Clare Island--most important of the long line which fringes that dangerous coast, from Inishboffin northwards. Aran belongs to a different grouping, its amazing formation links it to Burren, and it was, in truth, always owned by the O'Briens, lords of Thomond, the heart of which was Clare. But this string of petty island communities lies nearer the coast, is less separate from it--and yet, after all, very distinct. Land on Inishturk or Inishark, and the headman of the island will receive you with majestic courtesy--and he is still in some cases called the "king". But if you go there to collect rates for the county, I cannot promise you so kind a hospitality: there is unending though intermittent war, the islanders affirming (not unreasonably) that it is no business of theirs to pay for maintaining roads and bridges on the mainland. [Illustration: CROAGH PATRICK, FROM OLDHEAD, CLEW BAY] Clare Island is somewhat unlike the rest, its people having always depended on agriculture rather than on fishing; and it is one of the best examples of the Congested Districts Board's beneficent work in purchasing the whole, reselling to the tenants, re-allotting farms, dividing off commonage, and providing materials and instruction for the islanders to put up decent dwellings for themselves. In earlier days rents were collected there at huge cost by the aid of posses of police; now instalments of purchase come in regularly and smoothly, and people who have begun to prosper a little by their holdings see no reason why they should not add to prosperity by taking their share of the sea's harvest. Herrings have come back to those waters, and it is no longer as it was when a spokesman of the people declared that "the shoals came and there was no one to catch them, and so the fish went away"--slighted, it would seem. But Clare Island belongs to the outer fringe of the isles which lie across the entrance to Clew Bay, whose waters are sprinkled with little points and fields of sod-covered rock in a labyrinth past counting. Some affirm that the view from Westport over this blue water so bespeckled with green is the finest thing in all Ireland--and Croaghpatrick rising over against the little town is certainly a mountain worthy of all its associations. Here takes place annually one of the most impressive ceremonies to be witnessed at home or abroad--the saying of mass at the summit to which St. Patrick, they say, pushed his western journey, and looking out over the Atlantic blessed all that he beheld. Ruder legend, with its touch of grotesque, tells that from this steep height he drove out into the deep all venomous things that had haunted unchristian Ireland, tumbling toads and snakes by his white wizardry into the ocean depths.