Skellig Michael

Skellig Michael is a rocky island almost 12 km west of the Iveragh Peninsula in County Kerry, in south-west Ireland. Monks of the Celtic Christian tradition founded a monastery there at some time between the 6th and 8th centuries. Tradition names Saint Fionán in the early 6th century as its founder, though historians doubt this, and the first definite record of monks is an 8th-century note of the death of Suibhini of Skellig.

According to the annals, Vikings raided the island in 823, and the abbot Eitgal was carried off and died of hunger. The monastery was dedicated to Saint Michael at some point between 950 and 1050. Monks lived there until the late 12th or early 13th century and then most likely moved to the abbey at Ballinskelligs on the mainland, while the island remained a place of pilgrimage.

In the early 1820s the corporation in charge of the Port of Dublin bought the island for £500, and by 1826 it had completed two lighthouses on the Atlantic side. The monastery sits on a terraced shelf about 180 m above the sea, with six drystone beehive cells (one of them fallen), two oratories and a later church. The state took the remains into guardianship in 1880, and the island, with its path of some 600 stone steps to the peak, was inscribed as a World Heritage site in 1996.