Atlantic Britain by Adam Nicolson Read Free Book Online

width here. It is a black hole of spiritual energy, strictly compressed, its gravity squeezed into a pimple, the ultimate in island life. The compression and restriction is what creates the symbolic landscape. Everything that doesn’t matter is excluded. It is a sacred precinct, with the ocean as its boundary wall. Everything within it is made significant by that enclosure. Every microcosmic gesture here is symbolic of a macrocosmic fact. This is a nodule of holiness and suffering, of completeness and deprivation, the fulfilment of everything that is latent in the idea of an island.
    Claire led me up. The beautifully restored stairs are no rustic crumbly thing. They adapt their rising to the forms of the island. They bend their way in shallow S-curves to the knobbles and protuberances of the rock. But they are made wide enough for a stream of people to climb and a stream to descend side by side. They are, in other words, a social and even an urban construction, made for large numbers of people, a crowded busy place, as it is now for those few hours when the tourist boats can get here in summer, and as it must have been on the great pilgrimage feast days of the Middle Ages. The stones are worn smooth bythe feet of those who have climbed them. The long arm of the culture of Europe and the Middle East, of which this is the fingertip, reaching out into the Atlantic, has arrived here undiminished, at full strength. Skellig Michael is not St Peter’s. You will find no barley-sugar gilded baldachins here; but in these steps, made only of the material the island itself has supplied, you can see the Atlantic version of those central glories.
    At the saddle, the ways divide. The monumental steps continue up to the eastern peak. A rough, shaly path climbs to the west. You must choose. The establishment, the attraction of the wonderfully made thing, draws you to the east. All surprises are kept. The steps seem to climb to nowhere. They disappear over a blue horizon and of course you follow them. Christianity is not a religion of the word here, but of the involving, sculptural, enveloping image, and Skellig Michael an incarnation of an idea. In the way of all drama, Skellig springs its beautiful surprise. At the easternmost peak, just in the lee of a fin of rock that shields you from the westerlies, and on the far side of which a cliff drops six hundred feet into the Atlantic, is a miniature city. This is no cluster of rude hermits’ huts. Nothing aboutthe monastic enclosure on Skellig submits to its place. It dominates and ordains. It is the rule made stone. It brings civilisation, in the full urban meaning of that word, to the ultimate point of Europe and proclaims its overwhelming power and value there. You round the corner and are confronted by a long stone wall, fifteen feet high, without break or incident, stopping you and excluding you. It is a city wall, with a tiny doorway, through which you must stoop to pass. It looks fortresslike, a denial of the natural, exquisitely made (and restored), an act of empire. That Mycenaean wall, and the tiny entrance at its feet, has only one meaning: submit to whatever you find within.
    What you find within, arranged on the lip of the precipice, with the miniature
Auk
afloat on the rolling ocean six hundred feet beneath us, is a careful piece of town planning, almost as exact as a coloured Renaissance perspective of the ideal city, arranged within a space no more than thirty yards by fifteen. It is done with precision: the tiny dark church, in the form of an upturned boat, in the centre; a
leacbt,
or burial ground-cum-altar behind it, furnished with a sundial and many crumbled carved crosses as if in a cemetery (which it might perhaps have been); a pavedspace uniting these monuments, but also flowing around them and connecting them to a row of corbel-roofed cells slightly higher up along the western side. To the east, there are further burials beside the church, a low parapet wall, and then