Baile an Sceilg · Co. Kerry
The Skellig monks came ashore here after Viking raids and worsening winters made the rock impossible to keep. The artists came later.
Ballinskelligs is a half-village stretched along a bay on the Skellig Ring, the official Wild Atlantic Way bypass off the Ring of Kerry that takes the small road through Portmagee and Waterville. The bus tours do not come this way because the bus tours cannot. That is the whole point of the Skellig Ring, and it is the whole point of Ballinskelligs.
The place has two foundations and they sit on top of each other. In the 12th century the Augustinian monks of Skellig Michael came ashore and built a priory here after repeated Viking raids and worsening winter conditions made the rock impossible to maintain year-round. The priory ruins are still there, in a field beside the beach, with the McCarthy castle a few hundred metres away on its eroding promontory. Then in the 1990s Noelle Campbell-Sharp bought a row of pre-famine cottages on the cliff at Bolus Head and turned them into Cill Rialaig, an artists' retreat that has hosted painters and writers from forty countries since. Monks displaced by weather, then artists drawn by it.
What you do here: walk the Blue Flag beach, climb up to the castle ruins, drive the loop out to Bolus Head and the Cill Rialaig viewpoint, drop in to the Skellig Chocolate Factory up the road, drink a slow pint in The Skelligs or Cable O'Leary's, and listen for the Irish. Two nights. One is the Skellig Ring on the way past. Two is the parish.
