What they left behind includes the stone houses of a community that had lived there for generations, structures whose precise dates nobody has yet pinned down with any confidence. One such building sits in the archaeological record simply as a house of indeterminate date, which is in its own way an honest description. On an island abandoned within living memory, where the documentary record is thin and the buildings were never grand enough to attract the attention of antiquarians, the question of when something was built can be genuinely difficult to answer.

Inishshark, whose name derives from the Irish Inis Airc, meaning roughly island of the shark or perhaps a personal name, lies just to the west of Inishbofin. At its peak the island supported a small but resilient population engaged in fishing and subsistence farming. The evacuation, when it finally came, was the result of years of hardship, including the drowning of several men from the island in a single accident, which left the remaining community feeling that continued life there was no longer sustainable. The houses they left behind were built in the vernacular tradition of the west of Ireland, low-walled structures of unmortared or lightly mortared stone, shaped to keep out Atlantic weather rather than to impress. Without written records attached to individual buildings, distinguishing a structure from the eighteenth century from one built in the nineteenth or even the early twentieth is not always straightforward on the ground.