Today is St Patrick’s Day and March 17 is the supposed date of the 5th-century missionary’s death. Patrick was the forerunner of many early missionaries who came to Irish shores to preach Christianity, the island more receptive to new ideas about religion than its larger neighbour to the east across the Irish Sea. Consequently Ireland abounds with relics and ruins of early Christianity, sometimes in the most improbable of places.
Sailing around Ireland’s southwest coast, skirting the peninsulas that splay out from the Kerry coast, the two islands of the Skelligs come into view after rounding Bolus Head at the end of the Inveragh Peninsula. Both islands are sheer, with sharp-finned summits that resemble inverted boat keels. The smaller of the two appears largely white at first but increasing proximity reveals that the albino effect is down to a combination of nesting gannets and guano.  The acrid tang of ammonia on the breeze and distant cacophony announce the presence of the birds well before the identity of any individual can be confirmed by binoculars.
As the boat draws closer, the sheer volume of birds – gannets, fulmars, puffins, terns – becomes plain to see. With something like 70,000 birds, Little Skellig is the second largest gannet colony in the world. But on the larger island of Skellig Michael, although seabirds abound here too, there is also the suggestion of a human presence, albeit an historic one. High up in the rocks, small stone structures can be discerned: rounded domes that are clearly man-made and which soften the jagged silhouette of the island’s summit. These are beehive cells, the dry-stone oratories favoured by early Irish monks for their meditation. Sitting aloft the island on a high terrace, commanding a panoramic view over the Atlantic Ocean in one direction and the fractal Kerry coast in the other, these simple stone cells came without windows – the business was one of prayer and meditation not horizon-gazing. Such isolation was necessary for reasons of both safety and spirituality. And Skellig Michael was the acme of isolation. In the early Christian milieu the Skellig Islands, facing the seemingly limitless Atlantic off the southwest coast of Ireland, were more than merely remote: they were at the very edge of the known world.
The island’s monastic site is infused with mystery, as all good ruins are, but is thought to have been established in the 6th century by Saint Fionán. Consisting of six beehive cells, two oratories and a later medieval church, the site occupies a stone terrace 600 feet above the swirling green waters of the sea below.
Skirting Skellig Michael, a landing stage with a helicopter pad comes into view. A vertiginous path of stone steps leads up towards the beehive huts close to the island’s mountain-like summit. We do not disembark. Instead we keep sailing, bound for a safer harbour in Glengarriff in County Cork. No matter, the sight of the rocks, the winding, climbing path and the austere cells on the terrace at the top is already imprinted on our memory.
Without doubt this was a life of supreme hardship: the isolation, the relentless diet of fish and seabird eggs, the ever-battering wind and salt-spray. Such was the isolation, and so extreme the privations of this beatific pursuit, that one might assume that the monks would have been left in peace to practice their calling. This was not to be. Viking raiders arrived here in the early 9th century and took the trouble to land, scale the island’s heights and attack the monks. For most of us it is probably difficult to comprehend the blind-rage fury of the raiders, the wrath invoked in them by pious upstarts with their new Christian God. Easier perhaps is to imagine the dread that must have been felt by the monks as the Vikings approached their spiritual eyrie.
Orthodox Walsingham
A few months ago whilst travelling in central Serbia I met a nun at Manasija monastery near Despotovac. I was talking with my Serbian friends in the monastery shop when the nun behind the counter, hearing our conversation in English, started to chat with us. It turned out she was Irish, although she sounded Home Counties English to my ears, and had once taught Religious Education at the same school that Princess Diana had attended. The nun, whose name I never learned, was bright and engaging, and keen to hear news of the old country. “Tell me, is Mrs Thatcher still alive? Is it true that she’s gone a bit doolally these days?” I ventured to suggest that the Iron Lady always was quite doolally in my book and she laughed. “And how is the Duke of Edinburgh? He always had a twinkle in his eye. Quite an eye for the ladies, I fancy.”
We went on to talk about Norfolk and she mentioned Dame Julian of Norwich. When I said that I lived less than a mile from her chapel she went quite dewy-eyed before going on to talk about Walsingham and the time she had spent there many years ago. We talked more, about Norwich, about education (“Ah, I could tell you were a teacher”); about how the best books require an input of effort in order to get something back out of them. We also spoke of children’s expectations of instantaneous reward, and about delayed gratification, which I can only suppose,  given the sort of unshakable faith that its adherents generally have, is the essence of what the monastic life is all about.
It was starting to go dark outside and my friends were hovering at the doorway wanting to leave – clearly, it was time to go. I picked up the jars of honey I had bought and bade the nun goodbye. She smiled warmly as I made my exit. “Thank you for bringing me those wonderful memories of Walsingham. I will treasure them. God bless.” It was nice to be appreciated but I never did find out how a well-educated Irishwoman came to be an Orthodox nun in an isolated monastery in the middle of Serbia: I was too polite to ask.
Fast forward to December and I am back in Walsingham myself, researching for a forthcoming book on Norfolk walks that will come out next year. It is a beautifully bright day with a huge sky and green corduroy fields that gleam as spikes of newly emerged winter wheat catch the low-slung mid-winter sun. I walk up the east side of the valley from the village and then descend down to the Stiffkey River before going up the opposite side. At the valley bottom, the river is in flood, its ford almost impassable with the recent deluge. The landscape around here is perhaps Norfolk at its least typical (although some might argue that the nearby village of Great Snoring is quintessentially Norfolk in spirit). Undulating, lush and well-wooded, with discrete valleys and hazy horizons, it reminds me of the Welsh Borders in many ways – something distinctly Celtic, almost Byronic, about its folds and creases.
 I return to Walsingham from the west side of the valley, following a greenway that would have been one of several pilgrimage routes to the village in the past. The track emerges at the edge of the village alongside the path of an old railway track that in recent years has found new use as a walking route for pilgrims from the Slipper Chapel, a mile away. It was always a tradition to walk this last stretch to Walsingham barefoot – even King Henry VIII once performed this act of humility before returning two decades later to trash the priory during the Dissolution. As I arrive at the track, a group of robed monks are silhouetted as they walk west; walking, quite literally, into the sunset.
Across the track, the original station building still stands next to its redundant platform. But something strange has happened. Now the small red-brick building sports a small silver onion dome with a cross above it: it has found a new life as an Orthodox chapel. Surely it is this humble chapel that my Manasija nun remembers so fondly? This modest converted building is her personal connection with Walsingham. Now, purely by chance, it is also mine.
East of Elveden 