Portmagee is a colourful village that joins Valentia Island to the Iveragh peninsula in Co. Kerry. In the 18th century it was a smugglers village. Today the boats carry passengers rather than stolen goods. Every morning from May to September, pilgrims and history heads and Star Wars fanatics wait for the boats to let them aboard and they head 7km out into the Atlantic to try and land at Skellig Michael. This is the only time you are allowed on the island and the landing is not guaranteed if the ocean is too rough. There is a Cork couple waiting alongside us who have made the journey up here for 30 years and they have still not landed on the island.
The sea looks very calm as we wander around the harbour hoping to spot a seal. The sky is grey from the Kerry clouds sitting just above the chimneys. We stock up on sandwiches, water and crisps from O’ Connell’s Shop – a family run establishment that is also a post office, butchers, newsagent and general store. The store is tiny but it appears to have everything you could ever want if you ended up here. We are served by a young Kerry lad about 13 who looks like he would buy and sell us without us even knowing about it. Friendly though.
Our boat arrives at the pontoon – the Lady Clare, a sprightly blue vessel maintained by Skellig Michael Boat Trips. They are one of only 15 boat operators licensed to bring you to the island. We hop aboard, stow our bags in the helm, don our flotation devices and grab a seat on the open deck. There are two seats at the rear, two at the front and an island in the middle which seats 8. A young French couple take the two seats at the front. A pair of Germans with impressive looking cameras sit at the back. The Irish, being islanders at heart, sit in the middle.
Along with the skipper, there is a boatman who roams about on deck to make sure we are all ok. At times he points out different things to us as the Lady Clare heads out of the inlet and into the wide open sea. The waves start rolling and the boat heads straight over them, rising like a horse in the Grand National and chugging off to the next set. I’m enjoying the swell as it has a nice oceanic rhythm but the French dude has found a bucket and is losing his Irish Fry into it.
The mix of the boatman’s Kerry accent, the sound of the engine, my not so great hearing and the acoustics of the open sea means that I miss a lot of what he says. There is talk of birds. Also Harry Potter, I think. Once the Cork couple join the conversation I give up and spend my time watching seabirds skim across the water. One bird in particular stands out. It looks like a gull apart from a distinctive orange blush on the back of its head. At first I think they are following the boat but many of them pass us. Some of them are carrying seaweed in their beaks. They pay us no attention as they pass, powerful wings beating. The birds going back to land stay low to the water, their wing tips barely touching the surface. It is amazing to watch them as they hug the moving surface of the waves, always gliding millimetres above the rolling water.
The boat slows after half an hour. The noise of the engine is replaced by the harsh sound of thousands of birds going “Arrah arrah”. We drift towards Little Skellig. Rising out of the sea like something out of a Godzilla movie, the smaller of the islands is stark and inhospitable with sheer cliff faces that are home to 35,000 nesting birds. In my eagerness to get to Skellig Michael I didn’t give much thought to the little twin. I had no idea that it is one of the largest gannet colonies in the world. At first, I thought the cliffs were white, but that is just because every square foot is covered in birds.
The noise is deafening and chaotic and that is from someone who once worked at a Megadeth gig in Dublin. The heady aroma of bird droppings had the French dude clutching his bucket closer to him. The sky around the island is busy with birds that swirl in the air before dive bombing into the water to appear with fish in their bills. The boat circles the island and we pass seals basking on slabs like fat lazy slugs or bobbing up and down in the water. As the boat moves away, the sun starts to burn the grey out of the sky and Little Skellig is draped in sunlight and wisps of sea fog. I’m struck by just how incredible this place is. From a geological perspective this island was created by the same tectonic upheavals of volcanic stone folding over sandstone plates that created the McGillycuddy Reeks 370 million years ago. Rising sea levels have separated them.
Next stop is Skellig Michael. We slide into the harbour and disembark easily up a set of steps. From there we follow the road up – sheer rock on one side and a waist high wall keeping us safe on the seaward side. We pass the new toilets and a helicopter landing area until we are corralled in a group with visitors from other boats. There are only 180 people allowed on Skellig Michael each day and the first thing you have to do is a safety briefing. This was carried out by Robert Harris, the legendary tour guide who has been coming here for over 30 years. His message is take care, take your time, take breaks and take it all in. Up above we can see a string of visitors making their way down the 618 steps from above the grey fog. There are actually three sets of steps on the island but these are the only ones in use today.
The first thing I notice as I start to walk up the steps is the amount of plants. In between every rock on the island are carpets of greenery. There are clumps of soft pink sea-thrift and dense mats of sea campion that face the sea winds. The pale pink petals of sea spurrey peek out from the feathery leaves of sea mayweed. It is the complete opposite of Little Skellig. Whatever is green here, is a vibrant green, sucking up the moisture from the sea air. The colour is unlike any green I remember from land, which is saying a lot in Kerry. While the fog made it hard to see the overall scale of the island, it also meant that the clownish little puffins were content to stay on the island instead of throwing themselves into the air and flapping off out to sea. This is May, so there are plenty of them about. They wander around their little burrows on their flappy orange feet, peeking out from under ledges, completely oblivious to the string of humans that climb the steps. This is like nothing I have ever seen before.
The climb is steep in places, but it levels out at Christ’s Valley. Skellig Michael is a an unusual crag because it has two iconic pinnacles that look like they have been chiselled out of the rock by the sea winds. The valley is actually a geologic fault in the island that sits in between the two points. It is one of the few places on the island where you are not looking back down a vertigo inducing steep edge to the ocean.
To the left is the Hermitage, a slab of sheer rock 218m above the water which is off limits to visitors. It is not even visible right now. The Hermitage has a series of secret terraces on the other side that was only discovered in the 80s with the help of climbing archaeologists who found a 7m fissure that allowed them to “chimney climb” up to a hidden ledge. To the right are a set of steeper steps threading their way through sandstone spires to the monastery. This was probably where the monks kept their cows. People from previous tours are picnicing here. There is a guy in a Star Wars T-shirt. We head up the steps again, carefully.
This is up into the bare rock. There are no puffins up here but we can hear plenty of other birds calling as they fly around the island below us. Bob has already warned us not to eat anything up here as they want to keep the gulls away from the Storm Petrel chicks that are hiding in the monastery. The path levels out again along a ledge that disappears into the fog.
We meet the retaining wall of the monastery and enter through a stone doorway onto a flat terrace. This is the Monks Garden. The path leads to an even larger retaining wall. On the other side of this wall is the monastery. While Delphine has a bit of a moment soaking up the starkness of the space I wander around the buildings. There is a church, six beehive huts and an oratory. Everything is grey stone apart from the bright green grass. Most of the construction is drystone walling. There are also gravestones, crosses and a huge standing cross over 2m high.
Maggie Keane is the tour guide on duty today and she fills us in on what we know about Skellig Michael. The people who came here were inspired by the radical religion of the North African desert monks that took root and blossomed in Europe via the Roman Empire. The Christian movement was so successful that most of us hardly notice the churches and chapels in our communities today or the belief system embedded into our society. Skellig Michael is unique because the isolation and the dramatic environment ensures that its visual and historic integrity has been preserved like nowhere else.
I’m from the Boyne Valley so I know what it takes to make a World Heritage Site. Location, building method and rituals combine to create a lasting impression. I have explored those massive landscape mounds and just wondered why they went to all that effort. The builders had a different mindset. Their obsession with the movement of the sun and moon was too scientific for me. The monumental scale of their mounds is too big. I have stood inside Newgrange and felt nothing about their abstract neolithic symbols except a vague curiosity. Being inside a beehive hut on Skellig Michael listening to the trill of tiny Storm Petrels nesting in the crevices of the stone walling was a much more personal experience for me. As Luke Skywalker says “No one’s ever really gone”.
This was the end of the Earth for the people who lived here. They hacked the soil out from under the rock and backfilled it to create the walled platforms that float out over the sea. Every stone was engineered to create channels to collect water to keep them alive. Life was scrabbled out of the elements in the same way that the flowers cling to the island.
When Maggie finishes, we walk back down to Christs Valley. The sun finally breaks through the fog and we can make out the looming bulk of the South peak while we eat our sandwiches.
Visitors only have approximately 2.5 hours on Skellig Michael. I would have considered this plenty of time to see a small space, but the time flies here. This is probably due to the full attention needed when climbing each step. There is a peaceful atmosphere everywhere, despite the boats queuing and people like me moving about with cameras. This could be from centuries of spiritual practice soaking into the ground, or it could be because no one under 12 is allowed on the island. I remember having the chance to visit the Sistine Chapel one morning before any other tourists arrived. It was the only time I ever remember wishing I had another 30 minutes to soak up the atmosphere of a place, and I had the same feeling here before we returned to our waiting boat.
Google Maps: 51.772425, -10.538472
Distance: 14.8 km
Time: Four hours and twenty minutes
Type of journey: Boat-ride, steps
Views: coast, ocean, islands
Animals: Puffins, Gannets
Score : 10/10
Photos: Delphine Coudray
If anyone has anymore information about the Skelligs please add them in the comments below.
I first became aware of Skellig Michael in 1997, when I read “Sun Dancing” by Geoffrey Moorhouse. I recommend it highly. It’s two halves, one fictional account of the monastary spanning the centuries, and then the research he used to arrive at his tale. Well written and fascinating.
Thanks for the write-up.
Thanks for the reading suggestion Randy. I will seek that one out : )