Where the world feels far, far away
Attention on Skellig Michael after Star Wars filming sparks tourism industry for nearby town and ancient ruins
SKELLIG MICHAEL, IRELAND— Even with a dozen tourists sitting on the rocks and grass eating their packed lunches in the bright glare of a cloudless Irish summer day, it’s not hard to imagine this narrow strip between the peaks of Skellig Michael as a rocky outpost on some alien land.
This little island had once been considered the edge of the world, but in the latest Star Wars film it’s at the edge of the universe, a lonely, isolated place where Luke Skywalker has retreated from the war between the Empire and the Resistance, and this windswept saddle of rock — on the planet Ahch-To, according to Star Wars cosmology — is where Daisy Ridley’s Rey finally finds him, at the climax of The Force Awakens.
Skellig Michael sits almost 12 kilometres off County Kerry on the southwest coast of Ireland. When a colony of monks arrived on the island in the eighth century, Europe sat to the east and thousands of miles of Atlantic Ocean and an undiscovered world lay to the west. Like Luke, the monks had been looking for a remote and inaccessible place to live, and for four centuries they eked out a tenuous existence in a small collection of dry stone huts, living on fish and seabirds and surviving Viking raids.
It subsequently became a place of pilgrimage, a lighthouse station, an archeological dig and a UNESCO World Heri- tage site, and then Star Wars happened. Filming for the final scene of The Force Awakens took place here under a shroud of secrecy in July 2014. The island had been closed to the public for three days and an Irish Navy vessel stood guard, but fans had already arrived and they’ve continued arriving since.
Gerard and Patricia Kennedy run the Moorings, a small hotel with a lively bar and restaurant facing the harbour of Portmagee, the closest town to Skellig Michael. They had been told a documentary crew would be making a film about puffins when they began booking rooms for a shoot, but the whole town ended up renting rooms to the crew and every boat in the harbour had been hired to ferry them over with their equipment.
“Oh God, it’s going to change our lovely little village,” Patricia told Gerard when they learned the truth.
Star Wars has become a whole new industry for the town. Just two boats used to take tourists out to Skellig Michael each day during the season from May to September; now there are 12, the maximum number Ireland’s Office of Public Works allows, to prevent damage to the monastic ruins and the island’s seabird habitat. Star Wars T-shirts are on sale at the Skellig Experience Visitor Centre across the harbour from the town, the first place to go before you book a trip to the island — weather permitting.
The sun is bright and the ocean calm when we head out to Skelling Michael the morning after Irish tourism authority Failte Ireland arranged for us to get a helicopter trip around the island — a trip organized just in case the sea would be too choppy to let us land. There’s no guarantee a boat trip to the Skelligs will see you land on the island if the swells are too high, something every visitor has to keep in mind.
After a leisurely circle around Small Skellig — a protected seabird habitat frosted with centuries of guano from the gannets that nest there — we land on Skellig Michael. Rock falls from winter storms had delayed the opening of the island this year and we’re told not to dawdle on the path next to the cliffs.
At the bottom of the steps up to the ruins a guide tells us what to do (stay on the path) and not to do (touch anything, bother the birds). The rough rock steps are steep, with few handrails, and amusement is provided by the puffins, comic little birds with bright orange feet and masklike faces with no apparent fear of tourists.
As you walk you hear groaning little purrs — warning sounds from the tiny, nocturnal storm petrels that nest in the rocks and the steps.
The spot where Rey met Luke is halfway to the top and when you reach it there are helpful guides at the ruins, such as Claire O’Halloran, who has worked here for nearly 30 years. She tells us about the monks and the island’s history with seasoned enthusiasm, although she worries about the impact all these new visitors will have on it all.
The beehive cells are cool, dark and musty inside, and the whole place is unlike anywhere else on earth. Even with tourists mingling by the low stone walls and monks’ graves, it still feels like the rest of the world is very far, far away. Rick McGinnis was hosted by Failte Ireland, which didn’t review or approve this story.