Skellig Michael's monks eventually abandoned a site they had occupied for hundreds of years, and centuries later a film franchise brought more visitors in a few seasons than the island had likely seen in its entire monastic history.
Why the monks left
The monastic community occupying Skellig Michael's beehive-shaped stone huts is generally understood to have relocated to the mainland sometime around the twelfth or thirteenth century, with proposed explanations including a shift toward more organised Augustinian monastic structures on the mainland and the difficulty of sustaining the remote settlement through a period of deteriorating climate conditions, though no single cause is confirmed with certainty.
A different kind of pilgrim arrives
The island's dramatic, isolated rock formations were used as a filming location for Star Wars: The Force Awakens and The Last Jedi, a development that sharply increased public interest and visitor numbers to a site whose fragile ancient stonework and difficult sea access had previously limited it to a comparatively small, dedicated audience of historians and hikers, prompting new conservation and access management measures to handle the change.
As this entry's companion article covers
The physical layout of the monastery, its beehive huts and its centuries of remote monastic life on an Atlantic rock, are addressed directly in this entry's companion article rather than repeated here.