Shooting Skellig — 150 years of photography on Michael’s Rock

While director JJ Abrams brought global attention to Skellig when filming Star Wars, the island off the Kerry coast has a long photographic history, writes Ciarán Walsh

Skellig provided J. J. Abrams with the perfect location for the birthplace of the Jedi. The challenge of filming Star Wars on a steep rock 12km out in the Atlantic has added enormously to the mystique of a place with a long tradition of pilgrims scaling its twin peaks.

One hundred and fifty years before Abrams landed on Skellig, Edwin Wyndham-Quin noticed a monastic complex on the first ordnance survey map of the rock and included it in his study of pagan forts, Christian hermitages and mediaeval churches.