Every year, a writer and poet returns to her ancestral home on an uninhabited island off the Galway coast, drawn to the edges of things by a mysterious sense of needing to recover something lost

The short clamber over tiny walls is rewarding: beneath my feet lie stone fragments, remnants of an early Christian oratory and an ancient cross. To the south of Mason Island, I can see the shadow of a sandy graveyard where generations of my family were buried with no headstones, just a rock to mark their final resting place.

I bend down, pushing back ferns to where I know I will find two stones, the larger one hollowed into a font, another fitting on top. The dip of the hollow holds a little uisce (pronounced ish-ker) – “water”. I dip my finger and bless myself.

Behind me, to the north-east, at the top of a short steep road from the harbour, stands the now-derelict cottage my great-grandfather built on this Atlantic fringe in the years after the Irish Famine. Looking at its gable ends, stripped of a roof, I think of the Irish phrase, Ni bás ach ag fás (“not dead but growing”).

It is as if the bones of this place are shaped to provide a sanctuary for physical and spiritual wildness: for abundant birdlife – oystercatcher, plover, curlew, egret; for yearning, the nearly seen, the nearly heard, of a spirit that continues to give life, though the last inhabitants left the island in the 1950s.