In the Land of Giants

by Adams, Max;

  Canon John Barry, rector of Hillsborough, Co. Down, was the initiator of the project, crew member and chronicler of this latter-day peregrination in the book he called Joyful Pilgrimage. Remarkably, despite flaws in the design of the craft that became increasingly evident as the days went by, and despite having too few oars and too many passengers, the crew of the Iona curragh accomplished their journey in just eight days, via Port Ballintrae on the north coast, the south-west tip of Islay, the tidal island of Oronsay and the south coast of Mull. They were met on the strand below Iona Abbey by a large crowd, including the then Archbishop of Canterbury, Michael Ramsey.

  Their first night’s stop out from Derry had been on the shore at Castle Cary, less than a mile from Cooley cemetery. They had designed the boat, in the ancient way, both to be carried ashore and to be upturned to form their night’s shelter; they could stop where they wanted so long as they had a strand to pull her up on. They were met everywhere with kindness, generosity, huge amounts of hot food and a shared pleasure in their achievement and their homage to Colmcille. They proved that even relatively untrained crews could pilot a craft across these seas at good speed; that the Early Medieval curragh was indeed capable of open-sea travel.

  We were talking with some of our friends about this trip (I had some years ago met a member of the original crew by chance, in Greencastle museum, just up the coast from here, where there is a very similar craft). I think it was Sean or Martin who said, oral tradition has it that people came by sea from many parts to be buried at Cooley, partly because of its perceived holiness as a site (the Irish have long memories) and partly, perhaps, because of its special location close to the mouth of Lough Foyle and en route to the Western Isles where Iona lay. That might, at least, explain why the cemetery is so full. If only we knew who the founding saint was, could place them in time or in a genealogy of a known clan, it might tell us why this site had such resonance in the regional community.

  As the week went on, doubts were, at least, assuaged on one count. The original monastic enclosure at Cooley was a busy place, full of internal structure and complexity. As we had shown at Carrowmore, high-density magnetic anomalies showing up in the shugh of the outer vallum appeared to provide evidence of metalworking. South of the graveyard another apparently rectangular building began to show, and there were signs of structural activity to the east, outside the outer enclosure ditch. This was a serious establishment. We now began to think of the following: we supposed that the founding saint had been interred close to the centre of the monastery or that the monastery had developed around the existing cemetery. Either way, the skeuomorphs suggested that the first phase had involved a wooden church and wooden memorials (as had the well-documented establishment at Lindisfarne). That phase had been followed by the erection of a stone shrine to house the relics of the saint (our skull house), possibly on a small mound, and around this a long-lived cemetery developed, with some of the graves marked by stone crosses of various styles. A high cross visibly marked the site for pilgrims and visitors. Perhaps a full monastery then developed around the cemetery, including a church and workshops, cells for the monks and perhaps guest houses. Sometime, we do not know when, the monastery fell into disuse (we might tentatively blame the Viking raids of the ninth century—this is, after all, a horribly exposed spot), the legends of its saint lost to record. After that it was still used for burial, perhaps by people from far distant places, at least until the fourteenth century (a date suggested by a decorative carving of that period on one of the slab covers to a grave). This phase was perhaps ended by the Black Death. What we know from our work at Carrowmore is that, given sufficient funds and permission, we could answer many of our questions by excavation.

  On Sunday we carried on more or less uninterrupted: the rest of Moville had, it seemed, gone off to Croke Park in Dublin to watch County Donegal play in the semi-finals of the All-Ireland Gaelic football championship. It was a chance to take stock, for the unglamorous process of recording to take its course. Colm had undertaken not only to have all the known early crosses drawn—and we were finding a new one every day, it seemed—but also to write detailed notes on them. I doubt if there are any more crosses of this period to be found in mainland Britain, a landscape scoured by scholarly vicars, antiquarians and professional archaeologists for over two centuries. In Ireland it is still possible to make such discoveries, and there is a professional obligation to record and publish them which, for the archaeologist, goes hand in hand with the immense privilege of discovery. Our count was now nineteen crosses of various designs. Not only did we have our two wooden skeuomorphs, but a cross previously known had revealed, with a bit of cleaning, the incised shape of a square stone base—an even rarer example of the skeuomorphic translation of a free-standing carved cross into an incised ‘drawing’ of it.

  One of our autumn jobs, apart from report writing, is to get group members making inked versions of the drawings, to go alongside the photographs, so that we have an archive made available for other students of the Irish cross tradition. Because we now have so many new examples from a single place, we can start to look at typologies and to compare them with traditions in other parts of Ireland, as well as the Atlantic coasts of Scotland and Wales. Detailed recording of the graves also yielded important insights into how the graveyard had been managed. It looked as though graves towards the west end of the cemetery were more widely spaced than those close to the skull house; and in the south-east corner, where several of the row graves have early modern inscriptions, we were able to show by their subtly different alignment that they had been inserted after the wall was built: they did not date the mass of graves, just a discrete later phase. I relished this week of being in a single place, watching, looking, recording, steeping myself in a landscape.

  On Monday evening we gave a group presentation to the Moville community about our work. We had been allowed the run of Rosato’s bar in Moville, our local when we were at the hostel, so we were guaranteed an audience; as it happened we had about thirty. That sort of event makes us feel we are not just taking from, but able to give something to the town, and perhaps to galvanise them into taking more interest in the amazing past on their doorstep.

  On Tuesday, our last full day in Moville, we broke off in the early afternoon. I had promised to show Sarah a little more of the peninsula. So we got on the bike and headed west and north for Malin Head: first to the small town of Carndonagh, all brightly coloured houses and narrow, shop-crowded streets converging on a busy central square. A huge modern church sits on a hill so that the Almighty (or perhaps just the Pope) could look down on his congregation from a suitably lofty perch. The remains of a high cross depicting the crucifixion lie in the graveyard of an older, smaller church. Another, with classic interlace and the outline figures of holy men, sits beneath a thoughtlessly designed shelter that looks as if one ought to wait for a bus beneath it and which cuts out all the light. It is flanked by two smaller standing stones, like bollards: one showing the profile of a warrior with a sword on one face and a harpist and his instrument on another; on the other stone, a cat-like creature glares disconcertingly. These last two are decidedly Pictish in style, evidence perhaps that Colmcille’s travels among the Caledonians were reciprocated.

  From Carndonagh, sitting above the plain, we rode north and down into the Magh Tóchuir, the ‘Plain of the causeway’, the fertile fringe that gives onto lowland peat bogs and the tidal salt marshes of Trawbreaga Bay. We passed across the mouth of the bay on a long straight road raised above the marshes to Malin, a small, pretty village that calls itself a town and is set against peaty brown hills to the north.

  On the bike, familiar scents, like the tang of a peat fire and silage, mixed with the sights of bright crimson fuchsia hedges and long rows of turf cuttings stretching out into the peatlands. Low whitewashed houses, now and then with a traditional thatched roof, echoed an older Ireland. Parts of this landscape as, sadly, is the case across most of the west of Ireland, have b
een blighted in recent years by the profusion of Celtic Tiger breeze block and concrete mansions, large, brash modern houses set in a half acre of land, many of which can’t be and won’t ever be paid for now that the recession has bitten so deep into Ireland’s economy. Often these garishly decorated houses sit uncomfortably next to the earlier family home or farmstead that has been abandoned but never demolished. Often the new house lies unfinished because the cash has run out, and one hears tell that the government in Dublin will have to buy and demolish them; it’s tempting for the tourist or archaeologist to bemoan the loss of vernacular architecture and the apparent littering of this lovely land by what seem ugly incongruences. But the people who live in the new houses like them, if they are not crushed by debt; their standard of living has risen dramatically in the last thirty years and there’s no going back. Ireland moves on; but still, this part of Donegal seems a long way from the heart of government. Sitting out on a limb to the north of Northern Ireland, Inishowen seems more cut off than it should. To the west, on the other side of Lough Swilly, lies the ragged and beautiful coastline of the peninsula known as Fánaid, part of the Gaeltacht, or Irish-speaking area of the county. The county town, Letterkenny, is seen up here much less as a central place than nearby Derry now that the border is effectively down and geographic rationalism has returned.73 One reason, we have been told, why our work here has been so well received, is that we are seen to be more interested in this part of Ireland than the authorities in Dublin; not many central government funds seem to come this way. Donegal does not have a single mile of public railway (the last of its narrow gauge lines closed in the 1960s) and the roads, so far as tourism goes, are poor.

  The entrance to Trawbreaga Bay is narrow; on its south side sits Doagh Island, now connected to the main peninsula by a grassy spit but once only reachable by causeway. It is rich in memorial and rock art and may, in very ancient times, have been a preserve of the dead and the ancestors. I took the road slowly: you never know what piece of lumbering agricultural machinery will come round the next corner. The winding, twisty lanes that carry the intrepid out to Malin Head, the most northerly tip of Ireland, require caution. Despite the roads, there was a little huddle of parked cars and even a mobile coffee and refreshment van had set up shop in the grey car park beneath a grey Napoleonic-period watchtower on a grey afternoon. Concrete, car park and barbed wire together gave the place a tawdry feel; but you would only have to walk half a mile in any direction, or ponder on the weighted ropes that hold the old thatched roofs down on nearby cottages, to feel yourself in a place as wild and remote as Cape Horn. The wind does not let up. The pounding of salty white waves against the rocks, the dark, almost blue-black sea, the odd island set off in the distance can’t fail to impress itself on any member of an island race. Just on the edge of the earth’s disc, some six miles north-east of the point, lies the now uninhabited island of Inishtrahull, Ireland’s most northerly land. It seems to have been the site of an early Christian cell, an extreme example of the hermit’s preference for solitude and hardship.

  Below the prominence where the old tower stands huddled close to a meteorological station and a navigation transmitter, there is a grassy plateau above the cliffs, an ancient raised beach. For years beyond recall visitors have taken pebbles and stones from the scree slopes around and arranged them into names that can be read from above. They reminded me forcibly of the Latin memorials of Wales, albeit with less exotic names: THERESA; JANA; DES; CAITLIN; the one that says EIRE is big enough to be seen even on satellite images.

  Along the jutting line of the coast squat farmhouses sheltered in low folds of the land; in small inlets fishing boats had been pulled up onto the shore. Dark patches of undrained bog and dull saucers of light reflecting from small tarns pockmarked the green-brown mantle of autumn heather. Sheep and hardy cattle grazed in green fields that ran right down to the shore. One of the most remarkable features of this landscape is the absence of the barn—on the mainland they are a ubiquitous and unnoticed feature of British rural life. Here, hard winters are so rare—I mean hard as in months of lying snow; the winds can be searingly harsh and unremitting—that they graze their livestock the year round.

  We took another road back towards the east coast, along the north edge of the Magh Tóchuir, and crossed the narrow River Culdaff (where McGrory’s Bar was open, but much quieter than it had been on Friday night) that gives out onto the north-east coast of Inishowen. I had been meaning for a couple of years to locate Kinnagoe Bay, said to have a very fine beach and located on the east coast of the peninsula. After some tutting and helmet-​scratching when we couldn’t make sense of map and road sign, we passed through a tiny hamlet—the local term is clachan—perched on top of a hill overlooking the sea—a much flatter sea than at Malin Head—and negotiated a couple of vertiginous hairpins before coming down onto a sable-brown strand, absolutely deserted, where we parked the bike. The tide was halfway through its ebb. The beach, fringed by tall, scrubby machair grass and the odd blackthorn shrub, was set against cliffs draped in rampant, creeping vegetation. The sea was smoothly ironed, with only the long, menacing outline of a freight ship heading into the Foyle interrupting a perfectly flat horizon. I sat on a convenient, polished boulder in the middle of the beach. Sarah stripped off and swam. Apart from the almost silent lapping of wavelets on the shore, nothing stirred. It was a desert place suitable for a hermit to end his peregrination, build himself a modest cell, and set to contemplating his lord and master. It was either a metaphor for the gentle wind-down to a mad year, I decided, or the start of a horror film. Fortunately, no shark fin or siren from the deep appeared to spoil the moment and neither of us was mysteriously transported to some parallel reality. Sarah struggling, all wet, back into her bike gear provided the bathos to counterbalance the sublimity; and we rode back to Moville happily contemplative, to join in with a last-night meal in town.

  We said our goodbyes that night, packed all the kit away into the van, looked at Jack’s latest images from the highly gratifying survey of what we were now happy to call the monastery at Cooley. Sarah and I set off early in the morning. I wanted, before we sailed away from Ireland, to visit one of the great monasteries of the North. In the perfect, ethereal light of sunrise across the lough, we rode south along the west bank of the Foyle and crossed the border at Muff just before Derry, city of culture, religion and conflict now much revived and reinvented and a fascinating place to visit. It was from here that Wallace Clark’s curragh departed in those seemingly more simple days before the civil-rights movement of the late 1960s inadvertently triggered thirty and more years of sectarian violence: an entire generation lived in fear. From Derry we rode east on the A6, through Dungiven, home to both the former Republican hunger striker Kevin Lynch, who died in the Maze Prison on 1 August 1981 after seventy-one days without food and whose face adorns placards mounted on telegraph poles along the main street, and to Seamus O’Kane, bodhrán-maker.

  At the eastern edge of the Sperrin Mountains a spectacular escarpment gave onto the lowlands of Antrim and Lough Neagh, all sparkling in the sun. As a relative newcomer to these parts I am still struck by the overt affiliations of communities across Ulster: the odd tricolour here and there or a mural to a fallen warrior; kerbstones painted red, white and blue and defiant Union flags strung from lamp posts; the names of villages dimly remembered from atrocities reported in the news bulletins of my youth. Belfast, negotiated with the help of Sarah tapping me on the shoulder to point out the correct turn off a roundabout (and occasionally to a house where a relative lives, or lived), smelled of heavy industry, the air thick with smog. Giant yellow Harland and Wolff cranes, redolent of empire, hubris and the Titanic, passed to our left at the head of Belfast Lough. The Newtownards road heading east out of the city into a pastoral, gently folded countryside that might never have seen a gun or a bomb offered a sectarian fanfare of Unionist sympathy and passive-aggressive self-conscious identity. For those of my generation who grew up in the 197
0s and 1980s, it speaks of fist-thumping rhetoric, sordid violence, establishment stupidity; or bravery and collusion, betrayal and stoicism. If, as a distant witness, I find it hard to credit how brutalised and psychopathic it all became, as a historian I can see the Dark Age parallels all too clearly. Bede, the great scholar and historian, was a monk who believed that all Britons were schismatic, and damned. St Wilfrid and Gildas were as uncompromising in their beliefs as any of the rabid sectarians of Ulster’s twentieth-century Troubles. And one man’s freedom fighter, the warrior hero of myth and legend, song and memorial, is another’s terrorist, praised in poetry or cursed and damned, imprisoned or martyred.

  We reached the seventh-century monastery of Nendrum, which sits on a small emerald island at the head of Strangford Lough, by a causeway that must be of equal antiquity, after a very slow, winding, beautiful approach that ate into precious time but led us gently by the hand away from the political strife of the twentieth century. It reminded us both, immediately, of St Blane’s church at Kingarth on the southern tip of Bute; the same concentric, rising series of enclosures that give it a shape like a three-tiered wedding cake: sanctus, sanctior, sanctissimus. At the centre, on the summit of the hill, were a small church, a cemetery and tower, the latter a typical feature of Irish monasteries but probably not contemporary with the original foundation. On both sides the view was of narrow inlets and misty sun-graced islets with boats moored off them and flocks of geese gathering for their winter’s passage south: all Swallows and Amazons. We were the only visitors and had the place to ourselves apart from a man with a strimmer: heritage sites here in Ulster are trimmed by the hand of the Ministry of Tidy Monuments—just as they are in England, where green lawns and well-pointed ruins give visitors the mistaken idea that this was what the past was really like. The small museum, discreetly tucked behind trees, was excellent. Otherwise, a ruin is much like any other ruin except that Nendrum’s setting allows you to indulge the mind’s eye in giving a flavour of its meaning in the landscape: its isolation intentionally half-complete, with one foot in a very real world of economy and authority, the other in a dreamworld of contemplation and divine love.