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mainland Cornwall. The ancients, in other words, may have seen Scilly as a kind of Valhalla, the great sunset destination for the dead.
    In Scilly now, that edge-potency has gone, to be replaced by an almost stifling sense of upholstery and comfort, more middle than the middle, more, as one Scillonian said to me, ‘like an English village than any English village I have ever been to’. Self-protective, on the make, canny enough to portray itself as sweet and forgotten, Scilly is in fact hard and mainstream. But what else, for goodness’ sake, could you expect the people on Scilly to be or do? Hermits? Saints? To want an island to be a Valhalla in the west is, by definition,an idea that belongs to strangers. It is the apotheosis of ‘not here’. If Scilly is your ‘here’, then there will be no sense of distance. I once asked a man on Barra in the Outer Hebrides what it was like to live in such a remote place. ‘Remote from where?’ he asked me. It is the slap in the face that every islander will, and perhaps should, give a man off a boat; which says, in effect, that you have done no more than arrive at a place where I daily negotiate the complexities of life.
    But Skellig slides beyond that. It does not know about comfort. It knows only about discomfort and potency. In its intensity, its purity and its emptiness, Skellig delivers what the horizon has promised. It has been and remains, in other words, shaped from outside. It belongs to its strangers. It is the horizon drawn into three dimensions.
    The
Auk
strode towards the distant rocks as though they were her natural home. George was on the wheel; Harry, with his giant mahogany box of a camera, took photographs of the sea at our feet; and Clare and I talked in the cockpit about early Irish Christianity. ‘Of course,’ she said in the wind, ‘remoteness from the world looks like a closeness to God.’
    ‘That is the power of distance, the glamour ofdistance, the way in which an encompassed distance looks like potency.’
    ‘It is, it is, but there’s another side to it, what they call “the theology of dispossession”.’
    ‘Which is?’
    ‘That the Kingdom is a pearl of great price, and that if you are to gain it you must give all that you have to possess it.’
    ‘So the sea is a kind of nowhere, a divesting of everything, of every certainty, and in the nowhere, out there, is where you find the pearl?’
    ‘A hard and rocky place besieged by the most violent environment you can imagine is the place of redemption. That’s what Skellig is: a wet Golgotha!’
    ‘The Atlantic as the setting for metaphysical drama! This is all about the aesthetics of godliness.’
    ‘Early Christianity is quite as much a religion of the image as of the book. And look at that!’ she said, pointing forward to the Gothic peaks four miles or so ahead of us. ‘What does that look like to you, Adam?’
    ‘It looks like a place full of suffering.’
    ‘It’s a place for striving, isn’t it, don’t you think? With a great quantity of not very much round about. It’s like one of those places - in Tibet is it? - wherethey put the bodies out to be eaten by the eagles. It’s a place for a naked meeting with things … It’s the same for all these island monasteries on the Atlantic coast, it is a place where the
Rule
has to apply. Everything about that bit of incredibly heightened landscape demands a ferociously strict rule. It is the island of discipline. The sheer energy and subversiveness of a place like this demands it. I mean, Skellig, this tiny rock, with perhaps a dozen monks living here, became one of the most famous monasteries in Ireland, famous all over Europe for pilgrimage. And eventually that is why they shut it down in the end. There is something powerfully unregulated here, like a geyser of spiritual energy which the early monks had tapped, and when the Irish Church in the twelfth century wanted to bring this kind of local autonomy under control, the only