by Adams, Max;
On the ferry (kindly subsidised by P&O) we met up with the van-bound bulk of the party: Colm, whose career mine has paralleled in many ways, although he is a classicist who digs and I am a classically illiterate digger; Jack Pennie (who engineered bridges on the Irish side of the North Channel in his youth), our chief geophysicist; Joy Rutter, librarian, novelist and lover of all things Welsh; Deborah Haycock, part-time excavator and a veteran of our Heavenfield perambulations; and Sabrina Pietrobuono, a visiting Italian scholar who didn’t know what was about to hit her. Sarah had met some of the group before and, being a nurse, whether she liked it or not she was the senior first-aider. Otherwise, she was under no obligation to play the amateur archaeologist for the next week. Others would join us in Moville.
The two-hour ferry crossing was a chance for a quick snooze and discussions about food shopping and other domestic matters. At some point we must have crossed the now-invisible wake of Eda Frandsen; memories of a long night on watch came to mind. An Ulster girl, Sarah was familiar with the voyage; her grandfather was the harbour-master at Larne and she pointed out his house as we trundled down the ramp onto Irish soil. We left the van to make its own way from Larne, and rode off into the green rolling hills of Antrim.
There are two ways to get to Inishowen: one is the Derry road, which takes you through Antrim, past the north shore of Lough Neagh and across the easternmost hills of the Sperrin Mountains. Instead, we rode north-west to Coleraine, then beneath the massive cliffs of Binevenagh and out onto the sands of Magilligan Point, where the Lough Foyle ferry runs across its mouth to Greencastle. It’s just another excuse to get on a boat; besides, the very kind people who own the ferry company give us a concession; and it’s a fine way to arrive in the Republic. There are never any signs of customs points or security: the ferry leaves from a sloping concrete ramp and cars simply wait to board at the top of the incline.
Already a few vehicles had formed a queue when we got there at about four-thirty. In one of the cars was Sara Anderson, another group stalwart, on her second trip to Inishowen with one of her daughters. Ireland being such a small world of wondrous connections, it was no surprise to find that in another car was a good friend and colleague, Neil McGrory, with his wife Róisin and two daughters. They had just been shopping for school clothes in Coleraine. Neil and his family run a legendary pub and music venue in Culdaff; he is also a local historian and a man of universal knowledge of these parts, without whom we would never have been able to get our project off the ground. On the short crossing we chatted and caught up with news, promising to go over to the pub on Friday night.
The hostel at Moville, which we made our base, was welcoming, ramshackle and homely. Owned and run by Seamus Canavan, his daughter Cressida and her partner Chris, it lurks on the banks of a small trickling river at the inland edge of Moville, close to what purports to be Ireland’s oldest bridge. The hostel might once have been an old mill: a clotted assortment of extensions, outbuildings and gardens overshadowed by gnarled, dripping trees that give the whole a thoroughly gothic air, like a Caspar David Friedrich painting. A peat stove burns in the kitchen-cum-dining-room; upstairs are a small library and reading room with internet connection and various bedrooms, showers and nooks and crannies that I never quite managed to explore. Very kindly Seamus had given Sarah and I the swanky room with double bed, loo and shower as well as a kitchen that became the equipment room for charging, drying and generally sorting our field gear. Catering was a group effort: we all mucked in until a rota was established. We ate, refined our plans for the week and were clearing up when our first visitor pitched up (news travels fast in these parts): Martin Hopkins, the man behind rescuing the nearby Early Medieval graveyard from oblivion and a fine friend of the project. We arranged to meet on site in the morning.
The graveyard called Cooley, which sits magnificently on a hill above Moville looking across Lough Foyle to Northern Ireland and out to the sea beyond, is a suitably enigmatic spot in a mystical land of folklore and heroic legend. Past this shore Colmcille is supposed to have sailed for Iona in the year 563. At the entrance to the walled cemetery is an ancient high cross, a pierced wheel on a tall shaft with narrow arms and an odd hole drilled offcentre through the stype—the shaft above the cross head. Otherwise unadorned, it bears no obvious clues to its date, although generally archaeologists suppose that the rougher and simpler the dressing and decoration, the older the cross. It’s a dangerous assumption to make. All assumptions about Irish archaeology are dangerous.
The graveyard’s cast-iron gates are held shut by means of a plastic canister filled with water tied to a rope on a pulley. By that expedient Martin’s vegetation-management operatives (two sheep) are confined to their job of keeping down the weeds and grass which he and his group of volunteers laboured so long to clear some years ago. The cemetery wall encloses a rectangular area about fifty by twenty-five yards. The ruined walls of two buildings, supposedly churches, stand around ten or twelve feet tall. There is a scatter of gravestones and tombs belonging to the last couple of centuries, the names of their inhabitants still legible. Most of the cemetery is a higgledy-piggledy jumble: hundreds of unmarked head- and footstones, some of them bearing incised crosses—a mass of memorial anonymity spanning who knows how many decades and centuries. A sloping path more or less bisects the graveyard and ends at a small gabled building, built almost entirely of rough-hewn stone slabs, about nine feet long by five feet wide and no more than seven feet high at the ridge. It has a small entrance low on the western gable end—only sufficient to poke one’s head inside and squint up at the corbelled ceiling. A tiny slit in the east end admits just enough light to show a few scattered bones lying on the dusty, stony floor—whether of sheep or of a saint it is impossible to say without removing them.
COOLEY GRAVEYARD
It used to be thought that Molville was the site of a monastery founded by Finnian, teacher of Colmcille and in his own right a famous early Northern holy man; but we now know that was by misassociation with Movilla (whose abbey was founded by Finnian in the mid-sixth century) in County Down, near Strangford Lough. The Donegal Moville—the name means ‘plain of the sacred tree’—does not feature either in the great hagiographies of the seventh century, nor in later martyrologies that record the geographic and genealogical associations of the saints. The cemetery’s origins are, therefore, obscure. However, a Victorian survey of Donegal names the site as Domnach Magh Bhile; and the Domnach element is taken to refer to a tradition of foundations by St Patrick. At any rate it was a term not used for church foundations after the sixth century; and the small building, known locally as a ‘skull house’, looks very much like an early shrine. Thanks to the work of Martin Hopkins and his group, Cooley has in the last few years produced more evidence that it was a place of some ecclesiastical importance during the first millennium. The collection of incised stone cross-slabs known from the site now numbers more than a dozen, identified from careful observation in the right light. It is a very complex, concentrated miniature landscape. Nearly all the features we see could belong to almost any period before the Plantations.69 The whole requires serious analysis; but there are clues to tease the archaeologist. Two years ago Martin noticed that one of these cross-incised slabs, which now leans against the inside wall of the cemetery, has a very special feature. It is about three feet tall, broken at the top but clearly carved with a portrayal of a ring-headed cross. Martin saw that, at the bottom, the cross shaft had been finished to a tapered point, the way a wooden stake would be cut so that it could be driven into the ground. When he offered this inspired observation to Colm and me a couple of years ago, we did a double-take.
This is what we call a skeuomorph: the translation of a design feature from one medium (usually wood; but also metal) into another, often stone. The carver of this stone was used to making, or seeing, wooden memorial crosses driven into the ground and, in making the material transition to the more permanent stone, echoed what the builders of the hut circ
les at Din Lligwy had achieved: taken the original form and retained it as a decorative feature, in a sense a cultural fossil. Skeuomorphic representations of objects are a special class of artefact; they include wooden lathe-turned bowls from Iona which copied the everted70 rim of E-ware pottery (jars, bowls and jugs in hard granular grey wares) imported from Francia in the seventh century, the finials of cruck-framed71 wooden buildings copied in stone on shrines like our skull house, the Anglo-Saxon Runic script originally designed to be carved across the grain in wood, the mouldings on the Frith stool at Hexham and, in more modern times, the carrying through of carpentry joints into the cast-iron fittings of the Ironbridge at Coalbrookdale. Their significance is to mark a transition in technique and, surely, mental imagery. Thus St Wilfrid was scornful of those English and Irish monks who built their churches from hewn oak thatched with straw ‘in the Irish manner’—it was unbecoming of the dignity of the pontiff and the mother church and more evidence of the schismatic, antiquated practices of the Irish—and of the community on Lindisfarne. Wood, and carved wooden images, carried overtones of paganism. Stone was permanent, orthodox. So a skeuomorphic cross makes us think we are dealing with a memorial tradition belonging to this transient phase. Does this, do all the crosses at Cooley, belong to the seventh century? In our minds was an idea that the skeuomorphism implied an already established tradition of wooden memorials at the same place, which would take the site back still earlier, perhaps into the sixth century like the monastic complex at Carrowmore, a few miles to the north-west.
We had six days, on this trip, to see if we could tease out the many complex elements of the site: how the rows of stones related to the skull house; whether the building remains were those of churches and, if so, whether we could say how old they were. Did the present outline of the cemetery, known to belong to the seventeenth century, reflect its original shape and extent? Would we find any more crosses and could we relate them to other phases? Could we confirm that a monastery had stood on this site? If we could, what could we say about its origins and its location?
Our hope of resolving some of these questions depended on deploying the gradiometer to peer beneath the pastures that surround the cemetery, on conducting a really detailed digital survey of all the features within it and, perhaps most important, staying put in the same place long enough to see patterns emerging from the chaos: patterns which archaeologists are trained to recognise but which are rarely obvious on first inspection. Even walking the landscape doesn’t compete with sitting or working in it, day after day. It’s like buying a house. On a first visit, big, bold things stand out: size, light, garden, décor. On a second visit, it might feel smaller; you look for other, more functional details, like where the stopcocks are; is there room for a washing machine? A professional surveyor will look at the roof structure; at the wiring. Only when you move in do you realise that the front door sticks, the shower leaks and the toilet flush is hopeless, that there’s a damp patch beneath a window and that the curtains will simply have to go. That’s what dwelling does for bringing out the detail.
On our first morning we set the kit up. Jack and his team laid out grids in the fields on either side of the cemetery, chaperoned by five huge Charolais bullocks whose attentive curiosity was amusing to those of us inside the wall and variously annoying or unnerving to those in the field. Our survey method was the same as that which we had deployed at Heavenfield (see page 231–2). At Cooley we already suspected that the fields might reveal features diagnostic of a monastic enclosure like that at Llangian which I had recently visited. An early map showed a kink in the field boundary to the north of the cemetery which hinted at a circular enclosure. And in the last days of our 2013 campaign we had quickly run the machinery over the fields at Cooley and produced what looked like a crude map of ditches and banks. Ideally, this year the gradiometer would not just confirm their existence, but also show the internal detail of any structures such as houses and churches although, inevitably, there would be a large gap in the middle where the cemetery, standing proud of the land around it, masks everything beneath—our machine cannot penetrate so many centuries of built-up grave deposits and disturbances and, besides, it’s impossible to walk in a straight line in a cemetery full of stones, tombs and walls.
Four years ago, on a recce to see if it was realistic for the group to develop a project on Inishowen, Colm and I had come to the conclusion that, given Ireland’s predominantly pastoral economy, aerial photography to detect crop marks and field walking to look for finds in ploughed fields were both closed to us as methods of locating early sites buried beneath the soil. Geophysics was the way forward, and we were incredibly lucky when Sunderland University gave us the funds to purchase our own gradiometer. We wasted no time in bringing it to Donegal and, in 2012, we succeeded in establishing the presence of a classic double-ditched circular monastic vallum at Carrowmore. In 2013 we repeated the experiment at Clonca, a mile north-east of Carrowmore across the peatlands, where a church and high cross still stand, and produced even more spectacular results: a complex series of enclosures, trackways and a possible cemetery focused on the high cross. On the same trip we excavated trial trenches across the two ditches at Carrowmore, with a great deal of help from local volunteers, and proved the antiquity of that establishment. Our soil samples showed that we could retrieve crucial environmental data from the environs of the monastery; and we were fantastically lucky to find five tiny polished pebble gaming counters, of the sort that would have been played with on the merel boards of Inchmarnock (see page 35). We felt we had brought something to the party, that we could make a significant contribution to understanding the development of this landscape.
But nothing is straightforward here. To begin with, the complexity of local place names has us confused—we are mere novices at pronouncing written Gaelic; we find that most places have at least two, if not three alternative names, for whose derivation we rely completely on the local knowledge of our expert colleagues—and sometimes they can’t agree among themselves. Even names for simple landscape features have caused all sorts of cross-cultural confusion. Locally, what we call a ditch is understood as a dyke, an upstanding boundary or field wall. The word for ditch locally is shugh, its bank a bru. Then there is the conflicting evidence of local oral tradition and opinion, often very firmly held, and the testimony of documents. There are numberless associations of all sorts of rocks, trees, crosses and standing stones with various families, holy men and legendary events. There are said to be ancient tunnels everywhere. Layers of continuity and discontinuity, like a much-kneaded geological pastry confection, tease and mislead. Vikings followed by Normans followed by Cromwell’s genocidal rampage; plantations, rebellions, exploitation and colonial repression, all written into field boundary, parish, townland and clachan, place name and record. Pick the wrong straw from the pile and the whole thing collapses.
In England, where the historical evidence is generally a little simpler, there is much less relevant or useful oral tradition to assist or perplex the landscape archaeologist: in Ireland there is a whole universe of richly nuanced narrative which has to be interpreted as a textual source in its own right and woven into the broad tapestry we are trying to create, even if much useful material evidence has been lost or deliberately destroyed in acts of cultural barbarity. On top of that, the numinous quality of many early sites continues to endow them with spiritual meaning in the twenty-first century. At Carrowmore some visitors to our excavations admitted that they had only passed that way to visit the bullaun stone—a natural or hollowed-out depression in a stone that fills with rainwater, which thereby acquires healing powers—in the next field, in the hope of a cure for an ailment. The cutting down of trees such as the rowan is still widely regarded as taboo; roadside shrines and holy wells dressed with beads, photographs, coins and other offerings or mementoes are common sights. Here, past and present, real and supernatural, magic and rational are entwined in a way that wrong-foots the sometimes overrational
critique of the hard-bitten professional fieldworker. The cultural texture and depth of Ireland’s north-west, the lyricism and intellectual curiosity of its literary traditions, are part of the charm and fascination of these lands, even if they leave us scratching our heads from time to time.
