Skellig by Denis McClean at Inkitt

Summary

Like most in ancient Ireland, a Christian name was selected for Skellig and they called it Michael but it already wore a name, Tearmann or Refuge. Skellig is derived from the old Gaelic word Scelec, which is a splinter of rock. About a thousand years after Christianity, a ‘new’ church building there was dedicated to the Archangel Michael, to complete its current label. But Scelec was a special place long before the modern era, and it went by the name of Tearmann, or refuge. Further, it has always been a very ‘Thin Place’. Celebrated Irish Poet and Playwright, George Bernard Shaw, offered his own suggestion of what a ‘Thin Place’ might be, when he declared that Skellig does not belong to any world that you and I have lived and worked in. It is part of our dream world. “Thin Places’ are uncommon, but they do exist on every continent. However, Skellig Michael, or Scelec Tearmann, to give it its first name, is the thinnest place in all Ireland. That’s because it also serves as a refuge for the pure of heart who find themselves in desperate circumstances. When he considered himself quite literally god forsaken, a Jesuit Priest, the Reverend Father Ignatius Moloney reacted by abandoning god in return

Genre: Fantasy/Adventure

Author: Denis McClean

Status: Excerpt

Chapters: 13

Rating: n/a

Age Rating: 16+

NOTES

This is the fourth and maybe the last of my ‘Thin Places’ series of novellas for now, even though technically, this one is too big to be a novella. Some stories steadfastly refuse to be cropped and that has to be good news for readers. I made sincere efforts to log all sources of hard fact, superstition and inspiration that went into creating the journey you are about to undertake but there were many. So I apologise profusely for any omissions.

You might wonder why, if the book was not intended to be factual, that any actual research was necessary. The thing is, when so much of the entire setting is either fact or as close as makes no difference, and with so many of the characters taken from history, very little remains to be manufactured. This makes it easier to blur the lines between what was, what is and what can’t be to make the most of your time-out.