Islands of Ireland: History abounds in Cork's Roaringwater Bay

The Calf Islands are home to relics dating back to the Iron Age

Easter Calf Island, Roaringwater Bay, Co Cork. Picture: Terri Kearney

The easternmost of the Calf islands in Roaringwater Bay, West Cork, is probably the dead centre of the archipelago known as Carbery’s Hundred Isles. 

Not 100 islands of course, but who’s counting; poetic licence is much more preferable to pedantry. “Let the sky be clean of officious birds punctiliously flying on the left,” as Kingsley Amis wrote in ‘Against Romanticism’. There are magnificent views to Cape Clear and Sherkin and beyond to the twinkling Fastnet lighthouse.