IRELAND
Down in Ireland’s south west, the land frays to tattered peninsulas that splay into the Atlantic like five mighty, crooked fingers.
Around them, little islands — some inhabited, many not — stand sentinel among the thrashing waters, fragments of the mainland half-lured to sea by the mercurial wiles of the horizon. This stark coastline, stretching from County Kerry into rural West Cork, has the unmistakable feel of a frontier. “This is where Europe squares up to
the rest of the world,” my guide, Ciarán Thornton, confirms, adjusting his flat cap, to which is pinned a kestrel feather. “Just off this coast, the ocean shelf vastly drops away as the Eurasian Plate goes out to meet tectonic North America. You can feel it even without knowing it. There’s something almost magical about liminal places like this. It’s hard to put into words.” It’s still early — the first morning of my
week-long road trip tracing southwest Ireland’s coastal edges — when Ciarán and I climb out of the car in the former smugglers’ cove of Derrynane Harbour, at the tip of Kerry’s Iveragh Peninsula. We’re met by a briny slap of ocean air, an excitable sheepdog and a small flotilla of fishing boats floating upon a hazy bay. Somewhere out of sight is our destination: the archaeological marvel of Skellig Michael, an island settled by a dozen Christian monks in the sixth century and, today, abandoned to seasonal bird colonies — and tourists. Visiting isn’t easy, though. To preserve the
integrity of the site, only 15 small vessels are licensed to take people out (between May and October) and these tours — which sell out far in advance — are regularly called off due to dangerous ocean swells. “Someone has brought some luck along today. This is the first day in almost a week we’ve gotten the green light,” skipper John O’Shea says, as eight passengers and three dogs pile off the jetty into his boat.
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nationalgeographic.co.uk/travel Life jackets are passed around, the boat is
unmoored in a flurry of slackened ropes, an engine sputters into life and we’re away. In his captain’s cabin, John is steering with one hand and warming hunks of bread on a hob with the other. “Tea?” he asks as I squeeze in to join him, disturbing a sleeping dog as I do. “This is practically my second home,” he says, in an attempt to explain the jumble of possessions and pillows. “This was my father’s fishing boat. He was the first to offer proper tours to the islands, back in the ’70s. Business is much busier now.” Much of the reason for this upturn in Skellig Michael’s fortunes can be attributed to its star turn in the 2017 film Star Wars: The Last Jedi. “You haven’t brought a Jedi costume or lightsaber, I see,” John remarks dryly. I spend most of the hour at sea on the
prow with Luna, the Border Collie — “our chief dolphin spotter”. It’s a quiet morning for marine life: Luna’s barks only alert us to one seal, glossily flipping about in the waves. Soon the pyramidal outline of Skellig Michael appears on the horizon, its natural spires and buttresses crystallising into view as we grow closer. It strikes me as an untamable place; still simmering from the violent geology that formed it. Even on a calm day, tides smash into its barnacled cliff faces — sending up geysers of white spray — and gales compete to dislodge stones. The island unsettled the Irish playwright
George Bernard Shaw when he visited in 1910: he described it to a friend as “an 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.” The intensity of faith that drove
generations of monks — for some 600 years — to make this austere splinter of rock their home, is almost incomprehensible.
CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: John O’Shea, seen here with his dogs, Watson and Luna, has been sailing visitors to the Skellig Islands for over two decades; a boat waits under the cliffs of Skellig Michael; steamed Cromane mussels at The Boat Yard Restaurant & Bar, Dingle; the view across to Little Skellig and the mainland from the sixth-century monastery on Skellig Michael PREVIOUS PAGES: Walkers scale the cliffs of Dunmore Head, Dingle Peninsula
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