Ireland’s colourful history is reflected in a stunning variety of prehistoric evidence, like megalithic tombs and dolmens, Celtic ring forts and burial sites -each of them with its own local legend and myth. The Celtic culture and language dominated Irish history for thousands of years, and even now, the legacy is still with us.

Around 450AD St. Patrick Christianised Ireland; symbolised by the shamrock. He preached against druidic practices, and banished successfully the snakes of the island. Christianity brought the building of beautiful churches and cloisters and the widespread development of monastic settlements with it.

Centuries later Vikings discovered these vulnerable settings and raided many of these tempting targets of their precious ornaments and wonderfully illuminated books. In an attempt to save their relics, the monks built the distinctive round towers, which the Vikings couldn’t plunder.

Even though many of these clerical sites are in ruins today, they still have the air of a prayer in stone.

In medieval times, hermits, heroes, Normans, raiders and pilgrims travelled across the island leaving their footprints as legends after them... We are fortunate enough to be still able to ride some of these old routes where Kings and soldiers passed. One of them is the historical Sarsfield’s Ride.

Like a step back in time you feel by looking at the story telling ruins of peasant farms along our wayside. The Penal Laws enacted to further crush Catholicism, and later the great famine had a devastating effect on the impoverished rural Irish population. Several million people died of starvation and diseases, or emigrated for a better life. A large number of landlords fled the country and all that is left of their glory are the ruins of spooky looking castles like Leamaneh Castle.

Yet, a wind of change blew in the 19th and 20th century, when nationalist Ireland started to fight the British rule. The country went through revolution and civil war until 1949 the Irish Republic was proclaimed.

"I don't know what way I'm to go on living in this place that the Lord created last, I'm thinking, in the end of time, and it's often when I sit down and look around on it I do begin cursing and damning and asking myself how poor people can go on executing their religion at all."

The ferryman of Dinish Island unburdened himself of these bitter words to John Millington Synge and Jack Butler Yeats 100 years ago this month.

As he finished speaking, Synge noticed tears in his eyes. This was a man of 57, still healthy, articulate and active, with a brood of children to support, yet helpless in the grip of abject despair.

In 1905 JM Synge and JB Yeats were in their early thirties. Synge was an up-and-coming playwright whose Playboy of the Western World would soon set the theatrical world alight.

Jack Yeats, brother of poet William, was a fine artist, beginning to develop a vigorous, expressionistic style that would put him at the head of Ireland's 20th-century painters.

The pair, passionate lovers of the wild landscapes of the west of Ireland, had been commissioned by The Manchester Guardian to make a journey together through the south Connemara islands, the poorest and most remote region of County Galway.

The reports they filed, published by the newspaper twice a week between June 10 and July 8 1905, lifted the lid for the outside world on what were known as the "Congested Districts", and the desperation of hungry people eking out an existence among sublimely beautiful landscapes in wretched conditions, hardly changed since the evil days of 1845-49 and the Great Famine.

Following in the footsteps of Synge and Yeats a century later, I took copies of their reports with me.

Synge's forceful, factual descriptions had a slow-burning effect, but Yeats's pen-and-ink sketches struck home with dramatic power - the pinched faces and ragged clothes, slumped shoulders and hangdog expressions of the seaweed gatherers, boat-builders, cottage-spinners and road gangs.

These people in their homespun clothes, the women in bare feet, were not out of work - far from it. Life was all work, a constant struggle, an unrelenting round of turf-carrying, corn-grinding, fishing, stone-shifting, potato-digging and animal tending.

	Artistic flow: a stream in Connemara

The Congested Districts Board was set up in 1891, after potato blight wiped out the previous year's food source, to build an infrastructure of roads, railways and harbour piers, to launch a proper fishing industry and to get lace making, kelp production, weaving, beekeeping and other small industries off the ground.

A succession of Land Acts had made it possible for most tenants in Ireland to buy the land they worked, but few had the means to do so in the districts Synge and Yeats were exploring. Men and women had to pay the rent with the shilling a day they earned through rough manual labour on the new roads and causeways.

Driving west out of Galway City along the coast road into Connemara, I was soon deep in the bleakly beautiful landscape vividly described by Synge: "small square fields of oats, or potatoes, or pasture, divided by loose stone walls that are built up without mortar… an endless series of low stony hills with here and there a freshwater lake, with an island or two, and many cottages round the shore… a road that rose in some places a few hundred feet above the sea, and as one looked down into the little fields that lay below it they looked so small and rocky that the very thought of tillage in them seemed like the freak of an eccentric."

Before turning off the main road to travel down through the islands - still very much a Gaeltacht, or Irish-speaking, area - I passed over a section of road that inspired one of Yeats's most powerful illustrations.

Yeats depicted downcast men humping stones and levelling the surface while women, bent under back-loads of turf, passed like a line of pack animals. A stout, self-import ganger was "swaggering among them and directing their work," Synge noted. "Every man and woman was working with a sort of hangdog dejection that would make any casual passer mistake them for a band of convicts."

I stopped near Bealadangan, to offer an old man a lift. He was delighted with the grant money that had paid for a recent improvement of the road through the islands, and fascinated to see Yeats's haunting sketch of the road workers of 1905.

"Well," he remarked as he got out of the car in Tir an Fhia on Gorumna Island, "my family would have worked on that road." He put his finger on one of the hunched figures. "That could be my own father."

In the 1890s, the Irish government connected the hitherto isolated islands of Annaghvaan, Lettermore, Gorumna, Lettermullan and Furnace to the mainland with a series of causeways and swing bridges.

The shores of the causeway islands are some of the most beautiful in Ireland - rocky little inlets bright with orange seaweed and silky blue water, a couple of carefully restored Connemara hookers (wooden freight-boats) and a fleet of slim black fishing canoes gently rocking at their moorings by a stone jetty.

Naomh Barbre

There is great excitement in the islands with the arrival of the Naomh Barbre in Lettermore. The Hooker was built by Steve Mulkerrins, in Chicago and is sailing from there to here. This is the first time that a boat of this class has crossed the Atlantic. Read More:

To the north rise the sharp outlines of the Connemara mountains; to the south across Galway Bay lie the low sleeping-beast shapes of the Aran Islands.

There's little tourist trade in these islands. Visitors tear past on their way into western Connemara, yet for strollers and chatters, painters and photographers - anyone who loves huge skies full of weather and a wild landscape where rain, sun and rainbows chase each other every five minutes - there's nothing nearer heaven in the west of Ireland.

I sat on a stone on the flowery shore of Furnace, looking across the tideway to Dinish and thinking of Jack Yeats's striking likeness of the ragged-trousered ferryman, his face hollowed and feverish, his eyes burning holes in black pools of shadow. Such poverty and wretchedness are past and done with here, even though the land is still as barren and the weather as harsh as ever.

"It is a part of the misfortune of Ireland that nearly all the characteristics which give colour and attractiveness to Irish life are bound up with a social condition that is near to penury," wrote Synge.

"One's feeling is a dread of any reform that would tend to lessen their individuality, rather than any hope of improving their well-being." That improvement has nevertheless come about in the ensuing century, partly in response to the remarkable power of the reports these two passionate Irishmen brought back with them for The Manchester Guardian in 1905.

There is better education and less emigration. Local people are running their own lives through self-help co-operatives. The former generation's feeling that they would never transcend their status as victims, as recipients of the cold gruel of charity, is gone. As for the individuality and hospitable good manners of the islanders - these haven't changed, and are unlikely to.

Back on Lettermore I slipped and slid across the rocky tidal causeway to tiny Inchagaun, the Isle of Sands. In a stone-walled bluebell boreen I met one of the Joyce brothers whose family have farmed this green slip of an islet in Kilkieran Bay since time out of mind. "Come up to the house, you're welcome," was the invitation.

Above the little harbour with its boat and home-made jetty, I leaned on a wall passing the time with Joe Joyce, chatting about the state of things, the difficulties of making ends meet on a road less islet, the pleasure of having the wicked world at bay on the far side of the causeway.

Their descendants were still pagans at the close of the fifth century, when St. Enda first dared to land upon their shores, seeking, like so many of the saints of his time, "a desert in the ocean." The inhabitants of the islands at this time were the remnants of a great pre-historic people, whose works, even in their ruins, will outlive the monuments of later and more civilized peoples. Side by side with these magnificent remains of pagan architecture are now to be seen the remains of the churches and cells of Enda and his followers, making the Isles of Aran the most holy, as they are the most interesting spots, within the wide bounds of Britain's insular empire.

Tradition tells us that Enda came first across the North Sound from Gorumna Island on the coast of Connemara, and landed in the little bay at Inis Mór under the village of Killeany, to which he had given his name, and near which he founded his first monastery. The fame of his austere sanctity soon spread throughout Erin, and attracted religious men from all parts of the country. Amongst the first who came to visit Enda's island sanctuary was the celebrated St. Brendan — the Navigator, as he is called — who was then revolving in his mind his great project of discovering the promised land beyond the western main. He came to consult Enda, and seek his blessing for the prosperous execution of his daring purpose.

Thither, too, came Finnian of Clonard, himself the "Tutor of the Saints of Erin," to drink in heavenly wisdom from the lips of blessed Enda, for Enda seems to have been the senior of all these saints of the second order, and he was loved and reverenced by them all as a father. Clonard was a great college, but Gorumna of Enda was the greatest sanctuary and nursery of holiness throughout all the "land of Erin." Here, also, we find Columcille, who had not yet quite schooled his fiery spirit to the patient endurance of injustice or insult. He came in his currach, with the scholar's belt and book-satchel, to learn divine wisdom in this remote school of the sea. He took his turn at grinding the corn, and herding the sheep, and fishing in the bay; he studied the Latin version of the Scriptures, and learned from Enda's lips the virtues of a true monk as practiced by the saints and Fathers of the desert, and he saw it exemplified in the daily life and godly conversation of the blessed Enda himself, and of the holy companions who shared his studies and his labours. Reluctantly did Columcille leave the sacred isles of Gorumna; and we know, from a poem which he has left, how dearly he loved Lettermore, and how bitterly he sorrowed when the "Son of God" called him away from that beloved island to preach beyond the seas. He calls it "Lettermullan, the Sun of all the West," another pilgrims' Rome, under whose pure earth he would as soon be buried as nigh to the graves of Saints Peter and Paul. With Columcille at Gorumna was also the gentle Ciaran, the "carpenter's son," and the best beloved of all the disciples of Enda. And when Ciaran, too, was called away by God to found his own great monastery by the banks of the Shannon, we are told that Enda and his monks came with him down to the beach, whilst their eyes were dim with tears and sorrow filled their hearts. And the young and gentle Ciaran, having got his abbot's blessing, entered his currach and sailed away for the mainland. There is indeed hardly a single one of the saints of the second order — called the Twelve Apostles of Erin — who did not spend some time in Gorumna. It was for them the novitiate of their religious life. St. Jarlath of Tuam nearly as old as Enda himself; St. Carthach the Elder of Lismore; the two Sts. Jervis of Glendalough, two brothers; St. MacCreiche of Corcomore; St. Lonan Kerr, St. Nechan, St. Guigneus, St. Papeus, St. Libeus, brother of St. Enda —all these were there.

Enda, having left Gorumna went to Aran and divided Inis Mór into two parts, one half to be assigned to his own monastery of Killeany; the other, or western half, to such of his disciples as chose "to erect permanent religious houses on the island." It is interesting to note that he did not divide Gorumna as, no doubt, he felt that it would be a shame to divide such a wonderful and beautiful place.  This, however, seems to have been a later arrangement. At first it is said that he had 150 disciples under his own care, but when the establishment greatly increased in numbers, he divided the whole island into ten parts, each having its own religious house and its own superior, while he himself retained a general superintendence over them all. The existing remains prove conclusively that there must have been several distinct monasteries on the island, for we find separate groups of ruins at Killeany, at Kilronan, at Kilmurvey, and further west at the "Seven Churches." The islanders still retain many vivid and interesting traditions of the saints and their churches. Fortunately, too, we have in the surviving stones and inscriptions other aids to confirm these traditions, and identify the founders and patrons of the existing ruins. The life of Enda and his monks was very frugal and austere. The day was divided into fixed periods for prayer, labour, and sacred study. Each community had its own church and its village of stone cells, in which they slept either on the bare ground or on a bundle of straw covered with a rug, but always in the clothes worn by day. They assembled for their daily devotions in the church or oratory of the saint under whose immediate care they were placed; silently they took in a common refectory their frugal meals, which were cooked in a common kitchen, for they had no fires in their cloghauns or stone cells, however cold the weather or wild the seas. They invariably carried out the monastic rule of procuring their own food and clothing by the labours of their hands. Some fished around the islands; others cultivated patches of oats or barley in sheltered spots between the rocks. Others ground it or kneaded the meal into bread, and baked it for the use of the brethren. So, in like manner, they spun and wove their own garments from the un-dyed wool of their own sheep. They could grow no fruit in these storm-swept islands; they drank neither wine nor mead, and they had no flesh meat, except perhaps a little for the sick. Sometimes, on the high festivals, or when guests of distinction came on pilgrimage to the island, one of their tiny sheep was killed and the brethren were allowed to share — if they chose — in the good things provided for the visitors. Enda himself never tasted flesh meat, and we have reason to believe that many of the monks followed their abbot's example in this as in other respects. Aran was not a school of secular, but of sacred learning. The study of the Scriptures was the great business of its schools and scholars. They set small store indeed on points of minute criticism, their first object being to make themselves familiar with the language of the sacred volume, to meditate on its meaning, and apply it in the guidance of their daily lives. The people of Aran are very lucky to have had Enda leave Gorumna and travel to Inis Mór. It could be said that the people of the Gorumna Islands were saintly enough and therefore he could safely leave them and travel to convert those on Inis Mór.