Skelling Michael

This unique Irish heritage site has scarcely changed for several hundred years. Steve Newman braved the crossing to find out more.

- Steve Newman

IF you ever get involved in a staring contest with a puffin, back down. There’s no way you’re going to win. I had climbed halfway up the 600 steps that lead to the top of Skellig Michael and its sixth-century stone monastery and stopped for a rest and a drink. Turning round, I was met with a look of such disdain by the bird that it has stayed with me ever since.

Rising like the end of a giant Toblerone from the Atlantic, the UNESCO World Heritage Site of Skellig Michael is simply incredible and amazing, if for no other reason than very few people know it exists.

This is due in no small way to the fact that often the gigantic Atlantic rollers come in so high and fast that landing is impossible. With its smaller sister, Little Skellig, it sits some six miles from the village of Portmagee off the coast of Kerry, south-west Ireland, in splendid isolation.

It is, however, this isolation that has resulted in the site being exceptionally well preserved.

So remote and beautiful are the Skelligs that George Bernard Shaw described them as “this incredible, impossible, mad place, part of our Dream World”.

It can be quite a haul getting up those steps, and even when you reach the top there is a steady rise on a path that simply stares down to the Atlantic some 700 feet below.