Description
On a clear day, seen from the west coast of Ireland, they are just two jagged shapes rising out of the Atlantic Ocean. Even when you get closer, you think of them as rocks rather than islands. They are the Skelligs, they appear to be adamantly inhospitable, and they are uninhabited today, except by birds and seals. Yet, astonishing as it may seem at the end of the twentieth century, the larger of the two was for six hundred years home to a community of monks.
How did these monks come there when today if there is any kind of swell, no boatman will attempt a landing? How was it possible to scratch an existence on this almost barren rock, with its meagre deposits of soil? And what happened sometime in the thirteenth century – that sent the monks retreating back to the mainland?
In a remarkable feat of imagination and reconstruction Geoffrey Moorhouse, traveller and historian, and a past winner of the Thomas Cook Award for the best travel book of its year, answers these questions and does much more. Moorhouse says of his first visit to the larger of the two rocks, Skellig Michael:
‘As I climbed the path winding up to the ancient construction near the top of that cliff I sensed that I was on the threshold of something utterly unique, though I was no stranger to . . . But nothing in my experience had prepared me for this huddle of domes, crouching half-way to heaven in this all but inaccessible place, with an intimidating immensity of space all around, where it is easy to feel that you had reached a limit of this world. A holy place to be sure . . .’
From that first visit, Moorhouse knew he must write about Skellig Michael, ‘try to fix its essence in the collective memory.’ sun Dancing is the enthralling result, a vision of the past, rooted firmly in Moorhouse’s own experience and in a timeless Celtic sensibility.
Hardcover, 241 pages. In very good pre-loved condition with the exception of being ex-library.