HAUNTS OP THE SHEAKWATEK 225 



of us may yet live to see good clergymen flying from 

 the heresies of archbishops and v tyranny of secular 

 courts to reconstructed island monasteries. When that 

 time comes, nowhere will a site be found more beautiful 

 or more instinct with the traditions of a primitive 

 Church. 



But of even greater interest than the Great Skelligs, 

 if this is possible, for all but the Church antiquarian 

 pure and simple, is the smaller sister island the 

 poultry-yard of the monastery a triangular slaty rock 

 of some 14 acres, which rises, with a tilt to the north- 

 wards, 440 feet from the sea, a mile nearer the mainland. 



It is one of the most southerly, and perhaps the 

 largest breeding-station of the Gannet in the British 

 Isles, and must in old days have been a very important 

 adjunct to the monastery, supplying fresh eggs and 

 fowl in the summer, and, for winter consumption, 

 smoked goose and ' Poffin ' in unlimited quantities. 



On the south side the almost precipitous walls of 

 the Little Skellig are split by clefts running in places 

 through the island into flat-topped square blocks and 

 columns covered to high-water mark with a black 

 moss of mussels, blossoming with sea anemones. The 

 island looks from this side like an unfinished temple of 

 giants thrown out of the perpendicular by an earth- 

 quake. On other sides it bristles with fantastic spikes 

 and needles, and at the north-west corner a flying 

 buttress, under which the water breaks constantly into 

 foam, springs in a quarter-circle from half-way up the 

 cliff to the sea. 



V 



