Story: Chanting from the Crags

Our captain tosses an armload of battered rain wear on the floor of the fishing boat, then peers at us through bushy eyebrows. “You’ll be wantin to wear ‘um,” he says in his thick Irish brogue. “She’ll be gettin mighty rough out there.”

The ten of us heading to Skellig Michael that morning look blankly at one another for a moment, then begin fumbling through the pile of torn and tattered jackets and coveralls, searching in vain for a set that fits reasonably well. As I slide oversized suspenders up my shoulders, ignoble visions of hurling my Irish breakfast over the side of the boat in those promised rough seas edge closer upon my mind.

But the green and distant island of Skellig Michael juts wildly up through the far Atlantic, piercing the horizon with reflections of austere lives lived long ago in glorious isolation. I tie the extra-large yellow fisherman’s hat snug beneath my chin: I want to stand on that green and rocky place remote in all ways imaginable—in time and in space and in a culture of asceticism now mostly foreign to the inhabitants of the modern western world.

I duck my head and clutch the edge of the lurching boat as our captain picks up speed. We pass amazing Small Skellig, a rocky, guano-white gannet colony circled by thousands of those soaring seabirds, brilliant against the blue sky. After eight jarring miles of white-knuckling the heaving boat and unsuccessfully dodging sea spray, our captain cuts the engine. We admire the rare Irish day of brilliant sunshine from within the tall shadow cast by looming Skellig Michael.

As our wobbly-legged group disembarks to solid ground, our captain reminds us again of the rules: “You’ve got exactly three hours. They won’t let me stay any longer than that.”

Nesting puffins with comical dazzling orange beaks line the slab rock trail that twists steeply toward the summit. Slopes of lush emerald green compete for attention with boulders streaked by broad and brilliant starbursts of orange lichen. This is a surreal, windswept land made even more exceptional by the limited number of visitors authorized to land here in any given day. As a UNESCO World Heritage Site, the government protects this small, fragile and culturally unique island erupting like a bullet from the middle of the churning sea.

At the summit stands the tiny cluster of beehive huts made of dry stacked stone that I’ve come to see. They appear suddenly, as a wall of stacked gray slate tells me I’ve arrived at the edge of the remote monastic compound. Just inside the wall, I gaze upon the gray stone roofless remnants of a tiny oratory. It was here, at the rocky summit of an isolated, inhospitable island that long generations of Ireland’s early Christian monks chanted their strange Gaelic-Latin prayers up to their new God.

I bend at the waist and enter the dark, damp and chill interior of a beehive hut. A hide door flap, hides covering the cold ground, and a simple hide bed would have been the only luxuries for the resident hermit who devoted his years to this severe ascetic life. Although the monastery was long-lived, not many monks resided here at any given time, perhaps as few as six, corresponding to the six small beehive huts perched on the rocky edge of remote Skellig Michael.

This far-flung outpost of early Christendom was founded in the 7th Century, although its pagan roots reach much further in Irish folk memory. Some say it was here that St. Patrick, with assistance from the island’s patron St. Michael, fought his final battle to expel snakes—the pagan Devil’s last stronghold—from newly Christian Ireland.

If the tiny monastery perched at the craggy summit of Skellig Michael was testament to the success of Christianity, its abandonment in the 13th Century is testament to the consolidation of Rome’s power. As papal authority grew, it sought to bring independent, mystical outliers such as the hermit monks of Skellig Michael who chose to live on the “heretical” fringes of Christianity, into the closing folds of church doctrine.

From my vantage point at the top of this weather-beaten place, I gaze out across the rough Atlantic. What better way to ensure compliance than choke off the food supply to steep and windswept Skellig Michael, jutting dramatically but vulnerably off the coast and light-years away from mainland food production. Although the monks had survived the violent onslaught of 9th Century Viking raids, they could not withstand slow and certain starvation as the supply ships sent without protest for so many centuries from their mainland diocese finally stopped arriving. Orders from Rome were hard to ignore.

I imagine the last of those defeated hermit monks watched—as do I now—the receding island mass of jutting Skellig Michael as they clung to the edge of the lurching fishing boat. Once gone, the puffins and gannets reclaimed this gray and craggy place, and only the echo of those heartfelt chants in that ancient—and soon to die—Gaelic-Latin tongue were all that remained.