hillwalkers and scuba divers than Austrian philosophers.
The philosopher developed a fascination with nature and aspired to build a cottage on Inishbarna but was dissuaded by a local man, who said a hut would never withstand the occasional severe gales that blow up there.
However, a writer did live on Inishbarna, Seán Mac Conmara, a poet lived there in the 19th century.
When a British warship visited Killary Mac Conmara composed a ballad to mark the occasion: ‘Neileach’
Inishbarna (island of the gap) has the ruins of a cattle enclosure and bothy dating from the 19th century.
An Alexander C Lambert leased the island as part of a 250-acre deal at that time from Alexander Thomson, the owner of the 8,000 acre Salrock Estate, which swept northwest over rugged mountains and glistening lakes towards Renvyle and Cleggan.
The estate is named after a gap in the rocks just above Little Killary Harbour through which the contraband from Smuggler’s Gap would pass.
There is a deserted settlement here called Foher and at the harbour edge a Famine relief road.
Inishbarna is not habitable but campers could chance a couple of nights perchance.
killaryfjord.com; killaryadventure.com
Wittgenstein In Ireland, Richard Wall, Reaktion Books; www.connemarawildescapes.ie; www.killaryfjordshellfish.com
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