Island Endurance: Creative Heritage on Inishark and Inishbofin

Nine kilometers off western Ireland's Connemara coast, the islands Inishark and Inishbofin offer visitors a stark contrast. To the west, Inishark is a landscape of ruins, with monuments from a medieval monastery juxtaposed against the remains of a village that endured famine, poverty, and isolation before its evacuation in 1960. To the east, Inishbofin prevails as a community of over 200 residents that bustles every summer with thousands of tourists who are eager to take in the islands' unique historical sites and pastoral landscapes.

Island Endurance enters these islands' excavation sites, ritual traditions, tourist trade, and farming and fishing activities to show how centuries of islanders have cultivated their heritage to address a variety of challenges and opportunities. Author Ryan Lash expands the concept of taskscapes, or socially constructed spaces where interdependent agents and actions constantly reshaped patterns of living, revealing how ruins and material heritage objects provide the infrastructure necessary for a community's endurance. From medieval pilgrimages and monuments to nineteenth-century festivals and picnics, ruins repurposed for communal rites and usage, and present-day tourism fueled by return visitors' annual extended stays, the islanders have created senses of shared history and belonging that sustain their livelihoods.

Based on more than a decade of archaeological, anthropological, and historical research, Island Endurance shows us that the illusion of timelessness has always depended on creative adaptation.