The Franciscan friary stands above the Abbey Strand, looking back at Baltimore across the channel. Locally it is just "the Abbey," and it dates to about 1460. A short walk from it lay Dún na Long, the seat of the O'Driscoll clan, the family that controlled this coastline through the late medieval period. In 1537 the citizens of Waterford -- nominally English and Catholic at the time, but in a thoroughly Tudor dispute over a seized and plundered ship -- crossed the country and raided Sherkin, damaging both the friary and the castle. Neither building ever fully recovered. The friary, however, has held its bones together for nearly five hundred years since. Today it stands roofless and walled, with a small photo exhibition inside and some displays around the outside when it is open. The Celtic Iron Age promontory fort that predates both buildings sits elsewhere on the island, a less obvious presence on a coastline littered with the foundations of older settlement.

Sherkin once supported about a thousand people. The decline began with the Great Famine in the mid-19th century, when the population of West Cork collapsed across the board. The fall on Sherkin was steeper than the national average and the recovery never came. Today's 111 residents include artists, writers, craftworkers, musicians, photographers, beekeepers, cattle farmers, mussel and oyster farmers, oceanologists, fishermen, sailors, teachers, and doctors. A list like that on an island of a hundred-odd people means most residents wear several of those labels at once. The cars on Sherkin are mostly old vehicles unsuitable for the mainland, kept going long past their road-worthy lives because the only place they ever need to go is round the island. The roads are narrow, maintained by Cork County Council. Most residents walk or cycle. A small bus mostly carries people between the houses and the ferry.

The Sherkin Regatta, held in late July or early August, is the island's busiest day of the year -- a rowing regatta drawing competitors and supporters from across the West Cork islands and the mainland, with food stalls and children's events and music spilling out around the pier. The newer event is Open Ear, an annual music festival running since 2016 that focuses on experimental and avant-garde electronic music. The combination is appropriately Sherkin: a 1460 friary on one end of the island, modular synthesisers and ambient drones at the other, with the same Atlantic wind blowing through both. The Sherkin Island Marine Station, established privately in 1975 on the north-western side, has been gathering baseline marine data for half a century. It publishes books and a quarterly journal called Sherkin Comment. The lighthouse at Barrack Point, automated and locally maintained, has marked the southern entrance to Baltimore Harbour since 1835.

The Baltimore-Sherkin ferry takes between ten and fifteen minutes, depending on the boat and the conditions. Onward to Cape Clear -- the Gaeltacht island further out, where Irish is still the everyday language -- takes about forty minutes. Sherkin has camping but no rubbish disposal, so visitors are asked to take their litter back to the mainland. Silver Strand is the beach most often used for barbecues. The island has electricity through a submarine cable from the mainland, and a second submarine cable runs from Sherkin out to Cape Clear, making Sherkin the staging point for the further islands' electrical supply. There is a Sherkin Island Development Society and a local development officer. None of this sounds especially exotic until you stand on the pier in February with the wind taking the spray off the channel, and look back at the lights of Baltimore across a half-mile of open water, and realise that for the people who live here this is the everyday weather between home and everywhere else.