On the Edge of the World: Skellig Michael

The story of Skellig Michael and how it took part in saving civilization.

Skellig Michael, one of two small, isolated islands off the coast of County Kerry, Ireland, was the home of dedicated monks who preserved knowledge for centuries to come. ladipictures/Shutterstock

In the blustery blue-green sea off the southeast coast of Ireland lies a craggy isle, thrusting up from the ocean to great heights, like Dante’s mountain of Purgatory. The spitting and seething ocean endlessly lashes its sides and its ragged ridges look almost like the backbone of a dragon. It’s a formidable sight, soaring 700 feet skyward from sea level. This is Skellig Michael, the rock of St. Michael.

Centuries of History

For about 600 years, Skellig Michael was home to a Christian monastery composed of beehive huts made with dry stone construction, remarkably well-preserved to this day. Early Christian monks believed that they could draw closer to God through living in harsh and remote environments. Being away from the distractions of world and its business afforded them greater clarity to focus on the Divine. The harsh living conditions offered the opportunity for penances to expiate their sins and detach themselves from earthly comforts, freeing the soul for God.

Standing eight miles from the mainland and buffeted by strong sea winds, Skellig Michael fit the bill for an isolated and ascetic place to call home. Legend says that St. Fionan, a follower of St. Brendan the Navigator, founded the monastery at the pinnacle of the rock in the 6th century. The first written records of the isle come from the 8th century.

The monks constructed huts, terraces, stairs, walls, gardens, a cemetery, and a church on the island’s precipitous heights, featuring sheer drops to the waters below. The huts are round and domed on the outside but rectangular on the inside, and their design prevents even a single drop of rain from entering the enclosure—all without thatching or even mortar between the stones.

Skellig Michael beehive cells and Little Skellig in the distance. Arian Zwegers/CC BY 2.0

Every day, the monks descended the 670 steps to the ocean to fish for breakfast. In addition to fish, their diet consisted of vegetables, eggs, and meat from birds. Even today, Skellig Michael is home to voluminous populations of sea birds, including puffins, gannets, guillemots, fulmars, cormorants, and arctic terns.

Seabirds on the cliffs of Skellig Michael make nests and breed in colonies, as they have done for centuries. Jerzystrzelecki/CC BY-SA 3.0

Besides fishing, tending gardens, and collecting eggs, daily routines would have included prayer, study, and contemplation. It’s easy to imagine the thoughts of eternity that would have sprung to mind for a monk looking out over the vast ocean from his rocky perch, with the gales ripping through his hair and habit. It certainly would have stimulated a meditative spirit.

Only about 12 monks and an abbot lived at the monastery at any given time during the centuries it was in use. A little, hidden cluster of buildings on the south peak of the isle is separate from the monastery—a refuge beyond the refuge—and this was the hermitage where one courageous monk lived in solitude. Reaching it was a dizzying and harrowing climb. Legend tells that in 993 the Viking Olav Trygvasson, who brought Christianity to Norway, was baptized by a hermit on the Skellig, as related in “World Heritage Sites of Great Britain and Ireland” by Victoria Huxley and Geoffery Smith.

The staircase of Skellig Michael, where pilgrims still visit to this day. Public Domain

Ms. Huxley and Mr. Smith relate that in the 12th century, changes in the climate caused greater storms and gales, and the monks had to abandon the site, moving to the nearby Ballinskelligs Abbey on the mainland. The monks retained possession of the island until Ballinskelligs Abbey was dissolved by Elizabeth I, at which time the island passed into the hands of the Butler family. It had already developed into a popular pilgrimage site by the 16th century. In 1880, it became the property of Ireland’s Office of Public Works.

A Locus for Learning

Its barren, off-the-map aesthetic notwithstanding, Skellig Michael and places like it played a crucial role in European history. During and after the fall of the Roman Empire, Europe was plunged into a dark and confused night, and many of the achievements, principles, and learning of the Roman and Greek civilizations were destroyed or forgotten by the pagan Picts, Scots, Saxons, Allemanians, Lombards, Franks, who overwhelmed the empire.

Christianity itself faltered under this swelling tide of new peoples and the shifting landscape of Europe and the Mediterranean. But as historian Kenneth Clark says in his documentary series “Civilization,” “for quite a long time—almost a hundred years—western Christianity survived by clinging to places like Skellig Michael.”

The ruins of the lighthouse at Skellig Michael are haunting and evocative. Public Domain

It wasn’t just Christianity that the monks of Skellig Michael and similar monasteries preserved: it was the whole of the Western heritage. In “How the Irish Saved Civilization,” Thomas Cahill writes,

“For, as the Roman Empire fell, as all through Europe matted, unwashed barbarians descended on the Roman cities, looting artifacts and burning books, the Irish, who were just learning to read and write, took up the great labor of copying all of western literature—everything they could lay their hands on.

“These scribes served as the conduits through which the Greco-Roman and Judeo-Christian cultures were transmitted to the tribes of Europe, newly settled amid the rubble and ruined vineyards of the civilization they had overwhelmed.”

Many of the first Christian missionaries to the tribes throughout Europe were Irish monks, and in many ways they laid the foundation for European civilization as we know it, both in terms of faith and scholarship.

Mr. Cahill believes we owe a great deal to these monks and missionaries, living out on the edge of the world. “Without this Service of the Scribes, everything that happened subsequently would have been unthinkable. Without the Mission of the Irish Monks, who singlehandedly refounded European civilization throughout the continent in the bays and valleys of their exile, the world that came after them would have been an entirely different one—a world without books. And our own world would never have come to be.”

Theirs was a noteworthy achievement—not unlike the achievement of surviving for centuries on a barren rock in a cold sea. Skellig Michael is as remarkable for its topography as it is for its historical significance.

This topographical map of Skellig Michael visually explains the dramatic changes in elevation that mark this jagged island's cliffs and peaks. Vallee/CC BY-SA 4.0

In 1910, George Bernard Shaw gave an excellent summary of the mystique of Skellig Michael and its accompanying island: “The most fantastic and impossible rock in the world: Skellig Michael … the Skelligs are pinnacled, crocketed, spired, arched, caverned, minaretted; and these gothic extravagances are not curiosities of the islands: they are the islands: there is nothing else. The rest of the cathedral may be under the sea for all I know. … An incredible, 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.”

Indeed, it is the dream of wild, magical places, calling to us from somewhere past our ken. It was also the dream of Christian monasticism, striving for higher things—not unlike the impulse behind the Gothic cathedrals Shaw invoked when describing Skellig Michael. Dreamlike as it was, it was this vision of the Irish monks and hermits and missionaries that preserved Western civilization and gave us the seeds of European culture.

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