Travel: I climbed the ‘stairway to heaven’ next to a Star Wars film set in Ireland
The weeklong 'Hiking & Island Hopping: Cork & Kerry' trek traverses stunning Emerald Isle landscapes.
No blarney, the Force was with me. Or at least with Watson, a black Lab mix and crack dolphin spotter who, upon detecting dorsal fins, relentlessly barked while racing throughout our small fishing boat jouncing in the Atlantic off Ireland’s rugged coast. Almost magically, pods of playful cetaceans suddenly swam alongside and under the vessel, as our ancient destination — isolated Skellig Michael island — vaulted up like a jagged, supernatural pyramid on the sea’s distant horizon.
A magnificent otherworld awaited. Fantastically flanked by oodles of adorable, clownish puffins lining my path, I’d soon climb Skellig Michael’s perilous 618-step “stairway to heaven” to explore 1,400-year-old stone beehive huts of long-departed hermit monks. Those austere, solitude-obsessed Celtic Christians must’ve spun in their nearby graves when Luke Skywalker squatted in their divine refuge and a sizable Star Wars’ film crew clambered up the sacred UNESCO site. Skellig Michael became planet Ahch-To in “Episode VII: The Force Awakens” and “Episode VIII: The Last Jedi.”
Just getting to this wind-flogged, storm-lashed outpost is extremely difficult. Each year, for only a seasonal few months, a limited number of 12-seat boats can sail the eight miles to Skellig Michael, but excursions are often canceled because of nasty gusts and choppy swells that make landings too dangerous. Call it luck of the Irish: On an unusually clear May day, after passengers received explicit instructions about how to puke overboard (thankfully not needed), skipper John O’ Shea shuttled us across on a one-hour journey, his sharp-eyed Watson and border collie Luna hilariously going dolphin bonkers almost the whole way.
When I laid foot on Skellig Michael, a safety officer scarily warned visitors that tourists have plunged to their deaths and been injured on the steep, cliffside, monk-hewn rough steps that have no handrailing; she suggested if you freak out, turn back and slide down on your rear. I very, very carefully trudged 600 feet up to the goosebump-eliciting monastery, its six conical dwellings, church, two oratories, cemetery and rainwater cisterns all spectacularly trapped in the medieval past. About 12 monks and an abbot lived in the religious sanctuary at any given period over six centuries; atop this precipice they felt closer to God. However, despite their chanting psalms, praying and singing hymns, demons lurked. Axe-wielding Vikings occasionally pillaged the settlement, once kidnapping an abbot for ransom; he died of starvation.
I got here thanks to being on an exceptional weeklong trip, “Hiking & Island Hopping: Cork & Kerry,” with adventure operator Wilderness Ireland (wildernessireland.com). Five years ago, I did a colorful trekking tour with sister company Wilderness Scotland, and fancied a similar one frolicking among Ireland’s four-leaf clovers. We hiked through staggeringly gorgeous Emerald Isle landscapes several hours a day but there was much more — a visit with a beloved blind goat farmer, a haunted abbey, toe-tapping pubs, a “Sleeping Giant,” and an evacuated island of storytellers, to name a few highlights.
Let me give a major shout-out to our great-humored, knowledgable Irish guide (and Elvis fan), 52-year-old Declan Faulkner. He drove us eight Americans a total of 550 miles in a mini-van on the twisting, iconic Wild Atlantic Way and enthusiastically led us into the glistening green, wildflower-sprouting, sheep-replete, wave-crashing coastal yonder. The camaraderie among fellow travelers, all initially strangers to me, was “craic” (good fun) even before we lifted pints of Guinness in Crayola-bright, Irish-speaking villages.
History ran rampant. On day one, Declan made an impromptu stop at a cemetery in Skibbereen where 9,000 local victims of the mid-1800s Irish potato famine are buried in a mass grave. All week, we’d see countless dry-stone “famine walls” that were work projects created to give the unemployed income during the hunger catastrophe that killed one million souls.
Another morning, we walked around the charming, harbor hamlet of Baltimore, a still-standing 13th-century castle witness to the horrific “Sack of Baltimore.” A sign memorialized the night In June 1631 when 230 armed North African Barbary pirates attacked the sleeping town, torching homes and snatching terrified residents from their beds. An estimated 154 men, women and children were captured, chained, and loaded onto ships to become Algerian slaves.
From Baltimore, our smooth-cruising ferry — briefly surrounded by giant open-mouthed basking sharks — delivered us to tiny Cape Clear, Ireland’s most southerly inhabited island (pop.110). Inside a cement shed, cheery 75-year-old Ed Harper held a blue pail and milked black-and-white goat Morag, who wanted to eat my iPhone. Ed, a former sociology teacher in England, has been blind since early childhood. He founded his Cleire Goat Farm 45 years ago and currently has 26 cud-chewers roaming 27 verdant acres. His favorite, big-bodied Captain Nibbles, appears to be the boss.
“Goats want everything that people want: food, sex and status,” Ed told me with a hearty laugh and a tug on his snowy beard.
The farm sells six flavors of goat ice cream, including lavender (“I think it tastes like soap,” Ed chuckled), along with actual goat soap, burgers and sausages. I met personable Nibbles and curious herd members perched atop a rocky outcrop in the grassy fields; a young goat gnawed the red laces of my hiking boots.
Done milking, Ed sat outside on a bench and rambunctiously sang folk tunes (“there was Brown, upside down, mopping up the whisky on the floor…”). He was pure joy. And then off we hiked into Cape Clear’s fairytale hinterlands, pausing to devour our backpack-carried sandwiches atop a breathtaking, sheer bluff teetering over the expansive Atlantic. Behind us rose a crumbling Napoleonic War-era signal tower along with a lighthouse abandoned in 1854 after it was obscured in the fog, causing a ship disaster that killed 92 passengers.
On other jaunts, we’d trek on tranquil, aptly-named Sheep’s Head peninsula, stroll the enormous, palatial Killarney National Park estate of Muckross House that Queen Victoria stayed in, and amble to the eerie, 15th-century Muckross Abbey, where a man’s ghost has supposedly been seen chewing a corpse’s flesh in the tangled graveyard. Real-life “Dracula” author Bram Stoker used to hang around the grounds too.
This entire trip was also a bird bonanza. Some 8,000 puffins each spring inundate Skellig Michael to breed and nest, and scads of them stared at us unfazed with silly orange-beaked faces. In 2015, when “The Last Jedi” filmed on the island, there were so many puffins in the background that CGI artists had to turn them into intergalactic “porgs.” The monks would navigate the treacherous staircase every day to fish, but they also ate the eggs and meat of seabirds, including those cute puffins. Before we arrived at Skelling Michael, our boat floated around smaller, human-uninhabitable Little Skellig island, a colony of 70,000 gannets crowding every ledge.
Another hike brought us to a second “Last Jedi” location, the stunning Dunmore Head promontory on the Dingle Peninsula. This is where Luke Skywalker kept his X-Wing fighter, milked a gigantic sea cow and drank its green milk. Across from Dunmore Head, you can see the deserted, mythical Blasket Islands; one is dubbed the “Sleeping Giant” and appears to be an immense body in repose. We had planned to trek about Great Blasket island, but bad weather scrapped our boat ride.
Instead, we visited the intriguing Blasket Centre museum, which recounts how Great Blasket had to be permanently evacuated in 1953 because violent seas often thwarted medical care and other services for the 22 remaining and mostly aging residents. At one time, up to 175 people lived in the enclave that had no store, no doctor, no priest, no running water or electricity and a Morse code radio so unreliable that islanders set bonfires to alert the mainland they were in distress. Displayed artifacts, such as girls’ smocks, pipes, a domino set, and letters told of a tight, hardscrabble community that loved to fiddle and dance the four-hand reel. Great Blasket was also home to several Irish authors, including superb storyteller Peig Sayers who wrote her stirring memoirs about surviving on the island for 40 years.
From the Centre, I hiked along the tip of Dingle Peninsula until I ran into a dilapidated stone schoolhouse affixed with a plaque stating it was the 19th-century Kirrary National School. Hollywood again. The faux school was part of a set built for the 1970 Oscar-winning romantic epic, “Ryan’s Daughter.”
For sure, I hit a pot of gold on this adventure in counties Cork and Kerry. “It’s the people, the friendliness, the scenery, the ruggedness of the coastline and the mountains — and the peacefulness of it all,” Declan said. (That peace was temporarily interrupted when Declan played Elvis’ “Suspicious Minds” in the van and we all loudly crooned along.) And even though I didn’t glimpse sought-after leprechauns, I did see a yellow road sign designating their “crossing” at the panoramic Ladies View lookout.
We spent our final two nights in the lively town of Dingle, known for quirky and music-permeating pubs. Our group toasted in legendary Dick Mack’s, an 1899-founded pub-haberdashery where a craftsman now fashions leather belts at the booze-serving bar counter. (The motto is “Step Up and Get Waisted.”) Along Main Street, inside vintage pub-hardware shop Foxy John’s, patrons can sip a smooth whisky and buy DIY items, such as tools, vehicle anti-freeze and rat bait. (I guess their slogan could be “Step Up and Get Hammered.”)
Our trip ended way too soon when Declan dropped us off at the Limerick train station. On my locomotive-powered voyage back to Dublin, I sat next to Kevin Clancy, an elderly gent from Limerick who enjoyed how awed I was by his country. “You know what’s so special about Ireland?” he asked in his thick brogue. “You don’t have to go anywhere to see the beautiful scenery. In fact, you can always reach out and touch it.”
I knowingly smiled — and touched the shamrock in my pocket.