Light the Way, Skellig Michael, Kerry

Two nights. I've spent two nights on Skellig Michael, and I'm well aware how rare that is. This was the second, a calm, clear night with no moon and barely a breath of wind. The kind of conditions you hope for and almost never get on a rock eight miles into the Atlantic.

I'd asked a friend to climb to the clifftop with his head torch and stand there, pointing the beam down towards the monastery below. A human beacon on a summit that has drawn people for over a thousand years. He held position while I worked through several long exposures from further along the upper ridge. Little Skellig sits in the middle distance, that unmistakable pyramidal shape visible even in darkness, and beyond it the lights of the Kerry mainland throw a warm glow across the horizon.

What I love here is scale. That tiny figure with his light, dwarfed by the rock, dwarfed again by the sky above. Monks lived on this island for six hundred years, and standing out there at night you understand something about that commitment in a way no daytime visit could give you.

Not a photograph I could plan to repeat. You take these nights when they come!

More about what it's like to photograph Skellig Michael and the monks who lived here in my complete guide to the island.