James Sparshatt/Newscom
A hiker on Skellig Michael.
If anyone can explain why 10,000 people each year make the stomach-churning passage to Skellig Michael, a desolate rock pinnacle eight miles off Ireland's southwest coast, John O'Shea can.
From spring to early fall for the last 15 years, the ruddy-cheeked Kerryman has ferried passengers across the roiling Atlantic from Derrynane Harbour to Skellig Michael aboard his stripped-down fishing trawler, one of only 14 boats authorized to make the trip. If conditions permit a landing on the 54-acre crag, and often they don't, passengers must then hop from a pitching boat onto a concrete quay and scale 618 stone steps. The steps are rough, narrow and slippery when damp, which they usually are, without so much as a flimsy handrail as a barrier between you and oblivion hundreds of feet below. And all this to view a scattering of ruins below the 714-foot summit.
Why would anybody brave such a journey?
"I guess they're trying to figure out what those guys were doing out there," Mr. O'Shea said as he set off with me, eight other passengers and four of his beloved mutt terriers under a steely sky last fall.
"Those guys" were monks who used to live on this remote rock, from A.D. 600 to 1200, according to estimates, and they were why I had come, too. Physical traces of that community remain, battered by wind and rain but still clinging to the upper reaches of the island: carved Celtic crosses marking graves; the ruins of a small church; a primitive oratory and a few beehive-shaped monastic cells painstakingly built of mortarless, flat stones stacked in ever-constricting circles. They were relics of a time before rationalism ruled the Western world when blind faith in the divine was the pole star of life.
For centuries this monastic community bore witness to just how tenacious we can be in pursuit of the divine. According to Unesco, which in 1996 bestowed world heritage status on Skellig Michael, the island "illustrates, as no other site can, the extremes of a Christian monasticism characterizing much of North Africa, the Near East and Europe." Separated from the rest of humanity by howling winds and treacherous seas, the island served the same function as any other monastery: providing a mystical beacon, a clarion call, to guide the world toward God.
During the hour and three-quarters it took to cross through licorice-black seas, I got to know the other passengers, all Irish and all first-timers to Skellig Michael. Most of us sat under the open sky on backless wooden benches that lined the deck's perimeter. The light was flat, shadowless, the boat vibrated from the engine's noisy thrum, and the wind smelled of seaweed and salt. Somewhere ahead Skellig Michael was shrouded in low clouds and vaporous marine air.
"Skellig Michael is on our Irish bucket list," said one man, half of a 40-something couple from Dublin who were both accountants, wore matching jackets and sometimes finished each other's sentences. Another husband-and-wife pair announced that they were on a birding trip. (They already had one sighting from the ship: a majestic northern gannet with a six-foot wingspan, gliding silently overhead like a predator drone.) A university student from Cork in sunflower yellow jeans and blue patent leather high-top sneakers who said that he was nursing a hangover spent much of the passage poring over schematics of Skellig Michael in a hardback book he had lugged aboard. "Skellig Michael somehow seems a part of who we Irish are," he said, shivering because he had worn a T-shirt with no jacket.
And there was an elderly man in rumpled clothes and a tweed cap, accompanied by a friend who resembled him and by his daughter, a 50-something blonde with sparkly gold sandals and red toenails who arrived 30 minutes late for the boat, latte and iPhone in hand. "I've been wanting to see Skellig Michael all me life," he said excitedly. "Surely it's a holy place."
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