Skellig Michael

alone, on purpose.

They call it Skellig Michael, the Rock of the Archangel.

To reach the top you climb roughly 600 stone steps, cut by hand into a cliff face so steep that a wrong footing means a fall with nothing to catch you but the sea.

Pilgrims have died on those steps.

And if it's the real world monsters you're after, the ones who don't need teeth to be terrifying, deadly intent is waiting for you with a case file of its own.

But tonight we're not chasing a creature, we're chasing a place, one of the strangest, loneliest, most punishing places human beings have ever chosen to call home.

Skellig Michael isn't just remote.

It's aggressively remote.

Michael I connected with less until I was in Glastonbury and I was sat in the Chalice Wells gardens and I could just feel the like energy and movement of this line I could just feel and then I thought oh maybe that's what the lines feel like but I then went over to the Chalice Well which I knew would be Mary energy and it was just completely still but like like a lioness watching her cubs play like she was still but she was protecting and you know you didn't want to mess i felt like that i just felt completely safe and protected and held by her that she was absolutely just holding space and not moving whereas the other energy had been this like torrent like as if i was under a waterfall okay so the masculine energy is this like active movement and then the feminine was this still um like holding space um for those two lines and um was uh Yeah, then I realized when I left the lines and went and spent a night at my friend's house for the autumn equinox.

And I... basically had to go into London on a train and then go back out again like she wasn't actually far from where I was on the line but to get to her I had to go into London and out again and as soon as I did that I suddenly felt really vulnerable um and in like no longer safe and I realized how much the Michael line had been making me feel safe and protected so it was less obvious I was on it but it was more obvious when I wasn't on it um and and then yeah the surprise that I had when I walked the Ellen and Bellinus lines and discovered that they felt completely different that the Ellen line felt like an out of control furious dragon who was trying to buck me off her and was literally just like doing everything she could to fucking shake me off and then Bellinus felt like um Arthur or as like just this golden being that was was holding space it was the masculine that was holding space on those two lines it was this kind of you know uh benevolent loving all-seeing sun god sunshine that was like holding space while the woman just was having an absolute mental breakdown and was lost in fury so yeah very different feelings and so I'm interested to see what Athena and Apollo um feel like um yeah so and you know is michael and apollo similar feeling or is it a different aspect of michael that's a more apollo like aspect who knows i'm gonna see what comes but we we really get on the lines tomorrow so the the pilgrimage started in sark so we started in sark and we uh which was sort of because I couldn't get a sailor to get us from apparently you can't get on Michael Skellig either I didn't realise it's you can go on there as a tourist but it's like arranged trips you can't just like go and stay there it's a puffin colony so covered in like old beehive shaped medieval monastery buildings so we wouldn't be able to get on there and then there's Michael's Mount which we've been to three four times and i've never been able to get in um because there's always been some reason why like either the pandemic or they're not open at weekends which is insane um i think it's saturdays they're not open or something anyway crazy so um never been able to get in there it's been um hilarious i've like walked 2 000 miles to get into there and not been able to um so we started in sark which is, you know, in the channel which we would have sailed with the sailor if we'd found one and imagined Michael Skellig and then St. Michael's Mount and then, you know, sending our energy forward to Mont Saint-Michel and then we're going to head to Mont Saint-Michel tomorrow morning and then we'll do an opening ceremony and begin.

So we've done our intention setting ceremony, the Virgo dark moon, but we will do our opening ceremony at Montserrat shall draw, pick and draw stones, runes for setting off rune and our destination runes.

We'll be etching these spirit lines across the land.

You know, managing sites, again, is the key thing.

Skellig Michael down in Kerry.

It's such a sensitive site that can only be, you know, managed in a very, very controlled manner.

Again, we've been learning from that.

Before I literally had boots on the ground in Greece, because Kelly Armchair traveled with me, she didn't physically come with me.

Her and I did two pre-sessions working on the ley lines from Skellig Michael to Mount Carmel.

I'm not going to go into a lot of details about that.

I've spent multiple other episodes talking about the details around Skellig Michael all the way to Mount Carmel.

But Kelly and I paired places in England, which were Avebury and Glastonbury.

with places in Greece, which were the Acropolis and Delphi.

So tell me about that and tell me about the skelligs and just the whole dynamic there.

Well, I was out in Skellig Vigil, Skellig Michael, there last summer.

It was an absolutely magical experience.

And like all the tourists, you might not get to land.

I often call Evra and Valencia my spiritual home, a place where I feel connected to something deeper, where the landscape seems to speak and where the pace of life allows you to stop, breathe and simply be.

On my recent trip to Valencia Island with family and friends, I had the greatest pleasure of taking a boat trip out and landing on Skellig Michael.

And this is an adventure I want to highly recommend and share with you all today.

Twelve kilometres off the coast of County Kerry, rising dramatically from the Atlantic Ocean, are two of Ireland's most extraordinary islands, known collectively as the Skelligs.

The largest island is called Skellig Michael or Skellig Vicol in Irish and it is a unique world heritage site where an ancient medieval Christian monastery was built.

The second island is called Little Skellig or Skellig Viog in Irish and it is a nature reserve with a diverse bird population including one of the largest colonies of gannets in the world.

These two islands are havens for birds.

It's very tiny and it's called Lemon Rock.

rock beehive huts like what you see in one of the star yeah it was in Star Wars that's correct yeah you

know I never got to Skellig Michael it's off the coast of Kerry

yeah and the sea has always been too rough every time I was supposed to go out there the sea was too rough so I've never been able to go I guess I needed a helicopter but

anyway scale down the road but away you go

And, of course, you've got the famous Ring of Kerry to drive.

And if you're a Star Wars fan or if you just want to really get out there into the Atlantic, how about going out to Skellig Michael, which is that rugged...

Ireland off the coast of Kerry.

So you can take the boat, weather permitting, from Port McGee.

And it's there that Skellig Michael was featured in some of the Star Wars movies, like The Force Awakens or The Last Jedi and The Rise of Skywalker.

So if anybody interested in Star Wars movies, it's a, it's a fantastic, um, place to go 600 steps up, um, for the, um, uh, for the active traveler.

And then I love places like Kenmare.