Long Island

Inis Fada stretches four and a half kilometres through rough Atlantic water, narrow enough that wind crosses it in seconds yet long enough to hold abandoned cottages, a copper mine road and a lighthouse that still marks Schull Harbour. Three hundred people lived there in 1841; seventeen remain now, reaching the island by a small ferry that leaves Colla Pier across six hundred metres of channel. The departure did not erase the place. It exposed the shape of the place, a long ribbon where human life advanced, retired and leaves its homes open to the sky.