Read Atlantic Britain for Free Online Page B

option here was to pull them off. Pilgrimages continued - they could be centrally organised easily enough - but monks living their lives out here, that was ended about eight hundred years ago because it was too much.’
    ‘A marine Waco.’
    Claire laughed. She hadn’t been here for eight years.
    Little Skellig lay to the south and we altered course towards it. There is nothing little about Little Skellig. Even more than its neighbour, it is a battleship of rock, a grey, stiffened thundercloud of stone, not a blade of grass on it. But it has another colour: its ledges are white with the bodies and guano of 80,000 gannets. This is extreme unaccommodated nature. There is no compromise in such a brutally beautiful place. We turned aside to it and lay for a while under the northern cliffs as the swell surged on to them. An amphitheatre of white bodies. The gannets filled the air like snow in a glass bubble. Not a colony, not an ordained and regulated thing, but an agglomerating mass, competitive, flamboyant and difficult, a city of birds, an angry cackling above the surf, each separate from the other in precise geometrical arrangements, no gannet daring to sit within striking distance of another. A few lie dead on the lower shelves. They fish around us -the collapsing plunge into the surf, the glaucous bubbles left on its surface, a mass arrowing into the sea. It is a bird Chicago, loveless and intense. Nothing on the rock itself can sustain them. Every calorie of its life is drawn from the sea beneath us, as if the birds were an energy-pump, sucking the hidden into the visible.George blew the
Auk’s
huge and raucous hooter. The gannets paid not the slightest attention. Not a flicker. Little Skellig is a city of bird hermits, piercing, distant, far beyond us.
    A mile beyond them, the sky-scraping spires of Skellig Michael were waiting. It is Little Skellig’s mirror twin. The one is everything the other is not. Little Skellig is the rawest, hardest, most naked, and most impossible form of Atlantic land. No level land beyond a gannet shelf, no water, no shelter, no human presence, nothing green beyond the weed at its lower edge. Little Skellig is the world in full throb and completely unadorned. But Skellig Michael’ s own naturally fearsome imagery has been taken up and transformed by the equally powerful symbolic system of the early Christian Church. Even its name enshrines that collision - the Archangel Michael comes to occupy the Skellig, the tall rough, pyramidal island, just as he had St Michael’s Mount in Cornwall and Mont St Michel in Brittany.
    The swell was too big that day for any of the tourist boats from Port Magee to think of landing. We would have to anchor the
Auk
on the tiny shelf of rock that extends below water for thirty or forty yards from thecliffs on the northeastern corner. The swell was coming bowling through. There was a danger that she would drag her anchor and George decided to stay with her all day. It was lucky he did. After midday, as the tide rose, the anchor started to drag and George could only hold his station by motoring on to the anchor all day. When I raised it that evening, it came up as shiny as a frying pan, polished by the rocks of the Atlantic floor.
    The only place you can get on to Skellig is a little slit of an opening in which the swell rises and falls six or nine feet, and where you have to time your jump on to some steps. George took us out in the inflatable and one by one we made our leap on to the rock. George went back to the
Auk,
Harry was off with his wardrobe camera, and Claire and I entered the silence of Skellig Michael. I felt as if we had arrived at the world’s navel.
    Through carpets of sea campion, puffins among them, the first few hundred yards on a roadway cut by the lighthouse keepers in the nineteenth century, and then on a built stone stairway, we dived into the world of early Irish monasticism.
    Skellig Michael is a severely restricted landscape.There is no