ANCIENT Irish church sites are among the most beautiful, mysterious and, curiously, the most romantic places in Ireland. The Modern Traveller to the Early Irish Church, by Kathleen Hughes and Ann Hamlin, first published in 1977 and now reissued by Four Courts Press (no price given), attempts to recreate the early medieval society which often cent red around these monasteries and churches. The authors have taken a thematic approach to what is a general study of the subject, spanning the 7th to 12th centuries.
While this results in several shortcomings, this text, very much an essay in six chapters rather than a working guide - and although only 20 years old, surely due some extensive revision - does stress the range of these settlements, from the ascetic austerity of Skellig Michael to more communal environments such as Mellifont, Monasterboice, Glendalough, Devenish or Nendrum.
"The Irish saints were not meek and mild," writes Kathleen Hughes, who died only months after the first edition was published: "indeed some are depicted as violent, vengeful, mighty cursers. But this is incidental. The central feature of all saints is that they are men of power, who have access to the power of God . . . The men living in these monastic settlements were not misfits, the naturally humble and retiring: they were the social elite."
Author of The Church in Early Irish Society (1966) and Early Christian Ireland Introduction to the Sources (1972), Dr Hughes colourfully distinguishes between the ascetics and the others who found themselves living in monasteries as a result of inheritance and education. She leads her reader on an expedition to the past. "A monastery must be seen as an estate, directed to a religious purpose, but on which only some people, at times comparatively few, led an ascetic life.
Monasteries offered hospitality and during times of trouble stored valuables, were places of refuge, and at times, as Hughes points out, were "open prisons". The monastery "was an institution in society, and its site expresses its function". Building up a vivid composite picture of the physical life of early Irish monasteries, she establishes the monastery's communal role within a medieval world picture.
Her co author, Dr Ann Hamlin, is less impressionistic, more traditionally academic, examining the buildings as structures rather than environments. Among the peculiarities of many Irish ecclesiastical sites is the tendency to builds anew rather than repair or enlarge the existing building. Hamlin looks at the difficult practice of making all stone roofs, an "Irish eccentricity", while citing Cormac's Chapel in Cashel as the most highly developed. The high proportion of timber buildings in the wooded eastern section of the country is seen in contrast to the dominant stone structures of the stonier west. Acknowledgment is made to Petrie's pioneering work The Ecclesiastical Architecture of Ireland (1845), particularly in reference to round towers.
There are some awkward patches. In an otherwise crisply efficient chapter on stone carving an excessively cautious sentence reads: "Best known of the carved, stone monuments, and sometimes the most striking feature on the site, are free standing, three dimensional crosses, often known as high crosses." This comment is followed by a vague observation: "The Irish total of large crosses must run into three figures." Because only the suggested reading list has been revised, no reference is made to the contentious advent of interpretive centres, nor to the recent practice of moving crosses indoors and leaving replicas on the original site.
It is also surprisingly to find only one mention of the ubiquitous and mythic once pagan yew tree, a common feature of most churchsites and allegedly favoured by monks for making bows. The particular yew referred to is known only from an 1162 source reference, claiming it was planted by St Patrick.
Anyone looking for detailed descriptions of the sites will be disappointed. A list of more than 109 recommended sites offers minimal description. A hasty footnote suggests places to visit near Dublin - why? As a working text it does not compare in concept with Averil Swinfen's excellent, under celebrated Forgotten Stones (1992), her guide to the church sites of the Burren which, though admittedly dealing with a much smaller area, indicates what could be done on a national scale - as indeed Peter Harbison's National & Historic Guide to the Monuments of Ireland (1992) demonstrates.
While the reissue of The Modern Traveller to the Early Irish Church is welcome, a revised, extended and updated text would have been preferable - particularly in the light of the current archaeological research, survey and publishing activity. An important book might well have become a classic text.
