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.
