Atlantic Britain

by Adam Nicolson

  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 of distance, 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? - where they 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 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 the cliffs 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 width here. It is a black hole of spiritual energy, strictly compressed, its gravity squeezed into a pimple, the ultimate in island life. The compression and restriction is what creates the symbolic landscape. Everything that doesn’t matter is excluded. It is a sacred precinct, with the ocean as its boundary wall. Everything within it is made significant by that enclosure. Every microcosmic gesture here is symbolic of a macrocosmic fact. This is a nodule of holiness and suffering, of completeness and deprivation, the fulfilment of everything that is latent in the idea of an island.

  Claire led me up. The beautifully restored stairs are no rustic crumbly thing. They adapt their rising to the forms of the island. They bend their way in shallow S-curves to the knobbles and protuberances of the rock. But they are made wide enough for a stream of people to climb and a stream to descend side by side. They are, in other words, a social and even an urban construction, made for large numbers of people, a crowded busy place, as it is now for those few hours when the tourist boats can get here in summer, and as it must have been on the great pilgrimage feast days of the Middle Ages. The stones are worn smooth by the feet of those who have climbed them. The long arm of the culture of Europe and the Middle East, of which this is the fingertip, reaching out into the Atlantic, has arrived here undiminished, at full strength. Skellig Michael is not St Peter’s. You will find no barley-sugar gilded baldachins here; but in these steps, made only of the material the island itself has supplied, you can see the Atlantic version of those central glories.

  At the saddle, the ways divide. The monumental steps continue up to the eastern peak. A rough, shaly path climbs to the west. You must choose. The establishment, the attraction of the wonderfully made thing, draws you to the east. All surprises are kept. The steps seem to climb to nowhere. They disappear over a blue horizon and of course you follow them. Christianity is not a religion of the word here, but of the involving, sculptural, enveloping image, and Skellig Michael an inc
arnation of an idea. In the way of all drama, Skellig springs its beautiful surprise. At the easternmost peak, just in the lee of a fin of rock that shields you from the westerlies, and on the far side of which a cliff drops six hundred feet into the Atlantic, is a miniature city. This is no cluster of rude hermits’ huts. Nothing about the monastic enclosure on Skellig submits to its place. It dominates and ordains. It is the rule made stone. It brings civilisation, in the full urban meaning of that word, to the ultimate point of Europe and proclaims its overwhelming power and value there. You round the corner and are confronted by a long stone wall, fifteen feet high, without break or incident, stopping you and excluding you. It is a city wall, with a tiny doorway, through which you must stoop to pass. It looks fortresslike, a denial of the natural, exquisitely made (and restored), an act of empire. That Mycenaean wall, and the tiny entrance at its feet, has only one meaning: submit to whatever you find within.

  What you find within, arranged on the lip of the precipice, with the miniature Auk afloat on the rolling ocean six hundred feet beneath us, is a careful piece of town planning, almost as exact as a coloured Renaissance perspective of the ideal city, arranged within a space no more than thirty yards by fifteen. It is done with precision: the tiny dark church, in the form of an upturned boat, in the centre; a leacbt, or burial ground-cum-altar behind it, furnished with a sundial and many crumbled carved crosses as if in a cemetery (which it might perhaps have been); a paved space uniting these monuments, but also flowing around them and connecting them to a row of corbel-roofed cells slightly higher up along the western side. To the east, there are further burials beside the church, a low parapet wall, and then nothing: the 600-foot drop, pure air, and the Atlantic beyond it.

  It is as tautened a space as you will ever find. On this tiny scale, a straightforward progression, a sermon in stone, develops from west to east across the precinct: from dwelling, to drinking (water cisterns tucked inside the stone walls), to prayer, to burial, to the cliff-edge, its space and the wide slow rolling of the great Atlantic waters. I looked at the Auk tar below, her grey, stripped decks, her taking of the swells and her dipping after them, and read from her, and from my position up here, the power of smallness, of how much more this meant than any giant, gilt-encrusted church or palace could do. Skellig was a concentrate of beauty and meaning, like powder paint still in the jar, an essence long distilled.

  ‘It’s full of voices,’ Claire said, ‘full of silent voices.’ She had been down below one evening years ago in one of the guides’ huts that are on the lighthouse road, after the last of the tourists had left, and decided she might come up here to the monastery. It was a misty evening and the last of the sun was shining in spokes through the murk. Needless to say, like all islands, Skellig is a place for visions and as she climbed the long worn steps, she thought she heard something like plainchant coming down to her through the mist. As she climbed and the mist thickened, the sound grew clearer, until by the time she came to the gateway into the precinct, the voices were strong and distinct. They were in the oratory itself. Hymns were pouring out through the low doorway, the whole perfect corbelled stone box humming with the music of singing voices. She approached the opening and inside saw only the hems of black robes, bare feet and sandals. ‘I thought I had died and gone to Heaven,’ she said. She stood there and the singing stopped. Six Greek Orthodox monks had stayed on after the last boat had left. She left them and made her way down the long stairway listening to their chanted prayers floating down through the mist that lay in scarves around her.

  This monastery is the City of God, founded on the dream of domination. It represents a wholly powerful colonisation of an utterly wild place by an utterly powerful Christian civilisation. Ed Bourke, another Irish archaeologist who has studied Skellig Michael and for many years worked here on the Irish state restoration project, told me to remember that Christianity has a deeply ambivalent attitude to nature. ‘It sees nature both as a reflection of the divine and as an embodiment of the not-divine. And that is evident here. Everything you see is clearly a response to the gob-smackingly gorgeous nature of the place. But it is also holding it at bay, and disciplining it.’

  That balance and that coherence is what the early monastic tradition is about. Its aim was not madness, in the way of modern cults, but a kind of harmony. An island, particularly of this kind, distils and intensifies both what is good and what is difficult about the natural world. An island is both perfect and horrible. It is nature at its best and its worst, its most pure and its most hostile. Feelings of threat and of worship cluster here more closely than in any other form of landscape. The drive to satisfy that double impulse, in its most extreme forms, is what shaped the monastery on Skellig.

  This early monastic search for understanding was in the end profoundly humane. In AD 305 the great St Antony, founder of the monastic idea, emerged after twenty years’ solitude, walled up in a ruined Roman fort in the Egyptian desert. Bread had occasionally been lowered into a hole for him and groans of spiritual agony had at intervals emerged. His followers, clustered outside, waited in trepidation. What would a man look like after such travail?

  Antony, as from a shrine, came forth initiated in the mysteries and filled with the Spirit of God. Then for the first time he was seen outside the fort by those who came to see him. And they, when they saw him, wondered at the sight, for he had the same habit of body as before, and was neither fat, like a man without exercise, nor lean from fasting and striving with the demons; he was just the same as they had known him before his retirement. And again his soul was free from blemish, for it was neither contracted as if by grief, nor relaxed by pleasure, nor possessed by laughter or dejection, for he was not troubled when he beheld the crowd, nor overjoyed at being saluted by so many. But he was altogether guided by reason, and abiding in a natural state.

  *  *  *

  This beautiful emergence from incarceration, so reminiscent of Nelson Mandela’s slow, smiling walk from his imprisonment on Robben Island, is what, in retrospect, I imagine the quality of mind and soul of the monks on this Atlantic rock to have been. They had seen the best and the worst and had emerged whole.

  It is impossible to come this far into the heart of Atlantic spirituality and not go the final step. Claire and I found Harry taking photographs at Christ’s Saddle. She is frightened by heights and so would not come with us along the rough path the other way, to the western peak, the highest point of Skellig, 715 feet above the sea. In this most symbolic of places, that western peak represents Skellig’s other term: not social but passionately singular, not communal but eremitic, an exercise not in domination but submission, not a denial of nature but a subjection to it, the loneliest and most entrancing place I have ever been.

  After a few yards, the path is not heavily worn. Few tourists seem to go that way. It soon became obvious why. The path becomes a shaly rock-cut ledge about a foot or ten inches wide. Below, the cliff drops five hundred feet or so to the agitated sea. Above, the cliff, when you are not used to it, has a habit of pushing your body out, as if it is bulging, pregnant. Every rock is animated here. Panic comes stealing up from your boots on these ledges, a fear that rises and has to be slowly wooed and seduced into calming down and subsiding like the sea.

  Then Harry and I found we had gone too far, into some ancient rock-cut cul-de-sac, perhaps a path on which the monks had picked their way to catch the fulmars that were still peering at us around every corner. Back, gingerly, to a point where a clear succession of rock-cut foot- and hand-holds stepped up the cliff for us. In none of them was the stone worn or polished like the public way up to the monastery. English stonecrop, buttons of thrift, and the long green hair of the lichen grew on their treads as well as the risers, the lines of the stone still sharp after ten, perhaps even thirteen centuries.

  We climbed. All around, the world was only vertical, dropping five or six hundred feet straight below us into the incredible brightness of the western sea. The Auk rocked far awa
y, as if in a cradle, in the nine-foot swell. Up here, everything stood still. A puffin turned to me at one point and the wind behind him just lifted the feathers of his cheek as if it were a hat at Ascot. A section of the stair involved squeezing crab-like up a chimney in whose walls the steps had been cut. None of it was difficult if you forgot the height. Instead, I felt, these steps, so laboriously cut, forming so intimate a connection with the distant past - they were clearly made by a man not as tall as me, the reach between them shorter than I needed - were an act of generosity. A man we could never know was showing me and Harry the way to his summit hermitage. An immense quantity of work had been done here, perhaps over generations, by one hermit after another, a restless and relentless improving of Skellig, making the physical metaphysical, making an island’s holiness both explicit and accessible.

  We reached a terrace that was man-made. A dry-stone retaining wall had somehow been engineered to stand up from a near-vertical rock slope and the resulting wedge of space between it and the cliff-wall filled to make a level platform about six feet wide. A small, ruined oratory was poised on its far edge. On the inner side of the artificial platform, two shallow basins had been carved from the rock where rain falling on the cliff would drain down into them. We drank the sweet water. A dead puffin lay on the grass, its breast meat eaten away by a peregrine, the pilgrim bird, whose country this also was.

  On the next step above, now seven hundred feet above the sea, a further platform had been built, this time out to the west. The sun was now glorifying the western sea: golden air on a bed of golden metal. Cushions of bladder campion were growing in the entrance to another tiny ruined building. This was the highest and the westernmost point of the ancient Christian world. You could go no further. It was the end of the known solidity, the highest place, at the furthest place, encased in and enshrined by millions upon millions of acres of sunlit sea and seawashed sky.