Peter Costello
The Rock of Cashel seen at twilight. With things getting back to normal these days, summer provides enough fine days for us all to make some visits to often overlooked places of faith, as well as a few famous ones. Over the next few weeks some of these will be described here, with their appropriate literary associations.
Croagh Patrick
I am writing this on the last Sunday of July, a day when large numbers of people in fine weather or poor, attempt to climb Croagh Patrick. Legend claims that the saint himself spent some 40 days on the summit in isolation: it would be difficult to do that these days. And climbing the Reek certainly needs stamina and sometimes courage.
The English writer T.H. White wrote an account of his experience climbing the Reek in the 1940s, a charming essay which ends with the author of The Once and Future King colloguing with the bishop of the day outside the tea station at the summit. He does not deny that the day was a strenuous one, but one filled with friendly feelings all round.
Lough Derg
The pilgrimage to Croagh Patrick comes down to us it seems from a very early date. So too does the pilgrimage to Lough Derg in Donegal. Though it ought to be pointed out that over the centuries the nature of the activity has changed. In the early days they seem to have been visionary. But with the closure of Lough Derg first by the Papal authorities, and later its complete destruction by the English authorities, the nature of the shrine when it was later revived ceased to be visionary and was only for specially prepared individuals (who also paid the prior a significant fee) a penitential one. And this is the form that continues today.
These changes over the centre were inevitable, and are now well established.
Curiously Lough Derg has attracted not a few writers from William Carleton to Patrick Kavanagh and Seamus Heaney, but also more surprisingly Sean O’Faolain (whose short story The Lovers of the Lake seems now quite unread). These items would make from a historical point of view a very interesting anthology, though the tone of Carleton and others would dismay the more pious. But it is only the medieval material that has attracted scholarly attention (which can be explored in The Medieval Pilgrimage to St Partick’s Purgatory by Michael Harem and Yolanda de Pontefarcy, from the Clogher Historical Society, 1988).
Our Lady’s Island
At our Lady’s Island in Wexford, a place of pilgrimage from early Christian days (perhaps with roots in the prehistoric past), which had faded in the 18th century. And though efforts to revive the place in the 1860s were discouraged at first, but then were organised properly from 1897 onwards. Local clergy were very doubtful about many popular gatherings of a quasi-religious nature, as they seemed to involve scenes of what was seen as misbehaviour and were suppressed. The pilgrimage is on August 15 every year.
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Pilgrimages aside, there many places of faith that are well worth a visit, even just to see the ruins.
Clonfert Cathedral
I first visited Clonfert with my family when I was about eight. It was the height of summer and the little building was surrounded by the tall grass of midsummer which quite obscured the recent grave our guide wanted to specially show us. She was reduced to a vague indication that it was “somewhere there”. But the Cathedral is itself quite captivating, representing, in its isolated way, some of the nature of the Celtic Church in Ireland, long standing trees, long grass, singing birds and quiet piety all in one place.
It was founded by St Brendan in the sixth century: an air of genuine antiquity still pervades the setting. The west door, with its ornate and well carved decorations. It is rightly considered one of the finest examples of the Romanesque style in Ireland. Inside, the east end of the chancel is thought to be the oldest surviving part of the building, dating from the 10th century.
Clonmacnoise
By contrast with Brendan’s church at Clonfert, Clonmacnoise, “St Ciaran’s city fair” as the poet calls it, is impressive, but only I think if you drop down on it by boat from Athlone as we did another summer. To come by car through the long miles of bogs creates a sense of isolation. But seen from the River Shannon, the place rising on a brow of land, the surrounding, the round tower and the extensive ruins are truly impressive.
This was a famous place of resort for students from all over Europe, a genuine university. In the words of one scholar the place “received towards the end of VIII century the generous bounty of Charlemagne, conveyed on the monarch’s behalf by ‘the noble Alcuin’ who added another 50 shekels to the emperor’s original 50.”
This place too had a strong literary tradition. The Annals of Tigernach were compiled here, though not by the Abbot in person but under his direction. Here too were set down Chronicon Scotorum (“the Annals of the Irish”), the earliest version of the Táin in The Book of the Dun Cow. Clonmacnoise might seem isolated when you come by road, but by water it was open to the attacks of the Norse established on Lough Ree to the north.
But the place is the subject of the fine poem by Angus Ó Gillán, miraculously translated by Thomas Rolleston, in a poem which will retain him a place in our 19th century Anglo-Irish literature for as long as there is an Irish nation. It is short enough to quote in full.
“In a quiet water’d land, a land of roses,
Stands Saint Kieran’s city fair;
And the warriors of Erin in their famous generations
Slumber there.
There beneath the dewy hillside sleep the noblest
Of the clan of Conn,
Each below his stone with name in branching Ogham
And the sacred knot thereon.
“There they laid to rest the seven Kings of Tara,
There the sons of Cairbre sleep,
Battle-banners of the Gael that in Kieran’s plain of crosses
Now their final hosting keep….”
St Patrick’s Church, Jenkins Lane, Waterford City
When visiting Waterford in “the ancient south east” the real place of faith to see is St Patrick’s Church hidden away in the city.
This church is of important historical interest, for it is one of the earliest-surviving post-Reformation churches in Ireland. Though the exterior has been less than sensitively treated in recent restoration work, the inside is a place to be wondered at.
According to a government heritage survey, the interior “incorporates artefacts of artistic importance, together with a circumferential gallery of technical interest. The church is a discrete feature of the townscape of Waterford City, and contributes to the historic fabric of the locality”.
“Discreet” is delicately phrased: the church comes from a period when a Catholic church could not be built on a main street, and had in fact to have other buildings in front of them to prevent them having any prominence at all. But it is astonishing nevertheless what, even under strict rules, Catholic communities could achieve in the 18th century.
Cashel
But the most remarkable place of faith in Ireland has to be the Rock of Cashel, now in the care of the Office of Public Works. When the Church of Ireland was disestablished in 1869, there were those among the country people of Tipperary who thought this might mean that now that it belonged to Queen Victoria, it might be reroofed by the Board of Works, later the Office of Public Works, which was charged with the care of Ireland’s built heritage. But that never came about, preservation rather than renovation being the agency’s remit from the beginning.
Cashel was often called “the Acropolis of Ireland”, and its combination of religious, public and private buildings matches the Athenian site in many ways.
It stands proud of the Tipperary landscape, rising some 300 feet and covers 200 acres. It began as a fortress, where St Patrick preached to the rulers of Munster – legend says it was here that he first used the trefoil shamrock to illustrate the concept of the Trinity.
In 1101, two generations before the arrival of the Normans, the place was gifted to the Church by Murough O’Brien, when the bishop of the diocese was raised to the rank of an archbishop. It was here, soon after he landed in Ireland in 1172, that Henry II received the homage of both the princes and prelates of Ireland.
Its history since has been tumultuous. Finally in 1748 the Cathedral was unroofed by the Church of Ireland archbishop of the day, not for either religious or political reasons, but simply because (again according to local legend) he could not drive his coach and four horses up the steep road to the summit.
Cashel illustrates the long and complicated history of Ireland over more than 2,000 years. No visitor, young or old, cannot but be moved by what they see and hear of Cashel. It is a place that every family in Ireland should visit at least once. In many ways this is the most important place of faith in Ireland.