Skellig Michael, County Kerry, Ireland
Hermits at a sea-girt monastery helped rescue Europe from darkness

What if the West had never arisen? A recent novel of alternative history, The Years of Rice and Salt, creates a world where virtually the entire population of Europe is killed by the Black Death, instead of the 33% that actually died. Christendom ceases to exist, and power in the suddenly emptied continent becomes a struggle between Islam (salt) and China (rice).

Although the drastic events described in that novel never happened, Europe as we know it came very close to being plunged into an endless dark age, one from which the West as we know it might never have emerged. As barbarian invaders ravaged the remains of the Roman Empire, they did more than loot and pillage. Their disruption of daily life and its infrastructures destroyed hard-won knowledge about the crucial components of civilization: plumbing, bridge and building construction, medicine, advanced farming and animal husbandry, and much more.

They also burned books. By the sixth century A.D., Europe had come within a hair’s breadth of plunging into total illiteracy. Books and the people who could read them retreated to the furthest edge of the continent, the coasts of Ireland. In his 1995 book, How the Irish Saved Civilization, Thomas Cahill wrote how monks laboring in stony monasteries by windswept seas preserved the Bible and other great books that had been rescued after the fall of Rome. Isolated by distance, struggling to feed themselves and stay unnoticed while they painstakingly copied manuscripts, these Irish monks were the tenuous bridge between the dark age of the sixth through eleventh centuries A.D. and the vastly more complex and literate medieval civilization that succeeded it.

One of the sites where those monks struggled is Skellig Michael, a rocky 44-acre, 200-meter-high island about eight miles off the coast of County Kerry in southwestern Ireland. There’s simply no way to describe this place as anything other than a damp, windy, sterile crag rising from the sea, so barren that the monks had to import spoil to grow their food in, so gusty and bedeviled by storms that the monks could count the clear, calm sunny days of each year on two hands. Fortunately for them, high winds hitting the base of the 700-foot-high pinnacle would thrust up its side and create a vertical wall of air at the summit that actually kept the winds at the top from getting through to the monks' living area.   

They established their monastery around 600 A.D., constructing peculiar interconnected beehive-shaped huts from Skellig Michael’s abundant stones. Within them they led austere lives of worship and dedication to the preservation of the past. Their isolation lasted a little more than 200 years. Eventually the Vikings found them and raided their lonely island at least four times in the 800s.

It is a sign of the Viking’s own desperation that they did so – as feared as they were, these Scandinavian warriors were often the hungry second and third sons of Danish and Norwegian farmers who had squeezed them out of inheritances by following the rule of primogeniture. So they sailed the North and Irish seas plundering wherever and whatever they could, even almost-sterile Skellig Michael and its miserably poor monks. 

The monastery officially lasted about 600 years, when the monks abandoned the island and moved to the mainland. Their buildings finally were totally abandoned in the 17^th century. It was not until the 19^th century that the monastery returned to local consciousness as the ruins began to draw notice. It’s not hard to see why Skellig Michael fell from memory. Getting there, even across the relatively short distance from County Kerry, was never an easy proposition. Choppy seas, volatile weather, terrible anchorages and the sheer, slippery steepness of the place discouraged casual visits.

It still does. You can visit Skellig Michael as part of a summer trip to Ireland’s scenic southwest coast, but it will be a short call that depends upon the rare kindness of nature. When and if you do arrive there, you’ll find one of the most remarkable remnants of ancient Ireland and the dark ages, virtually intact and haunting for what it reveals about the lonely and fiercely enduring monks from that distant era.

One of the best books on Skellig Michael is a 1990 picture book whose production required an immense amount of planning, waiting and putting up with thousands of close calls. It’s called The Forgotten Hermitage of Skellig Michael, written by Walter Horn and four co-authors. The book is filled with stunning photos of the lonely island, including dangerous and almost inaccessible places that normal visitors will never see.

UNESCO declared Skellig Michael a World Heritage Site in 1996.

– Patrick Totty