Qualla: Ardoileán

Ardoileán: Introduction

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit 32cnamart, CC BY-SA 4.0. The boat from the mainland is small and the swell is usually rolling. Approach from the east on a calm summer morning and you see a single hump of land rising out of the Atlantic, treeless, perhaps a kilometer across, ringed by cliffs that the gannets and gulls work without pause. There is no jetty. To get ashore you wait for the swell to lift the boat to the rock, then jump. Ardoileán - Ard Oileán, High Island in English - has been like this since long before the hermits arrived in the seventh century. The Irish poet Richard Murphy, who owned the island from 1969 to 1998, wrote that the silence here was 'the silence of a place where prayers have been wearing the rocks for thirteen hundred years.'

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Image: 32cnamart | CC BY-SA 4.0

Ardoileán: Why Hermits Came Here

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit 32cnamart, CC BY-SA 4.0. Between the seventh and ninth centuries, Irish monasticism produced a peculiar genius: men who believed the path to God lay in extreme isolation, on rocks where nothing grew, where the wind never stopped, where survival meant collecting rainwater and seabirds' eggs. Ardoileán is ...

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Image: 32cnamart | CC BY-SA 4.0

Ardoileán: Richard Murphy's Island

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit 32cnamart, CC BY-SA 4.0. In 1969 the Irish poet Richard Murphy, then living on Inishbofin to the south, learned that the owner of Ardoileán was thinking of selling. He wrote later in his 2002 memoir The Kick: 'I got excited at the thought of buying this inaccessible holy island, restoring the beehive cel...

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Image: 32cnamart | CC BY-SA 4.0

Ardoileán: For Sale, One Holy Island

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit 32cnamart, CC BY-SA 4.0. In February 2019, Ardoileán went on the market through Spencer Auctioneers for 1.25 million euros. The Guardian's headline read 'Craggy island for sale: gulls, grass, wind and no mod cons.' The listing came with no buildings beyond the ancient ruins, no mains electricity, no fres...

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Image: 32cnamart | CC BY-SA 4.0