Islands of Ireland: Battle for survival on an island isolated by storms

Islands are too often referred to as remote, when in fact it is just because they are islands that they are described as such. For Calf Island West in Roaringwater Bay, West Cork, we are not talking remote as in South Pacific, but for the people who lived there up to the 1940s it may as well have been, when they were cut off from the mainland by huge storms.

This 65-acre island is the smallest of the three Calves of East, Middle, and West. The alternative name for the island is Leacrer, which probably comes from the Irish for flat stone — ‘leac’, writes Eugene Daly in Heir Island: Its History and People.