The first chapel here was wooden, put up in the 16th century right at the island's harbour, where a congregation of fishermen would naturally want it. It is now a kilometre and a half inland from that harbour, and nobody carried it anywhere. Osmussaar is rising. Freed of the weight of the last ice sheet, the whole crust here rebounds by about three millimetres a year - a rate too slow to notice in a lifetime and impossible to ignore across five hundred of them. On an island this flat, a metre or so of uplift does not raise a hill; it pushes the shoreline sideways, hundreds of metres at a time. The sea simply walked away from the church door and kept going.

The stone replacement was consecrated on 3 September 1766, built from the Ordovician limestone the island is made of. Osmussaar is essentially a slab of that rock lifted out of the sea, its edges breaking into low cliffs, and the chapel is the island talking to itself - the same grey stone underfoot, in the wall, and on the graves. The Swedes called it Jesu Kapell; in Estonian it is Jeesuse kabel. Roughly 130 people lived here in the 1930s, of whom 119 were Estonian Swedes, and a chapel of twelve by seven metres was sized precisely for them. They fished, hunted seal, farmed a little in the thin soil, and paid their taxes to an estate on the mainland near Haapsalu.

In 1852 the islanders mounted a figure of Martin Luther reading his Bible at the chapel gate. It had not been carved for a church. It was a ship's figurehead, taken from a British vessel wrecked off the island - and wrecks were part of how Osmussaar lived. The island sits in the mouth of the Gulf of Finland, directly in the path of everything sailing toward Tallinn and St Petersburg, and what the sea broke on its shoals, the islanders salvaged. There is something entirely characteristic in the result: a carved man made to stare down open water from a bow, repurposed to stand at a graveyard gate and look, presumably, at the same horizon. In the summer of 1905 the Swedish writer Albert Engstrom came out here with the painters Anders Zorn and Akseli Gallen-Kallela and wrote the place up for a Stockholm magazine. It was already, then, the kind of island people travelled to in order to see something that felt older than they were.

That summer the Soviet Union, operating under the bases agreement it had pressed on Estonia the previous autumn, ordered every resident of Osmussaar off the island so it could be fortified. They were taken to Vormsi, another Estonian Swedish island to the south, and the sea walls of their own home became a coastal artillery position with heavy batteries and a fire-control tower. Families whose names are documented on this rock since the 13th century packed what they could carry and went. Most never lived here again; within a few years the wider Estonian Swedish population had scattered to Sweden, and the Osmussaar community effectively ended as a place-based thing and continued only as a memory held by people living somewhere else. The chapel itself was wrecked in the fighting that followed. What survived is the facade and the tower.

The former inhabitants and their descendants did come back, though not to stay. In 1994, three years after Estonia regained independence and a year after the last Soviet troops left the island, they built and consecrated a new belfry beside the ruin - a bell for a church that no longer has walls to hang it in. The remnants of the chapel were conserved in 2011, and in 2014 the chapel and cemetery together were listed as a national heritage site. Roughly five people live on Osmussaar year-round now, and up to three thousand visitors come out in a summer. Most of them walk to the chapel. The plate on the wall is metal these days; the wooden original did not last. Seven names, one date, and a great deal of sky.