Ireland (Lonely Planet, 9th Edition) - Fionn Davenport [253]
Further up the rock you’ll see stubby-winged fulmars, with distinctive bony ‘nostrils’ from which they eject an evil-smelling green liquid if you get too close. Look also for razorbills, black-and-white guillemots and the delightful puffins with their multicoloured beaks and waddling gait. In May, puffins come ashore to lay a solitary egg at the far end of a burrow, and parent birds can be seen guarding their nests. Puffins stay only until the first weeks of August.
Skellig Michael
The jagged, 217m-high rock of Skellig Michael (Archangel Michael’s Rock; like St Michael’s Mount in Cornwall and Mont Saint Michel in Normandy) is the larger of the two islands and a Unesco World Heritage site. It looks like the last place on earth where anyone would try to land, let alone establish a community, yet early Christian monks survived here from the 6th until the 12th or 13th century. Influenced by the Coptic Church (founded by St Anthony in the deserts of Egypt and Libya), their determined quest for ultimate solitude led them to this remote, windblown edge of Europe.
The monastic buildings are perched on a saddle in the rock, some 150m above sea level, reached by 600 steep steps cut into the rock face. The astounding 6th-century oratories and beehive cells vary in size; the largest cell has a floor space of 4.5m by 3.6m. You can see the monks’ south-facing vegetable garden and their cistern for collecting rainwater. The most impressive structural achievements are the settlement’s foundations – platforms built on the steep slope using nothing more than earth and drystone walls.
Little is known about the life of the monastery, but there are records of Viking raids in AD 812 and 823. Monks were kidnapped or killed, but the community recovered and carried on. Legend even has it that the monks converted one of the raiders, Olaf Tryggvesson, and he became Norway’s first Christian ruler. In the 11th century a rectangular oratory was added to the site, but although it was expanded in the 12th century, the monks abandoned the rock around this time, perhaps because of particularly ferocious Atlantic storms.
After the introduction of the Gregorian calendar in 1582, Skellig Michael became a popular spot for weddings. Marriages were forbidden during Lent, but since Skellig used the old Julian calendar, a trip to the islands allowed those unable to wait for Easter to tie the knot.
In the 1820s two lighthouses were built on Skellig Michael, together with the road that runs around the base.
The guides on the island ask you to do your picnicking on the way up to the monastery, or at Christ’s Saddle just before the last flight of steps, rather than among the ruins. This is to keep sandwich-loving birds and their droppings away from the monument.
Small Skellig
While Skellig Michael looks like two triangles linked by a spur, Small Skellig is longer, lower and much craggier. From a distance it looks as if someone battered it with a feather pillow that burst. Close up you realise you’re looking at a colony of over 20,000 pairs of breeding gannets, the second-largest breeding colony in the world. Most boats circle the island so you can see the gannets, and you may see basking seals as well. Small Skellig is a bird sanctuary; no landing is permitted.
Getting There & Away
Skellig Michael’s fragility places limits on the number of daily visitors. The 15 boats are licensed to carry no more than 12 passengers each, for a maximum of 180 people there at any one time. So it’s wise to book ahead in July and August, bearing in mind that if the weather’s bad the boats may not sail (about two days out of seven).