Fifty years ago, one of the most daring expeditions in modern times left Ireland’s Dingle Peninsula. Tim Severin set out with a crew of three in a curragh – a skin-boat shaped like a banana – from Brandon Creek to emulate the voyage of St Brendan, which many believe took the saint over the Atlantic Ocean to Newfoundland. Described in a Latin text, the 9th century Navigatio Sancti Brendani Abbatis, Brendan (AD 484-577) and his skin boat made an odyssey every bit as extraordinary as Homer’s timeless tale. Brendan belonged to the second generation of Irish monks – building on what St Patrick before them had started – who, fortified by their beliefs, ventured far. His near-contemporary Columba made the island monastery of Iona in AD 563, and shortly afterwards Columbanus founded major religious houses at Luxeuil in Burgundy in AD 585-590, then, late in his life, at Bobbio in northern Italy in AD 614.
Brendan’s voyage, however, went west not east, and braved an ocean. His monastery on the Dingle Peninsula is no longer to be seen, but a ruined house of the same name survives close to the Romanesque church at Kilmalkedar overlooking Smerwick Bay. If Brendan did indeed live and pray here, close to the protected creek from which the equally audacious Tim Severin started his voyage in 1976, he may have been familiar with one of Early Christian Ireland’s treasures: Gallarus Oratory.
Gallarus is a small, stone, corbelled building of near perfect architectural lines. The little church ranks alongside the other great works of Brendan’s revolutionary epoch that proved to be a febrile connection between the learning and skillsets of antiquity and the Middle Ages. Such marvels from this age include the Ardagh Chalice, the Books of Kells and Durrow, and Ireland’s ornamental and figural high crosses. All of these set new standards for artistry and craftsmanship in the name of championing Ireland’s idiosyncratic and pioneering Church. In exhibiting perfectionism in stone construction principally without mortar, Gallarus is both a jewel and a vaunting testament to an architect’s mastery of an art that had its genesis in prehistory in these parts.
