Blasket Islands

Dingle · County Kerry · Ireland

The Blasket Islands are a scattered archipelago flung into the Atlantic from the western tip of Ireland's Dingle Peninsula, the last landfall before the open ocean stretches to Newfoundland. Great Blasket, the largest island, was inhabited until 1953, and the abandoned stone village on its eastern slope is visible from the dive boat as you motor past. But it is the underwater landscape that draws divers to this remote outpost: sheer granite walls plunging into indigo water, sea caves carved by millennia of Atlantic swell, and a biomass fuelled by the nutrient-rich upwellings that make Ireland's southwest coast one of Europe's most productive marine environments. I dived the north wall of Beginish Island on a rare calm July morning, dropping in beside a vertical granite face that fell away into darkness below. The first ten metres were a forest of kelp, the thick stipes of Laminaria hyperborea rising from the rock like pillars supporting a swaying canopy. Beneath the kelp zone the wall was encrusted with jewel anemones in emerald, orange, and violet, so densely packed they formed a continuous carpet of colour. Ballan wrasse in their mottled green livery patrolled the crevices, while cuckoo wrasse in electric blue and orange darted between the jewel anemone clusters. At 20 metres the wall stepped back to form a wide ledge before dropping again, and here I found a sea cave entrance perhaps three metres wide and five metres tall. I switched on my torch and entered. The cave extended fifteen metres into the rock, narrowing gradually, its walls plastered with dead man's fingers coral and plumose anemones that waved in the gentle surge. At the back a chimney rose vertically, and a shaft of green Atlantic light filtered down from somewhere above, illuminating the cave interior with a spectral glow. A large European lobster occupied a crevice near the entrance, its blue-black carapace and long antennae catching my light.