Skellig Michael

Thirteen kilometres out in the Atlantic, on a pyramid of rock with no harbour, no shelter and no soil, a dozen monks built six stone huts, two oratories, two gardens and a stairway of six hundred and eighteen steps, and lived there for six hundred years. Getting ashore now needs a licensed boat, a booking made months in advance, a body that can manage a hundred and eighty metres of unrailed climb, and the Atlantic's permission on the morning. Two days in five it does not give it. This guide is about what is up there and what it actually takes to reach it.

How you get there, and why you may not

The permits, and what happened in 2025

Access is controlled absolutely. The Office of Public Works issues a fixed number of landing permits — currently fifteen — and each permitted boat may carry twelve passengers and make one trip a day. That is a hard cap of 180 people, and roughly 11,000 a year actually get ashore. There is no central booking system: you book direct with an operator, and the good dates go months ahead.

You will read that the 2025 season was cancelled. It was not, and the real story matters if you are planning. The OPW ran a tender in late 2024 for the fifteen permits; unsuccessful bidders went to the High Court, which under procurement law triggered an automatic suspension that legally barred the OPW from issuing any permits at all. The island did not open on schedule in early May. Operators took a protest flotilla round the island on 22 May. On 5 June 2025 Mr Justice Simons lifted the suspension, permits were issued, and landings ran for the rest of the season; the case was later settled, with the OPW paying the challengers' costs and the challengers keeping the right to contest future allocations.

So 2025 lost about a month. 2026 ran normally — the island opened on 12 May, weather kept boats off for the first day or two, and the first weekend visitors landed on 17 May. For 2027 nothing has been announced; the permits appear to run on a multi-year term, but the settlement leaves future allocations open to challenge. Check heritageireland.ie before you book flights.

The boat, the price, and the odds

A landing tour cost about €145 a head in 2026, and takes around five hours: roughly forty-five minutes out, two and a half hours ashore, forty-five minutes back. Most boats leave from Portmagee; some go from Valentia, Ballinskelligs or Derrynane. The site itself is free — every euro you pay is for the boat.

Then there is the weather, which is the whole game. There is no harbour on Skellig Michael: landing means putting a small boat alongside a concrete step cut into the rock, in Atlantic swell, and if the swell is wrong it simply cannot be done. A working boatman quoted in 2026 put a good season at eighty to eighty-five landing days out of about a hundred and forty. Call it three days in five.

Typical policy when the sea says no is a transfer to a non-landing eco tour with the price difference refunded, or a full refund. What you will almost never get is a different date, because the rest of the season is booked. The only real defence is to allow spare days in Kerry and to book Skellig early in your trip, not on the last morning.

The eco tour, and the fallback

Non-landing tours — around €65 — circle both islands without going ashore. They are not a consolation prize for birdwatchers: they pass close under Little Skellig, which is where the gannets are and where nobody is allowed to land anyway. They also sail on days when landings cannot.

If everything is cancelled, the Skellig Experience centre on Valentia Island, across the bridge from Portmagee, interprets the monastery, the seabirds and the lighthouse service with models and film. Its website is badly out of date, so ring before you go rather than trusting published hours.

The visitor's cheat sheet

The climb

You come ashore at a landing cut into the rock on the east side, walk a stretch of the lighthouse road, and then the steps begin.

There are 618 of them by the OPW's count — Wikipedia says 600 — cut by the monks in three separate flights approaching from east, south and north. Visitors use the south steps. They are uneven, they are wet more often than not, there is no handrail for most of the way, and the drops beside them are long. The climb gains about 180 metres.

Halfway up is Christ's Saddle, the col between the island's two peaks at about 130 metres, which is the only flat ground on the island and where everybody stops. Above it the steps resume to the monastery terrace.

Take this seriously. Two visitors died in falls here in 2009 — a 77-year-old man in May and a 57-year-old woman in September — and the OPW's response, after an independent review recommended against installing barriers on heritage grounds, was a safety chain at one ledge and much blunter warnings. A safety assessment compared the visit to a mountaineering-grade activity. There are no toilets, no shelter and no refreshments, three OPW guides are on the island at a time, and sturdy footwear is mandatory.

What is up there

The monastery

The monastery sits on an artificial terrace at about 180 metres, inside a drystone enclosure, and it was founded somewhere between the sixth and eighth centuries — tradition says by St Fionán, and the first hard reference is an eighth-century note of the death of “Suibhini of Skelig”. The dedication to St Michael came later, somewhere between 950 and 1050. It was never a large community: probably about twelve monks and an abbot at any time.

Understand what that means. Twelve men, on a rock with no fresh water beyond what they could catch, no fuel, no soil, and no way off for months at a stretch, built and maintained terraces, cisterns, gardens, cells and oratories, and kept it going for six hundred years. The engineering is as remarkable as the asceticism.

The beehive cells

Six clochán-type cells, of which five stand, built corbelled: each course of stone laid slightly inward until the walls meet overhead, with no mortar anywhere. The stones are pitched very slightly outward so water runs off rather than in, and the cells are substantially watertight after more than a thousand Atlantic winters. The largest, Cell A, is about 14.5 by 3.8 metres and 5 metres high — rectangular inside, beehive outside.

Nothing about them is picturesque decay. They still work.

The oratories, the cisterns and the gardens

Two oratories, built like upturned boats in the same corbelled technique. The Large Oratory is about 3.6 by 4.3 metres, with a west door, a small east window and an altar. There is also a later mortared church, St Michael's, a cemetery, two leachta — drystone altar-platforms — and more than a hundred recorded stone crosses and cross-slabs across the island.

The two details worth hunting for are practical rather than devotional. The cisterns: cut and lined to catch and hold rainwater, because there is no spring. And the monks' gardens, two terraced patches, Upper and Lower, held up by high retaining walls — the only cultivable ground on the island, and made rather than found.

The South Peak

On the higher, western peak, reached by rock-cut steps, is a hermitage: an Oratory Terrace with its original altar still in place, a cistern, and the remains of what was probably a shrine. It is an even more extreme site than the monastery, on ledges above a sheer drop, and it is thought to have been used by monks seeking greater solitude than a community of twelve could offer.

It is closed to ordinary visitors. You can see the peak from the monastery; you cannot go up it.

After the monks

Vikings raided in 823 — the annal records that “Skellig was plundered by the heathen and Eitgal was carried off and he died of hunger” — and again in 838; some sources give an earlier raid around 821. The community left in the late twelfth or early thirteenth century for the abbey at Ballinskelligs on the mainland, probably for a combination of worsening climate, Norse pressure and the reorganisation of the Irish church into continental orders. Pilgrims and hermits kept coming through the Middle Ages.

In the 1820s the rock was bought by the Dublin port authority and two lighthouses were built on the Atlantic side, with the road you walk the first stretch of. One is still operational; keepers lived out here until automation, and their families are buried in a small graveyard by the light. The lighthouse section is closed to visitors.

It was inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1996, on criteria iii and iv, as “an outstanding, and in many respects unique, example of an early religious settlement deliberately sited on a pyramidal rock in the ocean”.

The birds, and Little Skellig

Two kilometres away, Little Skellig is white with gannets: about 35,000 breeding pairs, the largest colony in Ireland and one of the largest anywhere. Note the unit — a great many travel sources say “70,000 birds” or call it the second largest in the world; 35,000 pairs is the figure from BirdWatch Ireland, which owns and manages the island, and the world-ranking claim is not one they make.

Landing on Little Skellig is not allowed. It is a nature reserve and needs written permission. Boats circle it, which is much of the point of the eco tours.

On Skellig Michael itself, puffins nest in burrows right beside the steps from April to early August and are entirely unbothered by people. Manx shearwaters, storm petrels, fulmars, kittiwakes, razorbills and guillemots all breed here too, and grey seals haul out below. For many visitors the birds turn out to be the memorable part.

Star Wars, and what it did

The island appeared as Ahch-To, Luke Skywalker's place of exile, in The Force Awakens (2015) and The Last Jedi (2017), with aerial footage in The Rise of Skywalker.

What that did is more interesting than it sounds. It did not increase the number of people who get ashore, because the cap is fixed at 180 a day and the weather does the rest — the island still averages around 11,000 visitors a year. What it increased was demand, which means the boats book out further ahead and the whole Iveragh peninsula sees more traffic. Two incidents were reported during filming, An Taisce and heritage bodies objected, and there were warnings at the time that the site could jeopardise its World Heritage status. It did not; the listing stands.

Tickets and tours

Don't miss

• The cisterns Cut to catch rainwater, because there is no spring. The single most practical thing on the island and the one nobody photographs.
• The monks' gardens Two terraces held up by retaining walls — soil carried and built, not found.
• The corbelling Look at how the stones are pitched slightly outward. That detail is why the cells are still dry.
• The Large Oratory An upturned stone boat with a west door and an east window, and an altar still in it.
• Christ's Saddle The col at 130 metres: the only flat ground, and the view back down the steps you have just climbed.
• The puffins In burrows beside the path from April to early August, at arm's length and unbothered.
• Little Skellig 35,000 pairs of gannets on a rock nobody is allowed to land on. The boat goes close.

Insider tips

Stay in Portmagee the night before. Boats leave early, the road out along the peninsula is slow, and a cancellation call at seven in the morning is much easier to absorb from a guesthouse two minutes from the pier than from Killarney.

Take a waterproof, water and something to eat. There is nothing on the island — no toilets, no shelter, no shop — and you are ashore for two and a half hours.

Wear boots with grip. Sandals and flip-flops are refused at the boat, not at the steps.

Check the age limit with your operator, not just the OPW. The OPW rule is under-12s not permitted; at least one operator sets it at 14.

Do not fly a drone. They are prohibited, this is a World Heritage Site with a bird colony on it, and the guides will stop you.

Where to stay and eat nearby

Portmagee is a single street of brightly painted houses along the water with a couple of excellent pubs, and it is the right base — you can walk to the pier. Valentia Island is over the bridge and has more rooms. Further afield, Cahersiveen and Waterville are both on the Ring of Kerry and both within reasonable driving distance, but every extra mile is a mile to drive at dawn on a day that may be called off anyway.

More Irish churches

• Rock of Cashel — the great medieval site of the Irish church, on a limestone outcrop in Tipperary.
• St Patrick's Cathedral, Dublin — Ireland's largest church, and Swift's grave.
• Kylemore Abbey — a Victorian castle turned Benedictine abbey in Connemara.

See all the Irish churches in this guide →