‘The most unfindable place in the galaxy’

Near the top of the island, the feeling breezed through me: solitude. It didn’t last long, as my wife, daughter and son were nearby but out of sight on our journey to the ruins of a remote medieval monastery. For a moment, though, it felt as if I were standing alone at the edge of the world.

Skellig Michael is a jagged rock that rises from the ocean about 8 miles off the coast of County Kerry, in southwest Ireland. Its 54 acres are mostly steep and uninhabitable, except for the thousands of seabirds that roost here in the spring and summer, when the puffins are as plentiful as pigeons in a city park.

More than 1,000 years ago, a handful of monks dared to make this place their home. Visiting today reminds modern pilgrims of the lengths to which people will go to find a liminal space between earth and God.

“Skellig" comes from an old Gaelic word for crag—a rugged cliff or rock—and “Michael" refers to the archangel. The name is a fitting description for an island whose sharp peaks and precipitous slopes resemble a Gothic cathedral. When the monks first arrived is a matter of conjecture; they left no written records. One tradition credits the monastery’s founding to St. Finnian (470-549). Other sources, as well as archaeological evidence, suggest a human presence no later than the 800s.

In a feat of engineering, the monks built a small terrace almost 600 feet above sea level for their beehive-shaped shelters and oratories made of stone. Reaching the monastery requires climbing hundreds of rough-hewn steps, which can call to mind a stairway to heaven.

The founders’ goal was isolation. In Christian devotion, they renounced the comforts of civilization and embraced the rigors of asceticism. For food, they fished, hunted birds and cultivated gardens. With few distractions, they would have had plenty of time to pray and fast.

Today we might say they wanted to “get off the grid." That’s increasingly hard. On our voyage from the village of Portmagee, our ship’s captain pointed to the spot where the first trans-Atlantic telegraph cable came ashore in 1858, a reminder that technology ties us together. At the monastery, my cellphone showed a couple of bars. The grid is everywhere and always growing.

Many who trek here are secular tourists seeking to enjoy the island’s raw beauty, avian life and sense of adventure. Others come because scenes from “Star Wars" movies released in 2015 and 2017 were filmed here. In one, Luke Skywalker utters a line the monks would have appreciated. He calls his location “the most unfindable place in the galaxy."

Just as the Resistance found Skywalker, the Vikings found Skellig Michael: They raided the monastery more than once. Even without these attacks, life on the island would have been a constant battle to survive in a harsh environment. What eventually caused the monks to leave is a mystery, though it may be connected to climate change. They departed by the 1400s, a time of regional cooling in the North Atlantic known as the “Little Ice Age."

With the monks gone, the monastery became a place of pilgrimage, a sacred destination for Christian travelers in search of penance. Even nonbelievers have revered it. In an essay for “The Book of the Skelligs," the poet Paddy Bushe quotes the playwright George Bernard Shaw, a religious skeptic who went to Skellig Michael in 1910: “The thing does not belong to any world that you and I have lived and worked in: it is part of our dream world."

Getting to the island is easier nowadays than it was for the monks, who relied on curraghs with wooden frames and leather hulls rather than boats with motors and life jackets. Yet it still poses challenges. Fewer than 200 tourists on any given day can disembark on the island. They must buy tickets months in advance and hope for good weather. This is no guarantee of a pleasure cruise: On our hourlong return to Portmagee, violent waves splashed across the deck. The captain had given us slickers and warned us about what was to come, and still we were drenched.

The most hazardous part of the trip, however, was moving from the boat to the island, in a cove where the waters were only a little less rough than on the open sea. We learned that what it takes to make landfall on Skellig Michael is the same today as it was centuries ago: a leap of faith.

Mr. Miller is director of the Dow Journalism Program at Hillsdale College.