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piece of land I know. They represent, somehow, a far-off centre, removed from this world but pivotal to it, a place that could not be further out - they are, with the sole exception of the Blaskets just to the north, the westernmost point of Europe -but whose isolation and history as one of the great centres of Irish monasticism a thousand years ago makes them magnetic. When the Blasket islanders went to the mainland and were thinking of returning home, they would talk of going ‘back inside’ to Great Blasket or Inishvickillaun. ‘Inside’ is what the vast exposure of the Skelligs looks like too. Their silence looks packed and pregnant.
    Like many islands, grey on a distant horizon, the Skelligs invite and the boat allows, but circumstances were against us and for a week or two we couldn’t get out there. Even so, as the
Auk
travelled the length of that coast, up to the Blaskets and the Arans, downpast Dursey to Roaring Water Bay and Cape Clear, the Skelligs came to seem like the node of our own Atlantic geography. Skellig means ‘rough place’ in old Irish, a hard pair of rocks set out in the ever-swelling sea. The word in Irish for ‘swell’ is the same as the word for ‘stomach’ and that seemed from a distance to be the nature of our unvisited ambition: all crag in the soft and rolling ocean. We had to get there.
    Harry Cory-Wright, a photographer from Norfolk, and Claire Cotter, an Irish archaeologist, joined the boat. Harry, who has an obsession with the Atlantic, had long wanted to photograph the ocean
from
those rocks. Claire had worked there as a summer guardian for Duchas, the Irish state heritage service, and as a draughtswoman for the restoration project that has been underway there these last twenty years. George had been there as a young man, when skippering a sail-training vessel out of Liverpool, with eighteen world-curious Liverpudlian teenagers on board. And I was dreaming of them.
    We left from the little rock and sand nook of Derrynane in a northerly, close-hauled on a starboard tack, and made a course west by northwest, out to the western horizon, where the Skelligs lay waiting. A longswell was moulding the surface of the sea. Sometimes, as we came over one of its crests, we would find a valley in front of us as long and smooth as a coombe in the Sussex Downs, sliding away before us, the slope shallowing towards the bottom, and its whole surface crinkled, as if a silk dress had been packed away too long, the fabric crazed with little ridged creases. It was an infinite set of them: the further in you looked, the more creases there were.
    The hills of the Iveragh Peninsula greyed behind us. There is a glamour to distance and the Skelligs enshrine it in a way only matched, in our Atlantic islands, by St Kilda. That is why the Skelligs remain so strong a presence in my mind. Most islands you come to, from out at sea, look like a mystery, a power zone, unlike the places you have left. But all islands, when you come within that embrace, lose something of their allure. Take Scilly, for example. You cross from Cornwall, as we did on a sunny spring day, filled with high-pressure brilliance, a good eight hours from Falmouth. At the end of that day, the islands themselves emerge from the thick air of the High like a dream country: angular, rocky places, a magical arrival, the land only visible from four miles offin smoky blue silhouettes against the sparkling sea.
    When you land, you are struck by something else: the conservatism of it, the do-as-we-do orthodoxy, the net-curtain cosiness, the tight control of its resources - even commercial access to the main quays on St Mary’s - by a small group of islanders. There is some strong evidence that Scilly was viewed in the Bronze and Iron Ages, perhaps by the Romans, as some kind of sacred island, even as a place for burial in the west. There is far greater density of ancient graves there, often on prominent skyline sites, than in equivalent stretches of