Around them, little islands — some
inhabited, many not — stand sentinel among
the thrashing waters, fragments of the
mainland half-lured to sea by the mercurial
wiles of the horizon. This stark coastline,
stretching from County Kerry into rural West
Cork, has the unmistakable feel of a frontier.
“This is where Europe squares up to
the rest of the world,” my guide, Ciarán
Thornton, confirms, adjusting his flat cap,
to which is pinned a kestrel feather. “Just
off this coast, the ocean shelf vastly drops
away as the Eurasian Plate goes out to meet
tectonic North America. You can feel it
even without knowing it. There’s something
almost magical about liminal places like
this. It’s hard to put into words.”
It’s still early — the first morning of my
week-long road trip tracing southwest
Ireland’s coastal edges — when Ciarán and I
climb out of the car in the former smugglers’
cove of Derrynane Harbour, at the tip of
Kerry’s Iveragh Peninsula. We’re met by a
briny slap of ocean air, an excitable sheepdog
and a small flotilla of fishing boats floating
upon a hazy bay. Somewhere out of sight is
our destination: the archaeological marvel of
Skellig Michael, an island settled by a dozen
Christian monks in the sixth century and,
today, abandoned to seasonal bird colonies
— and tourists.
Visiting isn’t easy, though. To preserve the
integrity of the site, only 15 small vessels are
licensed to take people out (between May
and October) and these tours — which sell
out far in advance — are regularly called off
due to dangerous ocean swells. “Someone
has brought some luck along today. This is
the first day in almost a week we’ve gotten
the green light,” skipper John O’Shea says, as
eight passengers and three dogs pile off the
jetty into his boat.
Life jackets are passed around, the boat is
unmoored in a flurry of slackened ropes, an
engine sputters into life and we’re away. In
his captain’s cabin, John is steering with one
hand and warming hunks of bread on a hob
with the other. “Tea?” he asks as I squeeze
in to join him, disturbing a sleeping dog as
I do. “This is practically my second home,”
he says, in an attempt to explain the jumble
of possessions and pillows. “This was my
father’s fishing boat. He was the first to offer
proper tours to the islands, back in the ’70s.
Business is much busier now.” Much of the
reason for this upturn in Skellig Michael’s
fortunes can be attributed to its star turn in
the 2017 film Star Wars: The Last Jedi. “You
haven’t brought a Jedi costume or lightsaber,
I see,” John remarks dryly.
I spend most of the hour at sea on the
prow with Luna, the Border Collie — “our
chief dolphin spotter”. It’s a quiet morning
for marine life: Luna’s barks only alert us
to one seal, glossily flipping about in the
waves. Soon the pyramidal outline of Skellig
Michael appears on the horizon, its natural
spires and buttresses crystallising into
view as we grow closer. It strikes me as an
untamable place; still simmering from the
violent geology that formed it. Even on a
calm day, tides smash into its barnacled cliff
faces — sending up geysers of white spray
— and gales compete to dislodge stones.
The island unsettled the Irish playwright
George Bernard Shaw when he visited in 1910:
he described it to a friend as “an impossible,
mad place ... I tell you the thing does not
belong to any world that you and I have lived
and worked in: it is part of our dream world.”
The intensity of faith that drove
generations of monks — for some 600 years
— to make this austere splinter of rock their
home, is almost incomprehensible.Down in Ireland’s south west, the land frays
to tattered peninsulas that splay into the
Atlantic like five mighty, crooked fingers.
CLOCKWISE FROM TOP
LEFT: John O’Shea,
seen here with his dogs,
Watson and Luna, has
been sailing visitors to
the Skellig Islands for
over two decades; a boat
waits under the cliffs of
Skellig Michael; steamed
Cromane mussels at The
Boat Yard Restaurant
& Bar, Dingle; the view
across to Little Skellig and
the mainland from the
sixth-century monastery
on Skellig Michael
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