“One wonders in these places why anybody is left in Dublin, or London, or Paris, when it would be better, one would think, to live in a tent or hut with this magnificent air, which is like wine in one's teeth.” J. M. Synge, 'In West Kerry', The Shanachie, 1907 / In a letter to Lady Gregory dated August 1905 Synge revealed that the Blasket Islands off the Dingle Peninsula in West Kerry were the most interesting place he had ever been. The close association of Synge with the Aran Islands in Galway, through his plays and prose writings, has meant that his emotional and spiritual connection to the Blaskets is often overlooked. Part of his fascination with the Kerry islands was the almost complete absence of English as a spoken language and, as he writes to Lady Gregory, the necessity of being 'thrown back on my Irish entirely' in order to communicate (CL I, 122). The Irish language is woven into the topography of the landscape with the name of every hillock, inlet and outcrop carrying a local history of meaning. Synge's travel essays are acutely attuned to the landscape: from the Blaskets to Mayo, from Wicklow to Connemara, he documents the geography of the land as keenly as he records his conversations with local people. Synge's travel essays, collected under the title In Wicklow, West Kerry and Connemara (1910) and his long prose piece on his Aran sojourns, The Aran Islands (1907), illustrate how he can be understood as an early modernist. The concept of modernity is sometimes misunderstood as a descriptor of what is current and contemporary but often, paradoxically, modernity is concerned as much with the past as with the present.