Nuns' Island

Nuns' Island is a place in Galway that becomes central to Gretta Conroy’s recollection of Michael Furey’s final visit. The remembered scene at her grandmother’s house—Gravel thrown against a rain-wet window, a hurried passage into the garden, and Michael shivering by the wall—gives the location its significance as the setting of a farewell that ended in death.

Setting and recollection

Gretta identifies the place while explaining to Gabriel Conroy that she had known the singer of a song long ago, when she was living with her grandmother in Galway. The location enters the narrative through her memory, not as a present-day visit: Gabriel’s questions prompt her to disclose the person’s identity and their past.

The final visit

On the night before Gretta was to leave Galway for the convent, she was packing in her grandmother’s house on Nuns' Island. She heard gravel thrown against the window, but the glass was too wet for her to see outside. She ran downstairs as she was, slipped out through the back, and found Michael at the far end of the garden, shivering.

Gretta urged him to go home at once, warning that the rain could kill him. Michael said that he did not want to live. She remembered his eyes and his position at the end of the wall beside a tree; the precise details make the garden a fixed image in her account of the encounter, rather than merely a backdrop to it.

Death and narrative significance

Michael did go home. A week after Gretta entered the convent, he died, and he was buried in Oughterard, where his family came from. Gretta recalls the shock of hearing the news, connecting the brief scene on Nuns' Island to the death that followed.

When Gretta tells this story, Gabriel’s initial smile disappears and anger rises in him. The remembered place therefore marks a turning point in the conversation: the song leads to a past love Gabriel had not understood, and the rain-soaked garden brings him face to face with the intensity of Gretta’s memory and Michael’s death.