The wild goose studio
Skellig Cross of Hope

There were once monasteries on 23 islands off the Irish Coast, and that built 1,400 years ago on Skellig Michael was the most daring. Beehive-shaped stone huts and two boat-shaped oratories survive today on the great towering crag 720 feet above sea level and seven miles from Valentia on the coast of Kerry. Those early Christians were spirit wrestlers on the edge of the world.

"No Attic light for them and no Herodotus.
But thin rain and dogfish and the stopgap
Of the sharp cliffs
they spent their winters on.

And the pitch black Atlantic night
And how the sound
Of the bird's wing in a lost language sounded."
(from a poem by Eavan Boland; quote courtesy of Carcanet Press)