So what in the hell is skellig. That is what I was wondering last night after checking in at our B&B in Portmagee. The wifi password was skelligs, every second business in town had the word skellig in it's name and the major local attraction was Skellig Micheal. I did not find the answer to that question until we visited (you guessed it) The Skellig Experience building this morning, where one of the attendants told me (that many tourists ask that question). "skellig" means "rock". Skellig Micheal is one of two nearby rocky precipitous islands that in the years before 1000AD was the home to a community of early christian monks who carved a life on the steep cliffs of the island. We did not get to visit the island (too late in the year and in any case tours of the island are being scaled back to protect the ruins). But we did get a sense of the amazing achievement of those early christians builders. No photos - so follow the link above to get some sense of the place.

After "the experience" we took a little drive and then a walk to a place on the coast where there are fossilized foot prints of a Tetrapod in some rocks, these prints are estimated to be 385 million years old and are the oldest know evidence of vertebrate animals on land.

In the posed photo of me I am holding a steel gate from a lighthouse that was bent like a piece of wire by the waves of a storm.