The first time I went to Sherkin Island I went because someone mentioned it and I thought it sounded manageable. That’s how I approach most things – not with great ambition, but with a sense that manageable is a reasonable place to start. It was June that first time. Years ago now. I stood on the Baltimore pier waiting for the ferry and thought I was just going to cross the water for a few hours and come back.
I’ve been back three times since. The last time was late September, before the weather turned. January feels like the right month to think about it – not because January has anything in common with Sherkin, but because in January I’ve got nothing else to look at.
In September the light arrived sideways and lay flat on everything.
1. The ferry from Baltimore is so short it barely registers as a crossing. Eight minutes, maybe ten if the engine’s in no hurry. You stand on the deck or sit inside on the wooden benches and before you’ve done anything – before you’ve properly looked at the water or found your bearings – you’re there. The pier at Sherkin comes up on you quickly, and there are often a few people waiting on it, not to meet anyone in particular, just standing. I noticed this the second time – people on the island side of the water who’d come down to watch the ferry arrive, the way you’d look up when a car comes down a quiet lane. It’s that kind of place. The eight minutes isn’t enough time to prepare. You’re in one world, then you’re in another. The transition is so brief it catches you mid-thought.
2. There are almost no cars on the island. I knew this before I went the first time but I didn’t understand what it meant until I got off the ferry and started walking and nothing passed me. Not for twenty minutes. Not for longer. You notice the absence as a sound first – the road is so quiet you can hear your own coat against your arms. Then you start to walk differently, down the middle of the road if you want, along the verge, it makes no difference. I don’t think I’m a person who’s bothered by traffic. But I went back to Baltimore that first evening and drove home through Skibbereen and Kenmare and across the peninsula – hours in the car – and I kept thinking about that silence on the road. The way it had opened up the afternoon. I’m still thinking about it, apparently.
3. There’s a particular quality to the light on the water between Baltimore and the island, and again on the far side, the open Atlantic side, where the strand runs and the old abbey stands. I can’t describe it technically – I don’t have that vocabulary. What I can say is that in September the light arrived sideways and lay flat on everything, and the colour of the sea was nothing like what I’d expected, more green than grey, more specific than any photograph I’d seen had prepared me for. I walked out to the strand on the Atlantic side that last time and sat on a low wall for a while and didn’t take any photographs. I’d brought the camera. It just seemed like the wrong instinct. The Valentia ferry I wrote about two days ago is different in this respect – five minutes and you’re across and the island is practical, lived-in, has roads and a proper history of being somewhere. Sherkin has all of that too, people live there, there’s a pub, there are children who go to school – but something in the light makes it feel provisional, held loosely. I don’t quite trust my own description of this.
4. Plenty of places will tell you to slow down. Put it on a sign, sell you a concept. Sherkin doesn’t. It’s just slow because there isn’t anything to do quickly. You walk, or you sit. The abbey ruins are there if you want them, which I mostly didn’t on the last visit – I’d seen them before and that seemed sufficient. The strand is there. The ferry will come back when it comes back, and between now and then there is simply time. I hadn’t realised how long it had been since I’d had nothing I needed to do until I was standing on a small island in West Cork with nowhere particular to be and found that I had, for a few hours, nothing to postpone.
5. I’d say I’ll go back this year, but I said that last year and the year before and didn’t, and then went in September almost by accident – I was already in West Cork after the drive around the Beara, and I thought, well, Baltimore isn’t far. It wasn’t. An hour and a half from Castletownbere, more or less. I pulled in on the pier and looked up the ferry times on my phone and sat in the Yaris for ten minutes deciding, and then went. That’s probably how I’ll go again. Not plan it, not commit to it, just find myself already most of the way there.
The light in January wouldn’t be the same. I’d be curious about it, though.