Skellig Michael to Ballinskelligs Priory
The monks came down from the rock
For six hundred years a community of monks lived on Skellig Michael, the pyramid of rock eight miles out in the Atlantic. Around the 12th century the climate turned colder and wetter and the rock became impossible to winter on. The monks came ashore and built an Augustinian priory here, on the bay that looks out at the rock they had left. The priory ruins are in a field beside the beach. They are not signposted. They do not need to be.
Noelle Campbell-Sharp's cottages
Cill Rialaig
In the early 1990s the publisher Noelle Campbell-Sharp bought a row of pre-famine stone cottages on the cliff edge of Bolus Head, abandoned since the 1790s. She restored them as an artists' retreat. The deal is simple: a fortnight, no rent, no phone, donate a piece of work. Painters, sculptors and writers from more than forty countries have stayed. The road up is single-track and the building is on the lip of a 300-metre drop into the Atlantic. People who go up tend to come back.
A tower house on the tide line
The McCarthy castle
Ballinskelligs Castle was built by the McCarthy Mór dynasty in the 16th century, on a promontory at the western end of the beach, to watch the bay for pirates and tax any trade that came in. The McCarthys lost everything in the Tudor and Cromwellian forfeitures. The promontory has been eroding ever since and the ruin is now a few metres from the sea. You walk to it across the strand at low tide.
The most westerly Irish-speaking parish
An Ghaeltacht is Iartharaí
Ballinskelligs is part of the Uíbh Ráthach Gaeltacht — the Iveragh Gaeltacht — the most westerly Irish-speaking parish on the island. The Irish is thinner than it was. The 2016 census put daily speakers at around one in ten outside the school gates. But the school is an all-Irish school, the postmark reads Baile an Sceilg, the road signs are Irish-only on the Skellig Ring, and a small summer college brings teenagers from Dublin and Cork to live with local families and stop speaking English for three weeks. The language has not given up here.