FOLLOW the line of the horizon, concentrate. It’s not that easy; the boat lurches and heaves, and with it, possibly, your stomach, leaving you vulnerable facing the menace of jeering gulls expecting an impromptu snack. Your eyes will water from more than just the sting of the salt spray. Even now, in the 21st century, nature – the sea, the sky, mist and cloud – remains in control. The weather controls any attempt to visit the great monastic site of Skellig Michael, rising out of the Atlantic.
Some eight miles off Valentia (itself an island but also a settlement retaining elements of Victorian gentility), Skellig is majestic, a place of pilgrimage and once home to medieval Irish monks who came here to test their faith as well their bodies and perhaps even their sanity. What made them work so hard and live so dangerously? As the small boat fuelled by a diesel engine that puffs and splutters makes its way towards the twin sea crags of the Skellig rocks, the relentless swell and surge of the sea makes one wonder at the determination and courage perhaps even fanaticism, of those monks. Is prayer that strong? Can faith battle an angry sea? It must have. No one knows how many monks were lost but the seventh-, possibly sixth-century, monastery, serene and defiant, proves that a community arrived here and stayed; the monks prayed and they built.
The Vikings raided Skellig, they were formidable sailors, as must have been many of the monks.
The approach is dramatic; the two Skelligs appear to drift in and out of sight, a menacing pair initially of shark fins, then leviathans slowly transforming into two neighbouring cathedrals, before finally assuming their exact form, eerie fortresses prepared to test an intruder’s worth.
The smaller island, Little Skellig, shimmers with the life of the thousands of seabirds, particularly gannets, that season there. But Skellig Michael is less concerned with illusions or dreams; it tolerates its visitors and provides a place of contemplation, no more than that. A glance out over the open sea is a constant reminder of the power of the ocean or should that be, creation itself?
It is not an island paradise; there are no trees no freshwater lakes, it is a twin-peaked plug of rock. I’ve been to Inishmurray, off the Co Sligo coast, and also to High Island off the Co Galway coast, both wonderful and strangely welcoming, but nothing compares with Skellig: it is an adventure and an experience, most of all it is a privilege. Who were those monks? Did they build their boats to a uniform scale? How many pairs of arms helped to row? What kind of nerve did it take? In this, the week of the Winter Solstice, when we are again reminded of the genius of the late Stone Age farmers who created the wonder that is the Newgrange alignment down a long, narrow passage into a chamber, it must be said that the heroic monks who settled on Skellig inspire the same admiration.
The great Robert Lloyd Praeger was defeated in his attempt to visit Skellig and recorded his disappointment in his classic narrative, The Way That I Went(1937), admitting it was one "of the few places in Ireland which, to my sorrow, I have not succeeded in reaching."
But Paddy Bushe in the company of fellow poets, including John F Deane, Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin and Cathal Ó Searcaigh, spent time at the monastery and the result is a wonderful book, Voices at the World's Edge: Irish Poets on Skellig Michael, a celebration of a spiritual haven, in which history and religion, the communal and the private all play an important role.
In a prose piece "Out in the Weather", written for the book, Bernard O'Donoghue refers to the Anglo-Saxon poem, The Seafarer. When making my way to Skellig Michael in 2003, after several false starts courtesy of the weather, I remembered first reading it at university, and thinking how it caught the dream-like essence of solitude.
Once on Skellig I began my explorations, looking forward to the moment when the boat returned, taking the visitors away and leaving me to my night on the rock which had been arranged by conservation architect Grellan Rourke, a co-author of The Forgotten Hermitage of Skellig Michael.
Part of my vigil was a treasured glimpse of Skellig’s most elusive seasonal resident, the storm petrel, Europe’s smallest sea bird, which visits land only while breeding. It has an odd, purring, cough-like cry and hides by day and lays its only egg in stone walls, often within the monastery complex. The petrels moved against the sky.
Far less secrecy surrounded the confident Manx shearwater chick, calmly at home in a beehive hut and well used to being petted by the OPW staff. On the highest ledge of the South Peak, the taller, natural pinnacle dwarfing the lower, sloping summit where the monastery is sited, one would have to wonder at the hermit who had singled out a terrace here – overlooking the sea and exposed to the wind – for his oratory. Did he die on Skellig? On the north of the island is the monastery, accessed by a dramatic series of stone steps cut into the rock, ever higher above the sea. A sense of community lingers.
As darkness falls, the crosses standing in the graveyard are transformed into a group of monks gazing out over the sea. John F Deane's magnificent poem, Night on Skellig Michael: "I began up the steep black steps/ broken out of the ribs of rock, tripped almost at once, my palm/scraping against loose shale, drops of blood/an early offering to the island" conveys the physicality, the awe, the spiritual frisson of being on Skellig, the tourist as penitent. Only the birds shatter the silence. Yet for all the solitude, it is not lonely, it has an insistence, it asks questions; it causes the visitor to look, to listen and to think.
Voices at the World’s Edge – Irish Poets on Skellig Michael
, edited by Paddy Bushe is published by Dedalus Press