The Skellig Rocks, with its most famous islands Skellig Michael and Little Skellig, tower out of the Atlantic Ocean seven miles west of the Iveragh Peninsula in County Kerry. This isolated position on the very edge of Europe was chosen by a small group of monks to be the home of their remote and inaccessible monastery, sometime between the 6th and 8th centuries.
The monks moved back to the mainland in the 13th Century, but the island remained a holy place and pilgrimage destination until the 19th Century. At this time, two lighthouses were built here and Skellig Michael then became an important part of Ireland’s maritime history.
Skellig Michael was recognised by UNESCO on its World Heritage List in 1996, owing to its outstanding natural value. Today, it’s home to a large variety of breeding seabird species whose enigmatic calls characterise the island’s sense of magic and mystery.
Visitors to Skellig Michael can’t help but be in awe of the achievement of the monks, all those hundreds of years ago, who turned this remote but beautiful island into their home for so long. It retains a special spiritual appeal, which serves as a reminder of the island’s former life as monastic abode, almost as if the monks’ spirits remained.
Rising out of the ocean, these great rocky islands are a place of solitude, wonder and beauty, a place once described by George Bernard Shaw as “incredible, impossible and mad” and “part of our dream world”.
