Turbot lies just off the Connemara coast, west of the Aird Mhor Peninsula and south of Inishturk South, in the channel of bays and skerries that separates Clifden from Cleggan. The island is small - a few hundred acres of grass and exposed rock - and a single road runs across its narrow waist. From the mainland it looks deceptively close; in good weather a small boat can cross from Cleggan or Aughrus Point in twenty minutes. In bad weather, which on this coast can arrive without much warning, the same crossing becomes impossible for days at a time. That was the rhythm of life here for as long as anyone lived on Turbot.

The story of small western islands in twentieth-century Ireland tends to follow the same arc: the school closes, the priest comes less often, the young people leave for Galway or Boston, and eventually the calculation simply stops working. Turbot's last residents left in 1978, late in that wave of island depopulation that emptied Inishark, the Inishkea islands, the Blaskets off Kerry. There is no single tragedy to point to here - no drowning, no famine - just the slow accumulation of inconvenience that comes with being a few miles offshore in a country that had finally finished its own great migration.

What is left feels less like ruin than pause. Several of the cottages on the north side have been refurbished, their stone walls repointed, slate replaced over thatch, and they let in summer; smoke rises again from their chimneys in July and August. But the rest of the island holds its breath. Sheep graze where families once cut turf. The walls of unrestored cabins shelter ferns. From the air, the road across the middle of Turbot looks like a faint stitch holding the island together, the only sign that it was ever shaped by anything other than wind and tide.

Turbot sits within a constellation of small islands that thin out toward the open Atlantic - High Island, Friar Island, Inishturbot's near neighbour Inishturk South, and Omey Island just to the southeast, reachable across a tidal strand at low water. The fishing here was once excellent and still draws boats from Cleggan and Roundstone for crab and lobster. Birds work the cliffs in summer: shags, fulmars, the occasional gannet diving in from Inishbofin's colonies further out. Turbot itself rarely makes the maps, but pilots tracking the Wild Atlantic Way coast from Mannin Bay north will see it clearly - a low, two-pieces-of-bread shape with a thin road for a seam.