The Wild Places (Penguin Original) Read Online Free PDF Page A

are pocked with cells, built on the rock by the monks who landed there in the sixth century. The cells, which were used for penance and meditation, face out on to the Atlantic. Below them, the rock swoops away so abruptly and steeply that it is hard even to believe you are on land, and not hovering above only air and sea. There, with the ocean extending away from them, and nothing on the horizon to abbreviate or delay the eye, the monks were free to consider infinitude.
    George Bernard Shaw travelled to the Skelligs in September 1910 in a clinker-built rowboat. The journey out took two and a half hours in calm weather; the way back was longer and more unnerving. Rowing in thick mist and darkness, compassless and moonless, over tide races and currents, Shaw’s guides steered by instinct and knowledge alone. The following evening, sitting by the fire in the Parknasilla Hotel in Sneem, Shaw wrote a letter to his friend Barry Jackson about his experience on Skellig Michael. ‘I tell you the thing does not belong to any world that you and I have lived and worked in: it is part of our dream world . . . I hardly feel real again yet!’ For Shaw, as for the monks who once lived there, on the Skellig you were brought to think in ways that would be possible nowhere else. It was a place for deep dreaming.
    The sea journeys that the peregrini made are extraordinary to contemplate. We had difficulties reaching Ynys Enlli in a thirty-three-foot ocean-going yacht. Shaw had feared for his life returning from the Skelligs in a well-manned rowboat. Yet the monks had got to the Skelligs, and had made longer, riskier voyages - to Iceland and to Greenland, over the rough seas of the North Atlantic - in far more exposed and unstable craft.
    The boats in which they travelled went by different names in different traditions: the coracle or curricle in Wales, the carraugh in Gaelic, the knarr in Norse. Their shapes differed, too: the curragh was generally long and thin, with a snub nose and squared-off bows, while the coracle was lenticular. What they shared was a method of construction. Their hulls were of oxhide, which was oak-tanned, then wetted and stretched over a framework of bent wood and wicker. As it dried, the hide shrank around the framework, setting it rigid. Once it had set, it was caulked with tallow. What these craft had in common, too, was a logic of motion. They were designed, in their lightness and their shallow draft, to slide over the currents and the tide-rips, to slip up and over waves. This was their talent as vessels: they possessed a kind of maritime guile, barely displacing water, moving over the sea with the delicate touch of a pond-skater.
    At last light, near the tip of Enlli’s southern arm, I walked through a field of dead sea pink, the compact plant that grows so well in the saline conditions of coastal margins. The crisp heads of the flowers, on their stiff stalks, vibrated in the breeze, so that in the twilight it seemed as though the ground were shivering. On water to the south, I heard the clatter of a cormorant taking off. I could see the glimmer of the cabin lights of the boat, swaying in the bay, and briefly wished I were there with John and Jan: hot food, a glass of whisky, the company of friends.
    I glanced back towards the mainland. It was visible only as a line in the dusk, wire thin. The monks would have launched their boats from the coves of the peninsula. Even now in summer, if the weather is poor, it can be two to three days before it becomes possible to reach the island. When the winter storms set in, Enlli can be isolated for weeks at a time.
    The monks would have gauged their timing carefully. The long wait for flat weather. The watching of tides. Then the launch, feet crunching in the pebbles, splashing in the water. The boats lurching even in the swell of the coves, and then tacking out into the open waters of the Sound, the currents stacked in descending storeys beneath them.
    How exposed they