Skellig Michael is a pinnacle of rock 218 metres out of the Atlantic off southwest Ireland, and monks cut 618 steps into it and lived up there for six centuries. The boat out of Portmagee is small, and within minutes there is nothing but ocean and swell for forty-five. The island comes up from a grey tooth into a wall of rock over the bow, and the noise of the colonies reaches you before the pier does. Then the steps. They lift you 180 metres above the sea and the wind gets louder with every one, most of the way a stairway pinned to a bare slope with nothing beside it. Puffins nest in burrows right along the route and show no fear, standing a metre off while you get your breath back, coming and going in a blur of orange feet.
At the top the wind drops and you come out onto the monks' terrace, among six beehive cells and two oratories. Through a low doorway you are inside a dome of stacked stone, each ring stepping further inward until it closes overhead. There is no mortar in it, and it has stayed dry through a thousand years of Atlantic weather. For centuries pilgrims did not stop here. They kept climbing to the higher peak, up a chimney called the Needle's Eye and out along a slab in places twenty centimetres wide, to kiss a cross carved above the ocean. That practice died out a century ago, and the peak is closed now. Three kilometres off, Little Skellig is so thickly covered in gannets it looks snow-capped, the birds folding their wings and dropping into the sea like thrown spears. The cells have never really been empty. Engineers building the lighthouses in the 1820s lodged in them and kept explosives in one, and two Star Wars films later made the rock famous. What lives in the walls now is storm petrels. Some 7,600 pairs breed in the cracks of the huts, the terraces and the steps, and they come and go in darkness, so no day visitor sees them.