For more than 500 years, visitors shared the same seaborne view of jagged cliffs jutting from the sea like a crown of thorns.

We saw kittiwake chicks, like grey pompoms scattered between the jagged cliffs, and seals swimming below.

Each spring, hundreds of thousands of birds descended on the forbidding islands, blanketing their jagged cliffs with eggs of all colors and sizes.

It would also navigate around unexpected hazards like jagged cliffs.

There were turrets, spires, old merchants' houses painted yellow and orange in neat rows, medieval fortifications along jagged cliffs on the other side of a gorge - all quite beautiful.