Horizons: The World’s Western Edge: Skellig Michael

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It is not a peaceful island Eden—not an Innisfree, where man can retreat to a quiet cabin, raise crops, tend honeybees and, as Yeats counsels, “have some peace … for peace comes dropping slow.”

Rather, it is a desperately lonely, cold and wet outpost—a small monastery set on a rocky perch (Skellig means “rock”), 600 feet above the sea, 7 miles off the southwestern coast of Ireland. Inhabited from the sixth or seventh century A.D. to the thirteenth, the monastery on Skellig Michael epitomizes the extreme asceticism of early Christian Ireland.

Monasticism, in Ireland and elsewhere, derived from the tenets of the Egyptian saints Anthony (c. 251–326 A.D.), who promoted solitary withdrawal into the inhospitable Egyptian desert, and Pachomius (c. 292–346 A.D.), who encouraged bands of religious men to withdraw from society and live communally. In green Ireland, monks fled to the sea, establishing island monasteries around Ireland and the British Isles, and even off Iceland. As the Irish monk-historian Adamnan noted in his life of the sixth-century Irish saint Columba, who founded the monastery of Iona off the coast of Scotland: “Some of our brethren have lately set sail, and are anxious to discover a desert in the 054pathess sea.” Islands provided the monks with the isolated and harsh environment that they hoped would bring them closer to God.

The loneliest and most inhospitable of all the Irish monasteries is Skellig Michael, a desolate peak, caught somewhere between earth and heaven, at the western edge of the medieval world.

Today, the island’s three boat landings can only be reached when the sea is calm (and then, legend has it, only with the assistance of the Archangel Michael, for whom the island is named). Steep ancient paths lead up from the landings to the island’s lower, northern peak, where a stone retaining wall encloses the ancient monastic compound. Inside the 325- by 100-foot precinct stand five beehive-shaped huts (there were originally six, each about 10–15 feet tall), a small chapel (called an oratory), a later medieval church (dating to the 10th or 11th century) and several stone crosses.

No trees grow on Skellig Michael, so the earliest buildings (the huts and the oratory) were constructed of the island’s dense sandstone; no mortar was used to hold the stones together. The later church not only has mortar but some stone imported from nearby Valentia Island. Built to sustain high winds, the buildings are exceptionally well preserved; until recently, in fact, the sheer remoteness of the island has protected the site from casual and clumsy visitors.

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We have no records of daily life on the island, although it is assumed that 12 monks lived two per hut. Irish annals note that the monastery was sacked four times by the Vikings in the early ninth century. (During one raid, marauders snatched the monastery’s abbot, Etgal, and starved him to death.) In the mid-ninth century one of the community’s most devout and daring members, perhaps finding life in the monastery too easy and convivial, moved to the even-more-remote southern peak of Skellig Michael. Here, on a narrow ledge 700 feet above the sea, he (probably with the assistance of his fellow monks) constructed a one-man hut and chapel “as near to God as the physical environment would permit,” according to the late art historian Walter Horn.

The main monastery still stood in the 12th century, when the Welsh historian and traveler Giraldus Cambrensis reported on a miraculous wine-producing stone that stood outside the church: “There is a certain stone there outside of, but almost touching, the door of the church on the right-hand side. In a hollow of the upper part of this stone there is found every morning through the merits of the saints of the place as much wine as is necessary for the celebration of as many masses as there are priests to say mass on that day.”

Giraldus also indicated that the monks moved to the mainland in the 12th century—perhaps in response to dramatic climate changes, which would have made the island uninhabitable year-round for even the hardiest of monks. At the same time, throughout Ireland and Europe, hermetic, wilderness monasteries were waning in popularity. By the 16th century, the remote island had become a site of pilgrimage rather than of habitation. According to local church records, at least one murderer was sent there to do penance.—Molly Dewsnap Meinhardt

It is not a peaceful island Eden—not an Innisfree, where man can retreat to a quiet cabin, raise crops, tend honeybees and, as Yeats counsels, “have some peace … for peace comes dropping slow.” Rather, it is a desperately lonely, cold and wet outpost—a small monastery set on a rocky perch (Skellig means “rock”), 600 feet above the sea, 7 miles off the southwestern coast of Ireland. Inhabited from the sixth or seventh century A.D. to the thirteenth, the monastery on Skellig Michael epitomizes the extreme asceticism of early Christian Ireland. Monasticism, in Ireland and elsewhere, derived from the […]