Contents
Cover
Title page
Introduction
Chapter 1: Slane Friary
Chapter 2: Gallarus
Chapter 3: Clonmacnoise
Chapter 4: Reginald’s Tower
Chapter 5: Cashel
Chapter 6: Clonfert Cathedral
Chapter 7: Christ Church Cathedral
Chapter 8: Carrickfergus
Chapter 9: Mellifont
Chapter 10: Dunluce Castle
Chapter 11: Rockfleet Castle
Chapter 12: Black Tom Butler’s House
Chapter 13: The Walls of Derry
Chapter 14: St Mary’s Collegiate Church, Youghal
Chapter 15: Millmount, Drogheda
Chapter 16: Royal Hospital
Chapter 17: The Gardiner Estate
Chapter 18: Printing House, TCD
Chapter 19: Newtown Pery
Chapter 20: Castletown Folly
Chapter 21: Enclosure
Chapter 22: Catholic Cathedral, Waterford
Chapter 23: Great South Wall
Chapter 24: White Linen Hall, Belfast
Chapter 25: Market House, Gorey
Chapter 26: Glasnevin Cemetery
Chapter 27: Newtownbarry
Chapter 28: Moira Railway Station
Chapter 29: English Market, Cork
Chapter 30: Workhouse
Chapter 31: St Enoch’s, Belfast
Chapter 32: Avondale
Chapter 33: Robinson & Cleaver
Chapter 34: Red Brick
Chapter 35: Pearse’s Cottage
Chapter 36: Mechanics’ Institute
Chapter 37: Market Square, Thurles
Chapter 38: Dublin Tenements
Chapter 39: Marian Shrine, Liberties 1929
Chapter 40: Stormont
Chapter 41: Semple Stadium
Chapter 42: Strong Farmer’s House
Chapter 43: The Cove of Cork
Chapter 44: Busáras
Chapter 45: Blasket Centre, Dunquin
Chapter 46: Knock Airport
Chapter 47: European Union House, Dublin
Chapter 48: Drumcree Church
Chapter 49: Waterfront Hall, Belfast
Chapter 50: St Luke’s, Dublin 9
Bibliographical Essay
Photo Credits
Copyright
About the Author
About Gill & Macmillan
INTRODUCTION
This book is a series of narrative and interpretative essays. It looks at aspects of Irish history, prompted by a selection of fifty buildings or other man-made artefacts. The buildings are presented roughly in the chronological order of their significance so as to maintain a general sense of narrative flow. All but three of the buildings are still extant. One of the artefacts is not a building at all, but a landscape.
This is not an attempt to write a history of Ireland. It is, of its nature, selective. The selection is mine alone. Although it cannot be comprehensive it attempts to strike a balance between the obvious and the neglected. This is more easily done as we move towards the modern era, when there is a greater availability of source material and of published work. The closer we approach the present, the more dense the historical landscape becomes and the greater the choice of subject matter one has.
None the less, there are essentials to the Irish story that cannot be ignored. It would be a nice undertaking to write about the Irish past without any reference to politics or religion, and while it would not be a completely false exercise it would hardly fool anyone for long. There are dozens of quotidian concerns that make up the stuff of history but which get marginalised by grand narratives: diet, dress, sanitary arrangements, transport, money, childbirth, plagues, shelter, communication, housekeeping, literacy, dentistry, shopping. The list goes on. Some of these subjects are touched on at points in this book, although the reader will be pleased to learn at the outset that the author has resisted the temptation to dilate on either dentistry or childbirth, on the grounds of profound ignorance.
One may think of this book, therefore, almost as a series of personal snapshots. It is predicated on the simple and obvious proposition that history is about the transformation of land and landscape by human volition. The changes thus wrought become decisive when we cannot imagine — I mean that literally — the world before the transformative event. To select from the list above, our modern imaginations find it almost impossible to envisage a world without electricity, flush toilets and department stores. Yet these are all inventions and developments of the last 200 years. The series of events and locales described in this book cover a period of more than 1,500 years. It is one thing to know that most of our ancestors — and not just our remote ancestors — had to do without these and other marvels. It is quite another to imagine how they actually lived.
This is the hardest task for any historian, to set aside the automatic assumptions which constitute the silent grammar of modern life when fumbling for an understanding of a world in which these things were not merely absent, but had not yet been dreamed of or imagined.
History too is a fairly modern discipline. As an academic subject, it is effectively a nineteenth-century invention, and it runs in parallel with the development of European nationalism. National grand narratives still form the backbone of history writing, pushing the quotidian stuff to one side, but also furnishing readers with a structure and a context for the partial recovery of the past. Without that structure, we simply don’t have the vocabulary to attempt the task at all.
This book is a modest attempt to look at occasional aspects of ordinary social life without losing sight of that larger narrative. Like all compromises, it may fall between two stools. That is for you, dear reader, to decide.
RK, Dublin, February 2012
The remains of Slane Friary, on a hill overlooking the modern village of Slane in Co. Meath, can be clearly seen from the road as one approaches the village from Dublin. This is the main road to Derry and western Ulster. At Slane it crosses the River Boyne just a few miles to the west of Brú na Bóinne — the bend of the Boyne — where the river turns in a U-shape before resuming its eastward journey to the sea at Mornington. Within the U lie the Neolithic sites of Newgrange, Knowth and Dowth, the first of these being one of the true wonders of Ireland.
As old as the Egyptian pyramids, Newgrange is a passage tomb, a burial site. It is 11 metres high and over 80 metres in diameter, with a corbelled roof that has kept the interior dry for nearly four millennia, this in a country with abundant rainfall. A series of gutters carry rainwater to the margins of the tomb, where it runs off harmlessly. The tomb is aligned to the rising sun on midwinter day, for on that day and that day alone a lightbox over the entrance admits the rays of the sun, just breaking the horizon to the east, to flood the full length of the entry passage and to strike the back wall of the central burial chamber. The unknown pastoral people who built this and other extraordinary structures long antedated the Celts.
The Celtic peoples who occupied Ireland from about 300 BC and created a common linguistic culture throughout the island also established themselves in this lush river valley and its environs. This is rich limestone land, perfect for the pastoral rural economy of the Celts, as it had been for all the peoples that preceded them and whom they had obliterated from history. The royal site of Tara — seat of the kings of the southern Uí Néill — lies just 15 km to the south west. This was a provincial centre of some importance, although its later inflation into the seat of the high kings of Ireland was a nationalist whimsy: there was no such centralised authority in Celtic Ireland. Tara had been a site of military and strategic importance in pre-Celtic times, for like Cashel in Munster it commands a stunning view of the flat country all around and is therefore a formidable defensive position. It has evidence of human settlement from as far back as the 3rd millennium BC.
For all the early inhabitants of Ireland, this was a landscape worth possessing. So it is no surprise that the story of Christianity in Ireland starts here, albeit with what is certainly a fable. According the legend, St Patrick converted the local king at the hill above Slane to Christianity by showing him a shamrock and explaining that the trefoil leaves in the one plant represented an image of the unity of the Trinity.
According to the ballad, St Patrick was a gentleman — he came of dacent people. True. He is for the most part a figure of mystery, although the shadow of the real person is discernible. And this is for a reason: that he is the first figure in the history of the island to leave us a written record of any kind. In his case, he has left us a record of himself, a kind of displaced autobiography.
Two fragments are all we have, but they are undoubtedly the work of his hand. So, who was he? He was the son of a Romanised British family, born in the early fifth century, who had been captured by Irish piratical raiders and sold into slavery. His family were Christian, like all the late Roman elite, metropolitan and provincial alike. Having eventually escaped back to Britain, he dreamed that he was being recalled to Ireland to evangelise the island for Christ.
He was probably not the first Christian missionary in the country but he was certainly one of the most potent. His mission was confined to the northern half of the island: the southern half contains no verifiable Patrician sites. And the two documents he has left us? The first, and more important, his Confessio, is the text from which we can patch together the outline of his life. The second, the Letter to Coroticus, is a bitter protest against the depredations of a British chieftain whose troops came ashore in Ireland and slaughtered newly evangelised Christians, an outrage that Patrick might have felt with particular keenness given his own earlier experience at the hands of the Irish.
So this is the ambiguous man who stands before the sub-king above Slane, some time in the early fifth century, and convinces him of the Trinitarian version of Christianity. Or doesn’t. Almost certainly, this is the purest myth and there is not a shred of evidence in support of it. Which is important: because the point of Patrick is not that we can prove that he did this or that, or even that he was the national evangelist, but that he was the first living, breathing human being on the island of Ireland of whom we have a secure record, however tentative. Before him, all is conjecture, heroic myth and uncertainty. Here is flesh and blood: a real person.
The French have a marvellous phrase, les lieux de mémoire: the sites of memory. Slane is Ireland’s first such site, not because of what happened here (it didn’t) but because of how it has been remembered. When Patrick converted the king — so the story goes — it was Eastertide, the most sacred moment in the Christian calendar. And here, on the hill above Slane in the early fifth century, he lit the first Paschal Fire ever seen in Ireland: the light upon a hill that kindled a tradition still living today.
The Hill of Slane is also the site of the earliest documented mention of a round tower, that most distinctive of early Christian structures, in the Irish annals. No trace of it remains, it having been burned by the Vikings.
The story of Patrick and the Paschal Flame may be a myth, but it is an enabling one. On this site, important since pre-history, occurs the first narrative event in the history of Irish Christianity. And even if that narrative was fiction, it was no less powerful for that. Here, not long after Patrick, St Erc founded a monastery which subsisted for the best part of a millennium until the Franciscans established a friary in the early sixteenth century, just a generation or so before friaries and monasteries got it in the neck from Henry VIII. The church there finally closed as a place of worship in the early eighteenth century, and it is the ruins of this late medieval/early modern ecclesiastical complex that you see from the road as you drive north towards Slane.
The far western end of the Dingle peninsula is a heart-stopping landscape. At Dunmore Head, just as the coast road reveals the stunning view of the Blasket Islands, you are at the most westerly point in Europe: the next parish to America. It is like standing at the outer arms of Sydney Harbour and looking across the Pacific in the knowledge that beyond that vast expanse of blue there is nothing between you and Santiago in Chile. For Santiago, read Boston, Massachusetts. Actually, if you follow lines of latitude, read the Strait of Belle Isle that separates the northern tip of Newfoundland from Labrador. But let’s not get too literal.
This is a harsh and unforgiving land, for all its beauty. It is stony, arid and utterly remote. In every sense, it is as far from the lush plains of Co. Meath as it is possible to be on the same small island. For most of human history, it has been accessible by land only with the greatest difficulty. To this day, access — the demand for which has been ramped up by tourism — is still confined to narrow, single-carriageway roads. A narrow-gauge railway, itself never commercial, went only as far as Dingle and closed in the 1950s. And here we are 20 km west of Dingle. Traditionally, the sea was the highway here.
Blasket Sound, the whip of water that separates the mainland from the Great Blasket, is a vicious funnel through which the entire North Atlantic flows. In calm summer weather, it looks like an idyllic millpond. In winter, it can be a cauldron. Here, in September 1588, three ships of the Spanish Armada, having made a heroic anti-clockwise circumnavigation of the British Isles on the return journey to Spain, met their end during an apocalyptic autumn storm. Eight years earlier, in 1580, a papal force of 1,000 infantry, sent in support of the Counter-Reformation rebellion of the Earls of Desmond — whose lands encompassed the peninsula — landed at Smerwick Harbour on the more sheltered northern shore under Mount Brandon. There they built a fort, known then and ever since as Dún an Óir, the fort of gold. They bore papal letters absolving the Irish lords from allegiance to Queen Elizabeth I and calling for a religious war to secure Catholicism in Ireland. This was the great ideological fault line of the age. It was all or nothing for both sides, which helps to explain the horrors of the war.
The papal force was trapped at Smerwick by Lord Grey de Wilton, the chief governor, and massacred. The English response to the Desmond rebellion was pitiless: famine, together with wholesale slaughter of people and livestock. War à l’outrance was the means employed and it reduced the entire earldom, which stretched from this remote western fastness to the rich plains of central and eastern Munster, to a barren, starving shambles.
A few kilometres inland from Dunmore Head to the south and from Dún an Óir to the north, more or less in the centre of the narrow peninsula, stands the intriguing corbelled oratory of Gallarus. It is tiny. It looks for all the world like an upturned boat. It dates from around 1000 AD and is one of the best-preserved early Christian buildings in the country. Its remoteness and its diminutive size may account for the fact that what we see now is what its builder saw when he finished it.
The oratory of Gallarus is completely unmortared. The stones are laid each upon the other with such overlapping precision that it is bone dry inside and has remained so for more than a thousand years in one of the wettest locations in the northern hemisphere. This ancient corbelling technique had been used since Neolithic times, and had been employed in many of the great pre-historic burial sites. It is perhaps no surprise that such an enduring construction technique should have been deployed so successfully here three millennia after it had first been perfected on the island.
It is speculated that the principal function of Gallarus Oratory was as a way station — a place of prayer — on a pilgrimage route, possibly a seaborne route to the Camino de Santiago de Compostella. Smerwick nearby would have furnished a safe haven along this otherwise forbidding coast.
Gallarus is also redolent of the anchorite tradition in the early Irish Christian church. Because early Christian Ireland had no towns to serve as foci for dioceses, the structure of church government differed from the norm of Latin Christianity. The Irish church was monastic in structure: the great early monasteries served as proto-towns and proto-universities. But they never acquired the full sinews of urban life, nor did they develop into universities in the continental sense, as at Bologna and Paris.
Part of the monastic enterprise was a consistent search for purity of spirit, a rejection of the material and a retreat to remote places in pursuit of a spiritual life cleansed of luxury or wealth. The reform movement in the early Irish church known as the Céile Dé (the Companions of God) were especially remembered for their zealous ascetic excesses, but they were part of a tradition, not altogether at the margin of the early church, that reappeared on a regular basis. Extremes of fasting, the denial of music and an idealisation of the early desert fathers drove such rigorists towards remote and barren places like the western edge of the Dingle Peninsula. An even more celebrated and dramatic location was on the Great Skellig Rock, a vast triangular sea stack 16 km off shore, clearly visible to the south in clear weather.
These were the locations of the Irish ‘desert fathers’, echoing the anchorite ascetics of the early Eastern Church, whose huge influence in early Christianity was later eclipsed by the eminence of Rome in the west. Indeed, the Irish word ‘dysert’, which occurs in a number of place names around the island, is cognate with the Latin desertus. The excesses of the ascetics were often lampooned by more orthodox and worldly monastic writers. Not the least of these lampoons is the Navigatio Sancti Brendani Abbatis, otherwise the celebrated Voyage of St Brendan. A work of fiction, it has been read (and mis-read) as the story of an actual voyage, although some of the details are so plausible that it may be based on the lost account of a voyage that was actually accomplished.
Although it was written as a theological tract intended to satirise the ascetics, its popular fame came from its metaphor of the voyage and spawned the myth that St Brendan sailed from Brandon Creek, just below Gallarus, and discovered America in the sixth century. He may or may not have: we shall never know. In the 1970s, the adventurer Tim Severin established that it could have been done using sixth-century naval technology. It was a possibility — and it is as logical to believe that St Brendan sailed from here and reached North America centuries before the Vikings or the Basques or Columbus as it is to dismiss it all as whimsy.
The monastery of Clonmacnoise — one of the most dramatically sited in Ireland — stands on the eastern shore of the River Shannon just below the town of Athlone. Its location is no accident. This is the point at which the principal east–west route in ancient Ireland crossed the Shannon, itself the great north–south artery. (It can never be repeated often enough that water-borne transport was easier than overland until the proper metalling of roads in the early nineteenth century.) It is also close to the provincial boundary between Leinster and Connacht — the river being a very obvious part of that boundary — and as a consequence it drew patronage from both provinces. A number of Connacht kings are buried there.
The foundation is usually dated to the 540s, barely a century after St Patrick. Nothing survives from the early centuries; the buildings were almost certainly timber-built and perishable. Only when stone structures are first erected, from the tenth century, does the site assume the rough appearance with which we are familiar.
The spread of monastic settlements went hand in hand with the spread of literacy, grounded in the centrality of the Bible. Gradually, the influence of literate scholars — most of them initially in holy orders — embraced the secular world of the law. Clerical influence on the law was very marked from the eighth century. The older, customary law was gradually but decisively replaced by written codes. Moreover, it changed in nature, becoming more severe. Traditionally, the unwritten law had permitted material restitution even in some cases of murder. Clerical influence — clearly drawing from Biblical precedents — was much harsher. Kings were now encouraged to eschew milder forms of sanction in favour of capital punishment for capital crimes.
This is one of the less obvious consequences of early Irish monasticism. There are numerous examples of capital punishment. At Clonmacnoise, in the early eleventh century, a thief who had attempted to steal some of the monastery’s treasures was unceremoniously hanged by the community. He had been handed over to them by the local king.
The early monasteries were centres of learning and piety, but they were also prone to human rivalries and jealousies. Clonmacnoise saw itself, and was seen, as a rival to the ecclesiastical primacy of Armagh. As early as the seventh century, the bishop of Armagh complained of Clonmacnoise appropriating foundations, previously under the protection of Armagh, that had been abandoned due to a devastating plague. In this, the diffuse nature of ecclesiastical jurisdiction — with no agreed central authority or first among equals, despite Armagh’s claims — echoed the absence of a central political authority. No high king; no archbishop. Armagh enjoyed the prestige of its Patrician connection, but not the enforceable primacy that it asserted over the rest of the Irish church.
The Viking depredations of the late eighth and early ninth centuries affected Clonmacnoise as surely as they did other wealthy monastic targets. It was raided in 835, just as the foundation was recovering from an even more devastating raid two years earlier at the hands of the king of Munster, who killed half the community and destroyed its buildings by fire. The Vikings were back in 845, attacking monastic sites all along the Shannon, and once again Clonmacnoise was torched, although the Gaelic annals (or at least a version of them composed centuries later as a propaganda vehicle for Brian Ború) gleefully report the wife of the Viking chieftain draping herself in suggestive and lewd poses on the high altar.
The monastic enclosure that lies in a largely ruinous state on the banks of the river began to take permanent shape with the erection of the first stone buildings in the early tenth century. These were the smallest and largest churches on the site, respectively Temple Ciarán — reputed to be the burial place of the saint — and the so-called cathedral. This latter term should not confuse us: it was a small church (albeit it the principal one within the enclosure, ergo the inflated name) typical of Irish sites, not at all the large, imposing structure one immediately thinks of in a comparative European context. Over time, other small temples were added, as well as two round towers and three high crosses.
The high crosses, of which the Cross of the Scriptures is the finest, were parables in stone, representations in relief of Biblical and scriptural scenes, often employing animal symbols. In this, their purpose was similar to that of the stained-glass windows in Gothic cathedrals: offering a version of Christian instruction to an illiterate laity. The round towers were basically campaniles — bell towers — although they also served as treasuries, boltholes and lookout posts. These latter functions were secondary to a round tower’s primary purpose. The mistaken belief that they were mainly places of refuge is anachronistic, if only because they were ill-suited for that purpose, being natural flues and therefore death traps for those inside if a fire was set at the bottom. But the further error in all this proceeds from the fact that the round towers date from a period when Viking raids on monastic sites had either abated or stopped altogether.
Round towers are Ireland’s most distinctive contribution to early medieval European architecture. The two at Clonmacnoise, the smaller of which is well preserved, are by no means the most dramatic examples in the country, although their location is unrivalled for its drama.
Following the arrival of the Normans after 1169, Clonmacnoise gradually declined in fortune. Although it had developed as a proto-town, with tradesmen and other skilled laity dependent on it and available to it, the twelfth-century ecclesiastical reforms — which established the four provinces and a European-style diocesan system — bypassed it. As a result, it lost the patronage of kings and aristocrats which had sustained its wealth and prestige for seven centuries. It finally fell victim to the fury of the Reformation: an English army sailed down river from its garrison at Athlone and laid it waste in 1552.
In short, Clonmacnoise had been a place of some importance in Ireland for just under a thousand years. It seems utterly remote in time from us now, in its semi-ruinous state. But it has only been like this for half the time it was in its pomp.
The term Viking refers to groups of Scandinavian people principally from the south and west coasts of what is now Norway, and the Jutland peninsula to the south across the Skagerrak. These people, in possession of their lands from ancient times, had probably been part of successive patterns of migration by Germanic tribes across the Great Northern Plain of Europe, which offered few natural obstacles to such migration.
Quite what impelled the Vikings to their sudden, violent and energetic expansion overseas from the eighth century is uncertain. There may have been population pressures, which would have been particularly severe in Norway with its rocky coastal valleys trapped and surrounded by impassable mountains on the landward side. The combination of limited and poor land together with the unforgiving northern climate would have made such habitats especially vulnerable to population growth, with any surplus population impelled to shift for itself. The gradual development of the proto-kingdoms of Norway and Denmark in the early Viking period may also have caused tribal groups alienated from the move towards centralised kingdoms to seek their fortunes elsewhere.
The Vikings appear for the first time off the Irish coast in 795 and attacked the wealthy monastery on Lambay island, just north of Dublin Bay. They were raiding in search of loot and treasure and in this they were not alone, for native Irish raiders did not scruple to emulate their example. Undefended monasteries and their riches made a tempting target. For almost half a century, these Viking depredations continued, with the Norse the principal presence on the east and south coasts while the Danes pushed farther inland in their shallow-draughted longboats.
This so-called ‘hit and run’ period ended in 841 with the establishment of a proto-settlement, known as a longphort, on the banks of the Liffey. A longphort was a defensible enclosure for shipping which offered adequate berthage and easy access to the open sea. The establishment of the settlement marks the foundation date of the city of Dublin. The towns of Cork, Limerick, Wexford and Waterford all followed either side of 900 CE, each of them of Viking foundation. Interestingly, the Vikings fared worse in Ulster, where the Uí Néill had the measure of them.
Waterford dates from the first twenty years of the tenth century. The name is Norse, Vadrefjord, meaning the inlet of the ram. Indeed, the magnificent harbour — fed by three major rivers of the south-east of Ireland, the Barrow, Nore and Suir — looks on a map vaguely like a ram’s horn. At any rate, it is the finest natural harbour and safe haven in Ireland. It is no surprise that the Vikings sent their longships there and founded a settlement.
Reginald’s Tower, named for its alleged Viking builder, is the oldest surviving civic building in Ireland. It dates from about 1000 CE. It is almost certainly the first building in Ireland — and beyond doubt the oldest to have survived intact — to have been constructed using mortared stone. Its original function was military, standing as it does at the eastern salient of the old town walls where they touched the quay. It therefore commanded the seaborne approach to the settlement upriver.
As in the other urban settlements they started, the Vikings were displaced by the Normans in Waterford. The city prospered for centuries on shipbuilding and trade. It was well positioned for the wool and meat trades to Flanders and to the Low Countries generally, as well as to the west of England. In later centuries, it had a vigorous commerce with the West Indies and with North America. Its staple cargoes included butter, salted beef and pork, wine and cod. Bristol was a key connection, both as a port of destination and transit, but Waterford ships traded as far afield as Lisbon and Cadiz.
In modern times, Waterford became best known for its eponymous crystal. But the city’s origins are unmistakably Viking, although nearly all traces of their foundational presence have disappeared. Reginald’s Tower is the conspicuous exception to that rule. On the contrary, the Norman — and by extension, Old English — inheritance is still palpable.
Ireland as we know it is unimaginable without the Viking contribution. All the island’s urban life starts with them and for that alone they are an indispensable presence in the Irish past. They have had a bad history — all that raping and pillaging — not least because the history was written by the raped and the pillaged. But towns and cities are essential building blocks of civilisation. They provide a focus for commerce, trade, fine architecture, schools of learning, specialisation of function, civic and religious display. They are forcing houses for talent and human energy. One of the great differences between those parts of Europe outside the ambit of the Roman Empire and those within was that the empire was essentially a network of towns, all diminutive Romes linked by a kind of invisible mental thread to the eternal city.
That was why the post-imperial Christian church was organised on a diocesan basis, with each diocese centred on the greatest town in its region. In Ireland, which had no towns before the Vikings, the church’s organisational structure was monastic and did not come into line with standard European practice until the thirteenth century.
So, whatever destruction the Vikings wrought on Gaelic Ireland, they also started a process of urban development that was absolutely fundamental to the subsequent history of the island. Had it not been them, it would have been others. But those others would, like the Vikings, almost certainly have been invaders, foreigners; for Gaelic Ireland had shown no potential for significant urban development. This was unusual in early medieval Europe. Towns often thought of as classic colonial impositions — like the Hanseatic towns and cities along the eastern Baltic — were in fact developed versions of preexisting if less sophisticated urban centres.
There were no such centres of distribution and exchange in Gaelic Ireland. The Vikings were the fons et origo of Irish urbanity. And for that, we owe honour to their memory, so splendidly extant in stone on the waterfront in Waterford.
The Rock of Cashel is a dramatic limestone promontory standing proud above the flat, fertile lands of Co. Tipperary. From time immemorial, it has been a fortified position from which its possessors enjoy an unrivalled view of the countryside all around.
From the start of recorded history, it was the principal fortress of the kings of Munster. For most of the medieval period, the dynasty known as the Eóganachta dominated the province. Their dominance lasted until 976, when the small sub-kingdom of Dal Cais in what is now east Co. Clare suddenly began one of the more improbable adventures in all of Irish history.
It was the story of one remarkable man, Brian mac Cennétig, known ever after as Brian Ború. He succeeded his murdered brother as king of Dal Cais and within two years he had overthrown the Eóganachta kings and installed himself as king of Munster. By 1000, he was the effective ruler of the southern half of Ireland, having partitioned the island by agreement with Mael Seachnaill, king of the southern Uí Néill, who had previously claimed the high kingship of Ireland from his base at Tara in Co. Meath. This claim was as empty as all that had preceded it: the partition arrangement was, if nothing else, proof of that. But for Brian, it had been a stunning progress, from obscure provincial sub-king to effective warlord of half the island in a single lifetime.
Nor was he finished. In 999, he broke the truce and defeated a coalition of Mael Seachnaill and the Dublin Vikings and occupied Dublin for more than a month. In 1001, he launched himself against the southern Uí Néill. Mael Seachnaill found himself abandoned by allies, including the northern branch of his dynasty. His failure to compel his allies, even his own kin, is a stark demonstration of the limitations of kingly power in Gaelic Ireland. If an outstanding figure like Mael Seachnaill could not do it, who could?
Mael Seachnaill acknowledged Brian’s overlordship in 1002. In the following years, Brian pressed ever further north. In 1005, he secured the support of the see of Armagh, a key advance. This was the occasion that first caused him to be called Imperator Scottorum, or emperor of the Irish. The following year, he made a royal tour of Ulster without any opposition, although the stubborn little kingdom of Cenél Conaill in the very west of the province held out on him until 1011. In every year following the submission of Mael Seachnaill in 1002, Brian had felt required to assert himself in Ulster, making his royal progress and taking local hostages as an earnest of the local rulers’ submission to his power.
He was the nearest thing Gaelic Ireland had seen, or was ever to see, to a true high king. But this much abused term obscures as much as it illuminates. Brian was not a king in any common understanding of the word. He did not administer a territory from a secure, permanent capital. His legal writ did not run throughout the territory he claimed. He did not have any central revenue-raising powers. These were all characteristics of early European kingdoms: none were present in Brian Boru’s Ireland. And to be fair, even in Europe, they were for the most part characteristics of future, not present, royal kingdoms in the first decade of the eleventh century.
His hold on power was precarious. In 1011, a coalition of Leinster kingdoms and the Dublin Vikings rose against Brian’s overlordship. The issue was settled in 1014 at the Battle of Clontarf with a victory for Brian, but one that cost him his life as well as that of his fifteen-year-old grandson. His successors — taking the family name O’Brien in honour of his memory — were unable to emulate his achievements. Gaelic Ireland reverted to its previous pattern of local kings and contested boundaries. Brian’s kingdom of Munster did not hold together, breaking into two major units: Desmond and Thomond, respectively the southern and northern halves.
In 1101, the Rock of Cashel had been granted to the church and in due time it became the centre of the southern archdiocesan province, when the ecclesiastical reforms of the twelfth century were put in place. In the meantime, in 1127 one Cormac McCarthy, king of Desmond, commissioned the chapel on the Rock that has ever after borne his name.
It is an example of the Hiberno-Romanesque style then coming into vogue. The common European architectural style known as Romanesque developed from about 1000 and is characteristic of the next two centuries or so before the rise of Gothic. Unlike its successor style, it was characterised by rounded rather than pointed arches and a monumentality that drew in part on imperial Roman models and in part from Byzantium, at that time at the apogee of its cultural prestige.
The Irish variation of this common European theme is interesting for what it lacks as well as for what it contains. Compared to one of the great Romanesque cathedrals on the continent, the Irish versions lacked all monumentality. As before, Irish churches remained small, unassertive structures until the arrival of the Normans. But the mere fact that Romanesque had made its way to Ireland — although the pulse beat weakly — was significant. The kinds of external influences that had brought the Vikings to the island and would soon bring the Normans were not lost on the Gaelic kings.
Cormac MacCarthy wished his chapel to mimic the prevailing architectural fashion on the continent, although the building does contain some features characteristic of more traditional construction techniques. It was therefore, like the style it typifies, a hybrid. It is lavishly decorated, with evidence of continental craftsmen having contributed to it, and appears to have been intended as the king’s private chapel. It was consecrated in 1134.
A more substantial cathedral was later added on the Rock, but it was burned twice: once by Garret Mór Fitzgerald, the effective ruler of Ireland in the late fifteenth century, and then by Lord Inchiquin, the notorious arsonist, during the confused wars of the 1640s. After the first of these depredations, it is told that King Henry VII demanded to know what Garret Mór thought he was doing in burning the cathedral, to which he replied that he was sorry but he had thought that the archbishop was inside!
The apse of Angoulê