I’m in Ireland for three months, being the Frank O’Connor International Fellow in Cork – a generous fellowship offered annually by the Munster Literature Centre and funded in part by Cork City Council to commemorate the life and work of one of the greatest English language short-story writers.

I’m in Ireland for three months, being the Frank O’Connor International Fellow in Cork – a generous fellowship offered annually by the Munster Literature Centre and funded in part by Cork City Council to commemorate the life and work of one of the greatest English language short-story writers.

Regular readers will not be surprised to hear that one of the first things I did was to head west – and west and west, through the lovely and increasingly wild countryside to go to Skellig Michael: the almost vertical, twin-peaked mountain that rises 714ft directly out of the sea about six miles off the coast beyond Portmagee. It has a smaller companion a little distance away: Little Skellig, now home to 70,000 gannets (the second largest colony in the world) and to large numbers of puffins, fulmars, Arctic terns and other seabirds.

But I did not go for the bird life; that was a bonus. I went because out there in the wild ocean, up nearly 700 rough steps cut into the cliff face, there was once a monastery. From, at the latest, ad 600 until some time in the thirteenth century hermit monks inhabited this desolate, storm-wracked, beautiful place.

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