Qualla: Inishtooskert

Inishtooskert: Introduction

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Barbara Walsh from Ireland, CC BY 2.0. From the Dingle Peninsula at sunset, Inishtooskert lies on its back. The island's profile - a forehead, a nose, a folded chest, two upturned feet - is so unmistakably human that the locals have given it two names. The official one, Inis Tuaisceart in Irish, means simply the northern island. The other names are darker and more poetic: An Fear Marbh, the Dead Man, and the Sleeping Giant. Generations of Kerry farmers have looked west on still evenings and watched the giant sleep. Generations of birds have nested on his chest.

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Image: Barbara Walsh from Ireland | CC BY 2.0

Inishtooskert: The Dead Man

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Sharon Loxton, CC BY-SA 2.0. The name Inis Tuaisceart is descriptive and bureaucratic - Inishtooskert is merely a phonetic anglicisation of the Irish - but An Fear Marbh is the name with mood. The island sits at the northern end of the Blasket archipelago, slightly apart from its siblings, and when viewed fr...

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Image: Sharon Loxton | CC BY-SA 2.0

Inishtooskert: The Largest Storm-Petrel Colony in Ireland

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Ingo Mehling, CC BY-SA 3.0. What looks like a corpse from the mainland is, in fact, exuberantly alive. Inishtooskert holds one of the most important seabird colonies in northwest Europe. The Seabird 2000 survey - a coordinated census run across Britain and Ireland at the turn of the millennium - counted mor...

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Image: Ingo Mehling | CC BY-SA 3.0

Inishtooskert: Stones the Monks Left Behind

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Billy Horan, CC BY-SA 4.0. Among the island's other inhabitants, long since departed, were early Christian hermits. Inishtooskert preserves an unusual concentration of ecclesiastical remains: a dry-stone oratory, beehive cells known as clochans, slab crosses, and the trace foundations of a small monastic s...

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Image: Billy Horan | CC BY-SA 4.0

Inishtooskert: Ryan's Daughter

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit CC BY-SA 3.0. In 1970, David Lean - the British director of Lawrence of Arabia and Doctor Zhivago - released Ryan's Daughter, a sweeping romance set on a fictional version of the Dingle Peninsula in the year of the 1916 Easter Rising. The film won two Academy Awards and earned eight more nomin...

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Image: CC BY-SA 3.0

Inishtooskert: Listening to the Northern Island

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Billy Horan, CC BY-SA 4.0. Today there is no ferry service to Inishtooskert. Visiting requires a private boat, calm seas, and a tolerance for landings that are not really landings - the island has no harbour, just rocks where a rigid inflatable might pause long enough to disembark a careful passenger. Most...

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Image: Billy Horan | CC BY-SA 4.0