Qualla: Ballinskelligs Abbey

Ballinskelligs Abbey: Introduction

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Jibi44, CC BY 2.5. The monks who built this priory had already lost a fight with the Atlantic. For centuries their brothers had clung to the bare rock of Skellig Michael, eight miles offshore, where the wind tore at beehive cells and prayer was a kind of survival. By the twelfth century, when storms became too much even for that famously hardy community, they came ashore here, to the western lip of Ballinskelligs Bay, and started over. The ruins on the headland today - cloister, refectory, prior's house, burial ground - are what remained when that second monastery, too, ran out of time.

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Image: Jibi44 | CC BY 2.5

Ballinskelligs Abbey: From the Rock to the Shore

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Chris06, CC BY-SA 4.0. Skellig Michael had been a monastic outpost since at least the sixth century, and by medieval standards, it was extreme. Pilgrims who reach the island today still gasp at the climb. For the monks who lived there, the climb was the easy part - what wore them down was the relentles...

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Image: Chris06 | CC BY-SA 4.0

Ballinskelligs Abbey: Stones That Remember a Cloister

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Martin Southwood, CC BY-SA 2.0. Walk the site now and you can still read the plan. The church stands roofless on the headland, its long axis pointed roughly east, the way medieval churches almost always face. Around it lie the foundations of the cloister, the refectory where the canons ate in silence, and the p...

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Image: Martin Southwood | CC BY-SA 2.0

Ballinskelligs Abbey: The Suppression and the Long Afterlife

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Warren.buckley at English Wikipedia, CC BY 2.5. The priory was occupied until 1568 and formally dissolved a decade later, in 1578, during the reformation under Elizabeth I. The property passed to a man named Gyles Clincher, and from him through two centuries of tenants - none of them monks. What had been a working religious co...

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Image: Warren.buckley at English Wikipedia | CC BY 2.5

Ballinskelligs Abbey: Looking West From the Graveyard

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Hawkwind, Public domain. From the abbey burial ground the sea is everywhere. Little Skellig and Skellig Michael show themselves on the western horizon - two crooked teeth in the mouth of the Atlantic. Ballinskelligs Castle, a sixteenth-century MacCarthy Mor tower house, stands on a separate promontory ac...

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Image: Hawkwind | Public domain