Owey sits a kilometre off the Donegal coast, near the fishing village of Kincasslagh. The island rises to its high point at Moylemore - 102 metres, modest by mountain standards but commanding on a patch of land this size. The north end is granite and weather: sea cliffs scoured by Atlantic gales, no soil to speak of, no shelter for anything that wants to live. Everything human is on the south side, tucked into the lee, where the seaweed-fertilised plots once grew potatoes and cabbages and oats. Just over a hundred people lived here at the peak, surviving on what the sea gave them and what they could coax from the thin soil.

Turf cut from the island's bogs heated the cottages. It also heated something else. Some of Owey's islanders used their peat fires under copper stills, producing single malt and other liquors out of barley and spring water, well beyond the reach of any tax collector. This was Donegal in the 19th and early 20th centuries: poor, Irish-speaking, remote enough that the Crown's gaugers had to mean it to bother coming. The islanders fished the productive waters around the rocks, ate what they caught, traded what they could, and distilled the rest. It was a hard life by any modern measure. The people who lived it would have called it a life.

The story of Owey in the second half of the 20th century is the story of every small Irish island - and many of the largest. The school's teacher handled every age in one room, but secondary education meant the mainland, and the mainland meant boarding, and boarding meant the long drift away. By the time the school closed in 1971, the children had already gone. The adults followed. Now the cottages on the south side belong mostly to descendants of those who left, used in summer when the weather softens and the boat from Cruit Island can land without bouncing off the rocks. Some are kept up. Some are slowly going back to the wind.

Granite is the gift Owey kept for visitors. The island's north and west cliffs offer some of the cleanest sea-stack and coastal climbing in Ireland - long routes on solid stone, with the Atlantic boiling at your heels. A climbing guidebook produced by Unique Ascent maps the whole island, naming the routes in both English and Irish, recording the placenames the islanders used: the headlands and gullies that had names because they mattered to someone, once. The climbers who come now arrive by small boat from Cruit, pitch tents on the abandoned grass, and spend the long northern evenings reading the rock. The island has become quieter than it was when a hundred people lived here. It has not become silent.

Stand on Moylemore on a clear day and you can see how the geography works. Aranmore lies south, larger and still inhabited. The mainland stretches east, Mount Errigal's quartz cone visible inland. The Atlantic opens west, nothing between you and Newfoundland. The wind here has shaped everything: the cottages low and turned away from the prevailing southwest, the trees absent, the soil thin and acidic and clinging to whatever it can find. The same wind that emptied the island also kept its old buildings standing. They were built to endure. They are still enduring.