The Skelligs

For St. Patrick's Day, we'll pay a brief cybervisit to the Skelligs - two rocky islands just off the coast of Ireland. Both are famous for their seabird colonies (30,000 pairs of Northern Gannets on the smaller island, for example), but the larger one is also a UNESCO World Heritage site because of an early Christian monastery.

This was the "flattest" land the monks could find to work with -- though the land still slanted upward at a 45-degree angle. Working entirely by hand, the monks hauled earth and stone in small leather bags. Over several years, likely over several decades, they levelled the slope, handful by handful, scaling it into workable terraces -- one for a chapel, one for a cemetery, another a small garden. Soil for the garden was transported from the mainland and augmented by seaweed. Despite nearly 14 centuries of harsh, Irish coastal weather, what remains is in amazingly good condition...

To try to prevent the Irish weather from seeping in, the walls of the clochans were built more than two metres thick. All the structures are cobbled together from rocks or loose stones gathered by hand, without an ounce of mortar to hold them together against the pounding Irish rains...
As we retraced our steps downward, I recalled the Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw's observation on his 1910 visit to Skellig. "An incredible, impossible, mad place.... I tell you the thing does not belong to any world that you and I have lived and worked in; it is part of our dream world."

The colonization began in the 7th century, and the site wasn't abandoned until the 13th century. Religious devotion aside, one has to admire the toughness of people of those times, just to survive in places like this.

(Photo credit to this virtual tour site)