In the Land of Giants

by Adams, Max;

  We have been told an attractive story about the monasteries at Carrowmore and Clonca, which face each other across the River Culdaff and which are said to have been linked in some way—one the daughter house of the other, perhaps; there are rumours of a tunnel. The modern road crosses the river over a small stone bridge; to the north is an expanse of peat which once required a causeway to cross it. The late Mabel Colhoun, a distinguished local archaeologist, wrote that she had seen a section of the causeway—made, perhaps, from hazel hurdles staked into the peat. According to the story, at the time when the two monasteries flourished, perhaps during the seventh or eighth century, monks used to process between the two. Since they were linked by a narrow causeway, the procession must have looked like a thin snake, as the monks crossed the bog in single file. The priest at the head of the column, setting out from Carrowmore, was said to have realised, as he reached the other side of the river, that he had forgotten his prayer book. So he called back along the line for one of the brothers to fetch it. By the time he stepped off the causeway and reached firm ground at Clonca, the prayer book had been passed back up along the line and handed to him. That such a tale has survived a thousand years in these parts does not surprise. Why such a simple, not very miraculous tale is still told is another matter. I think its importance lies in a missing preamble, which I suppose to have gone something like this: There were at one time so many monks at Carrowmore, that it was said that when the priest [ perhaps St Comgall, the traditional founder] was walking from Carrowmore to Clonca to celebrate Easter…, etc. For the academic archaeologist, moulding such stories into the tentative narrative structures built on excavation and survey is as challenging as it is exciting.

  Inishowen was the core territory of the kin group called Cenél nÉogain (pronounced as ‘Kenneln Owen’); Éogain was a descendant of Niall of the Nine Hostages, the legendary fifth-century king who gave his name to the the Uí Néill family that dominated Early Medieval Ireland from the sixth to the tenth century. King Oswiu of Northumbria (r. 642–70), brother of the Oswald who raised his cross at Heavenfield, sired a child with a princess of Inishowen called Fina; that child was Flann Fina, or Aldfrith, scholar and later king of Northumbria (r. 685–704). The Inishowen peninsula looks both towards the sea and inland to Derry (supposedly a foundation of Colmcille) and early kingship sites at Grianán of Aileach and Elaghmore. Since the Cenél nÉogain became a dominant power in the north of Ireland in the Early Medieval period, the landscape of the peninsula may hold the keys to understanding how this early kingdom first established itself and then used the power structures and codes of kin, patronage and church to expand its influence.

  The north part of Inishowen is dominated by the Magh Tóchuir (pronounced more softly than its spelling suggests to an English ear), a fertile plain which drains north-west into Trawbreaga Bay and the gaping mouth of Lough Swilly beyond. Around the edges of this plain are dotted prehistoric standing stones, early Christian centres and the ringforts and hilltop enclosures of a secular elite whose origins lie obscurely in the prehistoric past.72 Just as on Llŷn, an understanding of the place and role of early churches and monasteries in their landscape sheds light on secular power structures, on the economy and culture of a period when the kingdoms of the Dark Ages emerge from the mists of prehistory. Add to that a traditional rivalry between Columban and Patrician churches for bragging rights over these parts and you have a heady mix of academic speculation and religious propriety which historically has seemed anything but trivial. Into this cauldron the English archaeologist treads with extreme caution in the knowledge that, apart from the superb field surveys carried out by Mabel Colhoun and Brian Lacey (the latter a kind supporter of our project), not a huge amount of practical archaeology has been conducted up here. With all these marvellous field monuments, and the chance to make a contribution to a key period in Ireland’s past, we are like children in a sweet shop. But we are painfully aware that we might be perceived more as bulls in a china emporium.

  In Ireland the social and professional are impossible to separate. We had a busy schedule and not much time to carry out our work; but during that first morning on site there was a more or less continuous, and welcome, stream of visitors: Sean Beattie, highly respected historian, friend and editor of the Donegal Annual ; John Hegarty, an archaeologist who dug with us in 2013; Dessie McCallion, an indefatigable rooter-around in Inishowen’s past, always ready to show you some odd treasure he has turned up; and then another two group members arrived: Cowan and Catherine Duff are entirely responsible for the genesis of the whole project. Catherine is a native of the west side of Lough Swilly; and Cowan, a retired industrial metallurgist and old BSG hand, persuaded us several years ago that we would not be able to resist this landscape. He was right.

  Meanwhile, I wanted to get the laser theodolite set up. I mastered these things many years ago when I ran the field unit at Durham University; but I was rusty, and could perhaps have done with shutting myself away for a morning with the manual. Until I established a solid base station we could not start surveying, and I hate to see people standing around waiting for me to tell them what to do. Not that they were unhappy: Cooley Graveyard is a lovely spot: green green hills, low stone walls, few trees, coloured houses dotted about, very like the Isle of Man; those panoramic views across the Lough and down onto the huddled townscape of Moville; the shadow of Rathlin Island far, far to the north-east on the very disc of the horizon; and an ancient graveyard to potter around. It’s a nice spot to be dead in.

  Our visitors kept us pleasantly busy all morning, giving generously of their considerable store of local knowledge and understanding. The geophysics team got on with their grid-laying. One or two more volunteers arrived to see if they could help and Colm began a field class teaching Sabrina and local supporters Mary and Elizabeth how to draw to a proper archaeological standard the dozen or so cross-marked stones that had been identified by Martin and others over the years. The plan was for me to photograph them all later in the week. Almost immediately this concentration of effort on a group of previously unrecorded stone memorials yielded results; or at least significant questions. Some of them seemed to have been used as headstones; others to mark the foot of a grave in this crowded burial space. Some faced west, others east; some were evidently on their sides. Our conclusion was that all of the stones inscribed with crosses had been reused, that they had originally been in other positions. The more or less organised rows of graves did not, then, reflect the first phase of the cemetery. So how old were they? And how did such a modest community—Moville’s growth into a small town is a nineteenth-century development, no earlier—produce such a large population to fill this cemetery to bursting?

  By the end of the first day’s play I had the theodolite working and had established my base points. The geophysics team had laid out their grids. We shared a convivial supper and as evening closed in on the town Sarah, Deb, Joy and I strolled down the road for a ritual and absolutely essential first pint of what Ireland is famous for.

  Fieldwork is subject to fates out of our control. Much of the second day on site was a washout; we spent a couple of damp hours huddled behind sheltering walls or under trees; we retreated to the hostel, tried again and got a couple of hours’ work done in the afternoon. Another friend of ours, Michael Hegarty, who besides living close to the site at Cooley and fixing it for us to get access to the fields, is also a Lough Foyle pilot and a highly entertaining companion, came up to us on his quad bike. He swore richly at us in at least two languages for our stupidity in staying out in the rain and persuaded some of us to retreat to his house to get warm and make tea. The day’s work more or less ruined, we consoled ourselves with the thought of an evening outing to McGrory’s where the food is divine—seafood chowder, bacon and cabbage with mash—and where, every Friday, musicians congregate to play traditional music. Róisin, Neil McGrory’s wife, plays fiddle in the band and occasionally one or other of our number is co-opted. Neil and his brother
John have their own band; and musicians come from across the peninsula and beyond to join in. I was delighted to introduce Sarah to the place, having told her many tales about it. We also had in the party an American student, come to work with Cressida and Chris on their permaculture plot at the back of the hostel. She had never experienced Guinness before.

  As the bar filled for the evening, musicians drifted in. Neil was the perfect unobtrusive front-of-house host, always attentive, never overly so; his sister Ann always in the background oiling wheels and making sure the place runs as though with no effort. There was a hum of noise: clinking glass, laughter, a fragment of song, friends met and stools scraped on the stone floor to squeeze another in. The bar is a great place for people-watching.

  A grey-haired, slightly stooping man with bushy dark eyebrows entered the bar carrying a bodhrán case in his hand. His face looked somehow familiar. I got up and worked my way through the crowd to where Neil was standing at the bar, and asked him if it was Seamus O’Kane. Sure it is, he said. What, I said, the Seamus O’Kane? Yes, he said: you want to meet him? Seamus is not just one of the great bodhrán players but a renowned maker of these Irish frame drums. He is steeped in the tradition of the instrument and its music but is also a pioneer of modern construction methods, dragging the frame drum from its fringe status as the refuge of toneless skin thumpers towards being a tolerated and even respected component of the Irish folk ensemble. He has achieved this by using a much lighter frame, skin and stick than was common in the past; by designing a cunning tuning system to keep the skin at the right tension. The result is that in his hands the instrument sounds like a rather subtle bass guitar, full of tone and resonance, responsive and kinetic. Watching videos of him working, the amateur wonders how the hell he produces such a melodic and gentle beat. We chatted for a while about wood and trees, drums and music; he knew of my friend Stefan Sobell, the luthier, who has his own fascinating views on acoustics and musicality. I thought I might never get another chance, so I asked him if he would make me a drum. Sure he would: could I wait a month or two?

  The buzz in the bar grew louder. In the background the musicians began playing, softly at first. Unconsciously, imperceptibly the buzz dropped and the punters began to listen with more than half an ear. There was Róisin on the fiddle with another, younger fiddler, an accordion player and a flautist; a guitarist strummed chords; Seamus caressed his drum, but concentrate as I might I couldn’t see how he managed to forge his beautiful rhythm with such little apparent effort. Our chat died as a singer began a lament; the noise in the bar melted away and his voice rang out true and clear. The room filled to bursting. I went to the bar for a fresh round and Róisin nodded at me to ask if I had an instrument with me. I never leave home without a harmonica or two, so I sat in on a number, trading some little improvisation with the accordion player; the others joined in, in that unselfconscious way that good musicians can: first listening, then gauging the tune, then coming in for a chorus. Róisin had disappeared, so I stayed in her chair while the band started something else with the flute leading—a jig. Seamus leaned over and handed me his drum, so I had the double pleasure not only of meeting him but also trying one of his marvellous instruments before I acquired one. It was no kind of disappointment. Even so, it was only later on, when I was sitting at the back again and listening with concentration, that I began to see how his technique had become so popular with other musicians—the bass-style rhythm was neither loud nor penetrating but it underscored the melody and guitar chords, the bass notes perfectly clear and syncopating. We drifted away after one in the morning with the music still in full swing and wishing we could have stayed longer.

  Saturday: a strong desire to linger in bed, but with the sun shining there was not a moment to lose. We were joined by John McNulty, who had flown into Belfast that morning; by Deb’s husband, Dick, an experienced sailor who has given us useful insights into navigation in these waters; and by another friend from last year’s excavation, Mervyn Watson. Halfway through the day the newcomer, Sabrina, announced that she had found a new, previously unobserved cross, obscured by grass and lying half on its side but immediately recognisable, as Colm and I walked across to see it, as another skeuomorphic wooden stake inscribed in stone. This was more than coincidence; it hinted at a local tradition of wood and stone cross-carving, and the striking similarity between the two representations very likely meant that they were contemporary, if not the product of the same sculptor.

  Plotting the outlines of the cemetery, skull house and ruined walls with the laser theodolite, Sarah (co-opted more or less willingly as an assistant) and I began to see some order in the chaos. The entrance and slit in the skull house were perfectly aligned with the high cross outside the gate, which suggested that it (the cross) stands where it was first erected. We also spotted—a new observation—that two of the stones in the wall of the skull house were of dressed stone: they must have come from another building, though where and what that building was we cannot yet say. Patterns watched, patterns emerging.

  We needed to understand the relationship between this apparently early shrine and the row-graves, the ruined walls and cross fragments; and while Jack’s team of geophysicists started to produce meaningful results outside the cemetery, Colm and I sat down on a tomb in the afternoon and laid out in a notebook the fundamentals of what we could and couldn’t say about the pure archaeology of the site. It was a thought-experiment conducted in the language of stratigraphy. The study of determining relative chronology by showing what event must come before or after another by virtue of superposition is the primary tool of the archaeologist. An object, building or layer which lies above another must have been placed, lost or deposited there later than whatever lies beneath. A disruption to the stratified sequence—a ditch cut across a boundary, a road running through the middle of a settlement—must also post-date it.

  After half an hour of brainstorming we identified more than a dozen phases of activity: an original cemetery in which a small number of graves were marked by carved wooden crosses in various styles, over perhaps a few generations, and very likely focused on a single special grave of the nameless founder, buried in a small wooden shrine (examples have been excavated beneath several stone churches); a phase of transition from wooden buildings and memorials to more permanent, orthodox stone replacements (petrification); then the expansion and filling in of the cemetery by row upon row of—who? Monks? Too many of them, surely. There might be a thousand graves here, and those just the visible ones.

  We had seen that the row-graves ran right up to the ruined walls on both sides, disrespecting (and so later than) any floors or interiors of whatever buildings had stood there. So the row-grave system as we saw it was later than the buildings, and by virtue of the fact that the rows bent slightly round it, they were also later than the skull house. At some point the cemetery wall had been constructed on its present alignment. Finally, early modern memorials showed that there had been a late, post-medieval phase of burial. But we could not absolutely date any of these phases except the last. The closer we looked, the more difficult it was to say what was going on where and when.

  Sunday. Deb, Joy and I started to plot the positions of all the graves and their accompanying stones: it was the only way to determine if there were hidden patterns in the scheme of burials that might help tease out the cemetery’s phases. We could see that many graves, if not all, had been covered either with a single slab or with several capping stones—these are called lintel graves. If we were able and allowed to remove the turf from the site we would gain a huge amount more detail and, no doubt, find more cross-inscribed stones. It was a tempting idea, but it would leave the site open to the depredations of erosion, vandalism and over-curious tourism, so for the moment we took it off the agenda. In the meantime, it was back to the business of looking for and recognising patterns. But it was a daunting task to map a thousand graves when, half the time, it was not clear where one started and another finished, half-buri
ed as they were under thick turf. We could not complete the task in a week; but we could measure and plot enough of the graves to show that the game was worth the candle. And now, sure enough, Jack’s survey began to show significant results: confirmation that there had been two enclosure ditches, or shughs, concentric like those at Carrowmore and Clonca; and a rectangular structure which might have been a timber building—a church or hall. It was now clear that the cemetery was located right at the centre of a double-ringed enclosure; and that the high cross stood inside that enclosure. And, emerging from the pattern of grey shades that reflect buried magnetic variations, we thought we could see circular structures, the right size for round houses… or for monks’ cells.

  On a clear late-summer’s day like this the cemetery gave views as far as Rathlin Island, a key landmark and stopping-off point between Derry and the Western Isles of Scotland. We had passed it at night, from the other side, in Eda Frandsen; now we could see how intimately it was connected with points further west and with the monastic and kingly hinterland of Ireland. In June 1963, had we been standing on this spot, we might have watched the passage of a traditional lath and tarred-canvas curragh up the lough from Derry, carrying thirteen cloaked men in two watches pulling at six oars, with a square sail set amidships bearing the image of a cross. This was the Joyful Pilgrimage, sailed by Wallace Clark and his motley crew of companions, celebrating the fifteen hundredth anniversary of Colmcille’s departure for Iona by re-enacting the saint’s voyage from Derry to the Inner Hebridean island. Clark was an extraordinary man: consummate sailor, expert on the history of linen, commanding skipper and reviver of the traditions of the curragh. His boat was designed by Richard McCullough and built by Jim Boyd at a workshop in Bunbeg on the west coast of Donegal. Such vessels, though they survive in modern form, were a rarity in the 1960s; not many men knew how to go about constructing a traditional craft from scratch. This old style of boat-building, echoing an even older use of hide-covered curraghs mentioned in the Life of St Brendan and tested brilliantly by Tim Severin in The Brendan Voyage, was longer and narrower than the traditional fishing boats of the West coast. Designed for a large crew, with a high seagoing prow and a square transom, it must take on all weathers during an open sea voyage that might take a week, or two weeks. Such is the enduring potency of the name of Colmcille that Clark’s expedition was part-funded by the then Bishop of Down and Dromore, as well as by many gifts of unasked-for help. For the safety of these twentieth-century avatars of Colmcille’s original crew, and because many thought them mad, a naval fisheries protection vessel and a diesel-engined tender were on hand to fish them out of the sea at any time.