Subscribe now for full access and no adverts
Firsts. I first went to Inis Cealtra – Holy Island in County Clare – with my first girlfriend, Leigh, in 1973. From County Antrim, a northerner, she had an esprit de vie that I always associate, like the constant drizzle, with Ireland. The Troubles in Northern Ireland were at their very worst, but we blithely set off to the South (as the British commonly called it then) in my 1962 green-and-cream Austin A40, then 11 years old. With the help of Peter Harbison’s marvellous Guide to National and Historic Monuments of Ireland, we rolled up at the great megalithic tomb of New Grange and were treated to a tour by no less a historical figure than its excavator and restorer, Professor Michael O’Kelly. As if this was the norm, we motored westwards and for some reason now lost to time we arrived at the village of Mountshannon in County Clare. Our objective was the monastery on Inis Cealtra. Leigh must have asked someone who simply swooned to her cadence and before long we were introduced to the vicar, Reverend Edgar Talbot, and his wife in his brick-built rectory overlooking Lough Derg.
Now, what follows is what I recalled from over half a century ago. In my memory, that night Liam De Paor, author of a canonical book on Early Christian Ireland and the excavator of Inis Cealtra, came to dinner and we talked archaeology. After two years of summer digging at Knidos in the eastern Aegean, I wanted to know if he had found imported Late Roman amphorae in his dig, like those present in Cornwall at Tintagel and at South Cadbury, Somerset, as well as in the royal fortress of Garranes near Cork. The next day, Leigh and I drove my A40 to a point opposite the little dock on Holy Island. There, a boatman fetched us as though we were royalty, and we were promptly escorted around the island. Whether De Paor had found the talismanic amphorae I simply did not recall.
More than 50 years on, I must admit that my memory has failed me: this dinner, I am afraid to record now, is fiction.
After my recent visit (described below), I dug out my dog-eared Collins diary from 1973, buried with dozens of notebooks. To my astonishment, the crabby, hastily written but detailed account for 19 July 1973 tells an altogether different sequence of events. What happened was that we stayed in Mountshannon youth hostel, and its director introduced us to the Reverend Talbot, who the next day kindly arranged the boat and only once on the island did we meet De Paor. How one’s mind can play tricks. As an archaeologist who works with texts to rewrite history, it is a telling reminder of how fickle memory can be.
Nevertheless, what remains with me to this day is the privilege we were granted. I was newly graduated; Leigh was still a student. Why were we so fortunate? Then again, truth be told, knowledge of spectral Aegean amphorae or not, it was surely Leigh’s gift of the gab that charmed the otherwise stiff Professor De Paor.
Return to Holy Island
Three years ago, I passed this way again, as I was travelling to my granddaughter’s baptism in County Clare. It was a mucky August afternoon with driving rain. Lough Derg was in ferment, and the boatman I called from a Mountshannon pub was laconic. ‘Not in this weather’, he negated in a dark bass tone.
But the lure of this place remained, and so a new opportunity arose when my son moved with his family to the shores of Ireland’s third-largest lake. Knowing my somewhat curious passion for this place, my son repeatedly telephoned the boatman and was no luckier than I had been three years previously. Then he had a brainwave. ‘You try,’ he said firmly. So I called and the guttural bass voice answered. I told him I had visited Professor De Paor on Holy Island 50 years before and was visiting my son, any chance…? In words I found difficult to comprehend, he agreed, and we were on for a 10.30am crossing.
My son and I drove around the lake: past the fortress associated with Brian Boru, the last great High King, who defeated the Vikings in 1014 at the Battle of Clontarf; past the charmless village of Scarriff with its high-pitched 10th-century stone church, birthplace of the novelist Edna O’Brien; and on to Mountshannon. In its marina, an old van was parked next to a wooden portable library, and beside it, quite unmistakable, stood our boatman, Gerard Madden. His forage cap covered most of his head. Only the bold features of his large face were visible. From the start, grumpy he might seem to have sounded, but I soon appreciated how genial he was. His is a labour of love that occupies his summer months. It turns out that he is my age, he studied archaeology at Cork University with Michael O’Kelly and has serious reservations about the late Liam De Paor’s excavations. The finds, he told us, are in the National Museum at Dublin, mostly unpublished. De Paor left his trenches uncovered, as though he fled the place. Now, Gerard rattled on, a touch unimpressed, a new age was beginning literally tomorrow. In the rectory where we were once hosted by the vicar, a visitor centre promoting the Inis Cealtra experience is about to open. Gerard then took out his book of recent photographs to show us how he participated in the funeral cortège in 2024 that brought the ravishing red-headed 93-year-old Edna O’Brien to her final resting place on Holy Island. Change takes many forms, he muttered elegiacally.
We donned life jackets that curled like lumpen scarfs around our shoulders, then jumped down into the simple dinghy. It was powered by a smoking outboard that caused the little boat to quiver and rumble. The lake was motionless, and sunbeams were lancing through the lowering clouds. But here the clouds are never still. Off we puttered, and I could not but feel a smidgen of nostalgia for being here again as we carved a passage out of the marina and into the lake. Cormorants flapped off a rock to my right and, well beyond, the high hills of County Clare were once more illuminated in the moments of effulgent sunshine. The breeze made the air glassy. The water churned up by our outboard motor was a muddy brown, the colour of freshwater trout. The island with its pencil that is a round tower beckoned ever closer. After 20 minutes, we arrived at the dock, opposite the place where 50 years ago we set out on my previous, dream-like visit.
The legacy of St Patrick
Why am I so interested in Irish monasteries? It is simple, really. Monasticism and the signal importance of Christianity have been played down in the story of becoming Europe. Great thinking minds from Karl Marx onwards have championed Europe as a secular story, with the Church as essentially an ephemeral actor. To say the least, it is a perverse version of a history that paradoxically has come down to us almost entirely thanks to monkish authors. Slavishly, archaeologists have in recent decades emphasised the role of farmers in this grand narrative at the expense of understanding the fundamental role of churchmen. Now, Ireland, as it happens, is blessed with many early monastic sites that have attracted decent archaeological attention. From Clonmacnoise in the Irish Midlands to Skellig Michael out on a rocky pinnacle in an archipelago off County Kerry, early Christianity has been studied here in more detail than in any other part of Latin Christendom. Inis Cealtra is just one of many later 1st millennium monasteries to have been well and truly scrutinised.
The narrative is compelling. Late Iron Age Ireland was an underdeveloped world in stark contrast to the extraordinary later Neolithic and Bronze Age communities responsible for New Grange and the lattice of fields, for example, found buried beneath the peat bogs of Connemara. Then, a generation or two after St Patrick’s 5th-century mission, archaeologically dated by imported Aegean amphorae and occasional North African ceramic plates (the first waves of pottery imports), book-wielding monks executed a cultural revolution in Ireland. By the mid-6th century, a small army of churchmen, often in competition with each other, had established the first iterations of many of the most-celebrated monasteries. Inis Cealtra is one of these. This second generation is archaeologically dated by the presence of plain Aquitanian tablewares – containers for enigmatic Merovingian treasures (the second wave of pottery imports) – as saintly churchmen with Iberian connections established a distinctively outgoing Christian culture. It was little short of a renaissance for Celtic culture. It also prompted a secular reprise worthy of deep prehistory, with hundreds of small, fortified farming households becoming the hallmark, along with their accompanying fields, of an extraordinary economic uptick. Along with their distinctive tonsures, Ireland’s churchmen who had travelled the byways of Gaul, Iberia, and Italy in Late Antique decline, returned to Ireland to introduce new-fangled technologies and, above all, to invest in books that by any standards are some of the finest artworks in the history of the planet.
The 6th- and 7th-century Irish monkish story was then slowly overshadowed. The pioneering Irish monks who had converted much of Scotland and northern England were gradually eclipsed by the rise of the competitive Anglo-Saxon church moving up from southern England in the late 7th century. Nevertheless, even in the face of the ferocious 9th-century Viking onslaught on these rich places, the Irish Church prospered, often reaching a discrete accommodation with the colonising Scandinavians in the 10th century. It was only with the arrival in Ireland of Angevin knights from later 12th-century England and Wales that the balance of power, then 600 years old, shifted away from the Church to more secular powers. It left many monasteries as monuments to an almost mythic era when stories of their audacious saints and their incomparably world-class artforms held sway.
Holy Island today
The first mention of the island monastery is in the year 654. The Annals of Inisfallen record the passing of Caimin of Inis Cealtra. Innis means an island, and Cealtra is a derivative of Celtair, Old Irish for church.
The recorded history of the island dates back further, to the early 6th century. St Mac Creiche appears to have spent time there, perhaps as a hermit. According to a much later source, the churchman’s cell comprised ‘four stones; namely a stone at his back, a stone on each of his sides and a stone at his face’. Today, this loosely appears to resemble the little building known as the Confessional (see below). The hermit’s presence attracted St Colum mac Cremthainn (c.490-548), whose feast day is 13 December. He was from County Laois, but settled here after some challenging peregrinations, with a band of followers. There is an account of his life in the Acta Sanctii Columbae De Tyre Da Glass. From this we learn that it was at the bidding of an angel that he settled on the island. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the same angel had bidden the hermit, Mac Creiche, to leave. According to the story, St Colum also found ‘a tree by the name Tilia, whose juice distilled a vessel and that juice had the flavour of honey and the headiness of wine’.
In 548, Colum visited his former teacher St Finian of Clontard in County Meath, who was dying. There, Colum contracted the same disease and promptly passed. This illness brought a yellow hue to the afflicted and was almost certainly the Justinianic plague that had started in Constantinople in 541 and raged through western Europe. Knowing he was a saint, the Uí Néill family in whose territory he had died refused to release Colum’s body. Secretly, however, the saint’s devoted followers came and disinterred him, taking his body back to Inis Cealtra.
A century later, the monastery was led by Colman Stellan, a priest to whom Pope John IV addressed a letter c.640 concerning the controversy over the date of Easter, which was to split the two Churches in the British Isles at a fateful and controversial gathering at Whitby in Yorkshire in 664. St Coelan, in the later 7th century, broke with the Irish Church rule and, like his English peers, pursued the Rule of St Benedict, first composed at the Italian monastery of Monte Cassino.
The Italian connection did not cease with this renegade. A century later, St Donatus, Bishop of Fiesole (790-861), was educated on the island, and made a pilgrimage to Rome. He was pausing at Fiesole, above Florence, when its bishop died, and he was persuaded to stay as the new prelate. By this time, Holy Island boasted a scriptorium. Only part of one book associated with the monastery has survived. This is an incomplete illuminated manuscript of six unbound and dilapidated folios of thick parchment, known as the ‘Psalter of St Caimin’. It contains the first 16 verses of the 118th Psalm. Its name, however, is misleading because the book dates to the late 11th or 12th centuries.
In 836, the first Vikings came this way. Led by Turgesius, they had overwintered in Limerick and then sailed up the Shannon into Lough Derg. Whether they attacked the monastery is not known. But almost exactly a century later, in 932, Tomrair son of Elgi plundered Inis Cealtra and sailed on to burn the great Shannon-side monastery at Clonmacnoise.
The Viking dominance of Ireland was to be ended by a son of these parts, Brian Boru, who was almost certainly educated on Holy Island. The bulky earthworks of a small fortress above the point where the Shannon meets the lough are impressively preserved beneath a stand of high trees. From here, at Killaloe, he was to become High King of Ireland from 1002. He met his end as an old man, defeating the Vikings at the Battle of Clontarf in April 1014, in a field north of Dublin. Such is his status, every café, pub, or centre around the lough bears his name as though he were some Hollywood star.
At the Synod of Ráthbreasail in 1111, Ireland was divided into two ecclesiastical provinces with dioceses. This was the beginning of the end of the celebrated age of monasteries. Thereafter Holy Island became a parish comprising the island and a part of the mainland.
The surviving monuments
The so-called ‘pilgrim’s path’ leads from the little stone dock towards the constellation of monuments gathered close to the round tower. The grass is long, thick, and inevitably soaking wet. Such is its thickness that the few sheep grazing here appear to be stuffed and rather oblivious as we walk past.
Most of the monuments on Holy Island are located close to its eastern shore, away from the prevailing winds that sweep off the Atlantic Ocean and pass over County Clare and on to County Tipperary. The high round tower draws the eye from Mountshannon village, as if it were an antenna of some kind or other. Contemporary with St Caimin’s church, and possibly erected by Brian Boru, it stands 24.4m high and has a circumference at its base of about 14.6m. Originally it is likely to have been about 30m tall. Tradition has it that the conical cap of the tower was never built. An old witch is supposed to have omitted the appropriate benediction, ‘God Bless the Work’, and the outraged mason threw his hammer at her and killed her. The doorway in the tower faces east and is 2.4m above the ground. Inside were five floors, while the small windows are restricted to one per storey. It is usually said that the towers were refuges from the Vikings, but many were almost certainly masonry symbols of status in which a bell was hung.
The high-pitched roof of St Caimin’s church stands proud, close to the tower. It is said that Brian Boru built it as the first attempt at a large church on the island. The present door was actually inserted by Liam De Paor when he was excavating here in the 1970s. It has an elaborate zigzag patterning with sculpted heads either side. The building was enlarged in the 11th century with the addition of St Colum’s church – in effect, a new chancel, which is thought to have occupied the footprint of the saint’s 6th-century cell. Today, the bare nave of St Caimin’s is lined with fragments of high crosses and tombstones. One of these almost certainly dates to the 9th century and graced the top of the surviving stump beside the adjacent round tower. This, the only figural sculpture surviving from Holy Island, had a wheel cross with five bosses, and may have been modelled on a timber cross. Some believe the bosses represent nails. Adam and Eve are depicted on the end of the right arm, and what looks like a man walking with a long staff can be made out on the left side.
In the walled graveyard to the south of the church lie a small forest of tombstones of all eras. One presently lacking a headstone, though graced by bunches of flowers, catches the eye. This is the resting place of Edna O’Brien, famous for The Country Girls – a trilogy that infuriated the Catholic Church and much of Ireland in the 1960s – and now regarded as one of the great storytellers of this isle. She was the epitome of Yeats’ ‘indomitable Irishry’. In the often-elegiac film of her life, Blue Road (2025), O’Brien – bereft of a home and car – cheerfully boasts that she has this burial spot and it is hers.
In the graveyard beyond the east end of St Caimin’s is the roofless Church of the Wounded Men. Dating to the later 12th or 13th centuries, this was to become a mausoleum for the O’Grady family in the 17th century. Across the churchyard wall from it stands the so-called Confessional. Some historians have claimed it was an early anchorite cell, such as the legendary St Mac Creiche might have occupied. De Paor’s excavations, however, showed that it was probably 18th century in date, but a timber precursor may have existed to its west.
South of the round tower are two churches within their own walled graveyards: St Brigid’s and St Mary’s. St Brigid’s is a small Romanesque church. An Ordnance Survey map from 1839 indicates that it was the baptism church. Its west doorway is beautifully sculpted with zigzigging patterns and lozenges. Excavations by De Paor showed that, by the 13th century, it was a lay burial place, including two women who had perished in childbirth. Next to it, St Mary’s is a 13th-century parish church, which is entered through a Gothic doorway. Pride of place is an altar that is actually the base of a 17th-century O’Brien/Butler tomb set against the south wall. Much weathered, the inscription on the face of the tomb tells of the noble Lady Brien, Sir Terlagh Brien, and his Lady Butler, the latter two dying in 1625 and 1626.
The Holy Well lies beside a little forest of reeds edging the lough due east of St Mary’s church. From here, beside the pellucid waters, the view to the far eastern heathered hills is magnificent. Known also as the Lady Well, there are recesses for pilgrims to leave offerings. The poet Charlotte Elizabeth Johnson finished a poem about a monk praying for forgiveness before leaving the island:
And those who kneel beside, a prayer may say
But of its waters taste not, till they grasp their
Foeman’s hand again in friendship clasp!
Set back from the shore, on the highest part of Holy Island, now lost under a wildly unkempt mound of thorns, is apparently a D-shaped enclosure that may pre-date the monastery. De Paor excavated here and discovered a children’s cemetery, the infants each being accompanied by a handful of quartz pebbles. Beside the graveyard stood the little church of St Michael, probably of later medieval date. In 1838, a surveyor with the Ordnance Survey stated that pilgrims walked seven times around this church and then around the flat sandstone lying in front of it, before kissing the stone. I longed to do the same, imagining it would promise a return visit one day. The stone, though, is now lost below a wild thicket, from which my son picked blackberries while I took photographs.
Returning to the Rectory
After an hour on this island, lost in spiritual timelessness, it was easy to forget the Irish weather. Clouds now drifted over us like brooding ghosts. We spied Gerard returning, his boat at first little more than a speck on the lake’s empty waters, once again agitating cormorants. Leaving the dreamlike solitude of this place was hard. But we got into the boat, which rocked gently as the west wind blew with the promise of rain. Heading back, there was constant spray as Gerard navigated the eddying brown waters. All the time, my eyes were drawn to the thin round tower, the spiritual pivot of this serene lakeland universe.
On docking, after saluting Gerard, promising to return one day, we set off to find the Rectory where the vicar, the Reverand Talbot, so kindly treated Leigh and me decades ago. It is but a stone’s throw from the marina. The brick-built building looked polished and unexpectedly and curiously proud. There is a very contemporary reason for this. It was about to become a new visitor centre for the Lough Derg experience, and due to open the next day. Inside people were busying around, expectant of a political celebrity to perform at the opening. I asked one of the nattering group if the centre was open; she politely said no. So I spilled the beans on how I had stayed here once and so forth. (Yep, unadulterated faction as it later turned out.) Cheerfully, she invited me to see the three new rooms downstairs with their pungent scent of newness. These are dedicated to large videos and colourful illustrated panels, about the origins of the lake, its natural environment, the history of Holy Island (accompanied by a model), and one properly devoted to Edna O’Brien.
In this fleeting visit, what strikes me is that the personalities that so impressed me decades before, the kindly Reverend Talbot and Liam De Paor, and, indeed, our loquacious boatman to the isle, are missing. For sure, future generations will be helpfully guided to grasp the wonders of this lough with Holy Island, but its people who have indelibly lived in my mind since my first girlfriend and I chanced to visit will be lost to time. Whatever the exactitude of our actual visit, how very lucky we were in that bygone age.
THANKS: My thanks to Gerard Madden, who is not just the boatman, but also the author of Holy Island. Jewel of the Lough (2025).
All images: courtesy of Richard Hodges
