Many look to Ireland's Atlantic islands as timeless places, resistant to change. Island Endurance offers an alternative perspective, examining two neighboring islands where people have cultivated their heritage to confront new challenges and opportunities across centuries.
To the west, Inishark is a landscape of ruins, with monuments from a medieval monastery alongside the remnants of a village that endured privation and isolation before its evacuation in 1960. To the east, Inishbofin remains home to a small community of nearly 200 that bustles every summer with thousands of visitors drawn by the island's reputation for hospitality and distinctive local heritage. Combining archaeological discoveries with folklore and ethnography, author Ryan Lash explores how islanders from three different historical eras encountered, altered, and reimagined traces of the past. Fifteen years of fieldwork reconstruct more than a millennium of creativity—from the development of pilgrimage traditions at the shrines of monastic saints, to the reuse of medieval monuments for local devotions in the 19th and 20th centuries, to the repurposing of ruins for managing livestock and guiding tourist trails in the 21st century. Attuned to the sensory dynamics and other-than-human elements of landscapes, Lash illustrates the power of quartz pebbles, picnics, and sheep farming to generate vital perceptions of place, time, and belonging.
Islanders have continually and creatively adapted their heritage to foster shared experiences, negotiate collaborative relations, and sustain livelihoods amid adversity. Island Endurance shows us that the illusion of timelessness has always relied on the creativity of heritage.
Table of Contents:
Preface
Acknowledgments
Introductory Maps
1. Alive in Ruins
2. Dynamic Endurance and Creative Heritage: A Taskscape Approach
3. Traces of Leo on Inishark
4. Pebbles, Pilgrims, and Sacred Order: Heritage in Inishark's Medieval Taskscape (c.700–1300)
5. Cult, Commemoration, and Cooperation: Heritage in Inishark's Modern Taskscape (c.1600–1960)
6. Tourists, Corncrakes, Cattle, and Craic: Heritage in Inishbofin's Contemporary Taskscape (c.1960–2019)
7. The Enduring Challenge
Bibliography
Index
About the Author :
Ryan Lash is Teaching Fellow in The School of Archaeology at University College Dublin. He is author (with Ian Kuijt, William Donaruma, Katie Shakour, and Tommy Burke) of Island Places, Island Lives: Exploring Inishbofin and Inishark Heritage, Co. Galway, Ireland. He received his PhD in Anthropology from Northwestern University and has held postdoctoral fellowships at the University of Notre Dame and University College Dublin.
Review :
"Beautifully written, sensitive, and insightful, this is historical anthropology at its best. Lash demolishes naïve and harmful narratives about western Ireland, weaving together tales from the past and present to reveal Inishark and Inishbofin as dynamic spaces of human engagement for thousands of years. The past and present of the islands come to life through his lively and intimate prose, as he convincingly argues for the value of an approach to heritage and sustainability that takes seriously the entanglement of humans, animals, and landscapes of memory and ritual. Thoroughly engaging."—Audrey Horning, editor of Becoming and Belonging in Ireland, AD 1200-1600
"Arising from important archaeological and ethnographic research, Island Endurance explores how the inhabitants of two Atlantic islands, both past and present, adapted to changing circumstances by drawing upon the rich heritage of these unique landscapes. Written in an engaging and accessible style, it is a model study with far-reaching implications that deserves to be widely read by archaeologists, anthropologists, historians, and anyone with an interest in ritual, heritage, and sustainability."—Tomás Ó Carragáin, author of Churches in the Irish Landscape AD 400-1100
"The heritage of Inishark and of Inishbofin includes medieval monastic sites and abandoned 19th-century homes and fields but also the dynamic cultural practices of today's islanders, who consciously engage with this "creative heritage" to face the challenges of contemporary island life and to situate themselves in the world. Using archaeological data, written records, oral tradition and participant observation, Ryan Lash writes a lyrical, sensitive and compelling account of these island communities past and present and looks to a sustainable future. A major work of scholarship."—Diarmuid Ó Giolláin, author of Locating Irish Folklore
"In this important book, Lash takes us on a journey to understand the central role of heritage in the social experience of people on the islands of Inishark and Inishbofin from the early medieval period to the present. Extensive, multidisciplinary research is enlivened by vignettes of life at different times in the past and the author's accounts of his own experiences on the islands, particularly the tending of sheep. While heritage is traditionally understood as providing a direct continuity with an often distant past, in an innovative approach Lash focuses on heritage as a creative and flexible phenomenon; made, developed and adapted to fit with and underpin changing patterns of life and community."—Gabriel Cooney, author of Death in Irish Prehistory
