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Archaeology 360: Clonfert Cathedral. Co. Galway

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Clonfert Cathedral, not far from the banks of the River Shannon in east Galway, on ground St Brendan the Navigator first chose for a monastery around 563 (yes, that Brendan - the one whose legendary voyages supposedly reached America the better part of a thousand years before Columbus, and who's buried somewhere inside). The majority of the exterior of the building is rather nondescript (& I managed to turn up when the doors were locked, so I've no film of the interior!). Still, there's no reason to be disappointed - the East Doorway is worth the journey on its own! Six orders of carved brown sandstone stacked one inside the other, crowded with animal heads, foliage and human faces, and capped by a steep triangular pediment where more stylised heads alternate with blank triangles, with an arcade of still more carved heads running beneath it. Nobody agrees on quite when it was created - some date it to around 1180, tied to a synod held here after the church burned in 117...
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Archaeology 360: Carrowmore High Crosses, Co. Donegal

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Look around this shot and you're standing at Carrowmore, near Gleneely on the Inishowen peninsula not far from Culdaff, where two lone crosses are about all that's left standing of Both Chonais - a monastery whose buildings vanished centuries ago, though a geophysical survey still traced a double-ditched enclosure running beneath the field. Who founded it depends on who you ask: tradition names Conas, husband of Dareaca (said to be a sister of St Patrick), while at least one academic survey credits St Comhgall instead - take your pick. Start with the Eastern Cross: its south-west face carries the site's one real piece of figure-carving, a Majestas Domini showing Christ facing forward with a small angel whispering at each shoulder (barely visible today, though 1940s photographs caught it more clearly), dated anywhere from the 9th to the 10th century depending on the source; swing round to its north-east face and there's nothing there at all, just plain weathered stone. T...
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Archaeology 360: Clonca Church & High Cross, Co. Donegal

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Swing round this shot and you're in the graveyard at Clonca, on the Inishowen peninsula near Culdaff - a monastic site with roots back to the 6th century. According to tradition, founded by St Baudan, though what's actually standing is a much later Church of Ireland building, raised in the 17th century and left to the weather after 1827. Head for the west doorway: the lintel carved with worn figures of clergy wasn't made for this church at all but lifted from an even older building on the same ground, a bit of medieval recycling hiding in plain sight. Duck inside and look for the grave slab of Magnus MacOrristin in the north-east corner - probably a Scottish gallowglass, one of the mercenary soldiers Gaelic lords imported from the Hebrides - carved on one side with a sword and, more unexpectedly, a hurl or camán on the other, which makes this one of the earliest bits of evidence for hurling (or something close to it) in Ireland; there's a cast of the stone in the GAA mu...
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Archaeology 360: Hill of Slane Friary, Co. Meath

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Approach from the east and Slane's hill looks unassuming for somewhere with this much claimed for it - it's the spot where, in AD 433, St Patrick is said to have lit the first Paschal fire in Ireland, in deliberate defiance of the High King's ban on rival fires while the court at Tara held its own festival some ten kilometres away (the two hills, conveniently for the story, can see each other). Patrick supposedly impressed the king enough to be let carry on preaching, and put one of the king's own men, Erc, in charge here as bishop - Erc founded a monastery on the hill in the 6th century and is said to be buried in the graveyard under two gable-shaped stones known as the Bishop's Tomb. Standing between the ruins of the Franciscan College and St Patrick's Church, you're on ground that's seen most of it: a round tower here was burned by Vikings in 948, a motte and bailey went up in the 1170s (its builder, Richard Fleming, killed along with more than a hund...
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Archaeology 360: Monasterboice Monastic Site, Co. Louth

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  You come in through the site entrance into a graveyard that's still in active use - centuries-old cross-slabs standing shoulder to shoulder with modern headstones - and the first thing that stops you is Muiredach's Cross, reckoned by most to be the finest high cross in Ireland. Walk its east face and you're looking at Old Testament scenes (Adam and Eve, David and Goliath among them); round to the west face and it switches to the New Testament, the Crucifixion and a Last Judgement, the whole thing carved - so the theory goes - by the same mason responsible for the Cross of the Scriptures at Clonmacnoise, with a pair of cats playing at the base of the shaft for good measure. It's named for Muiredach, an abbot who died in the early 920s (923 or 924, depending which source you trust), and a scaled reproduction of this exact cross stands in the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. Circle the South Church - its north side, then in through the door, then back out the west -...
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Archaeology 360: Bective Abbey, Co. Meath

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Bective doesn't announce itself the way Tara does - you approach from the south-west across flat Boyne pastureland and the ruins seem almost modest, until you're inside them. This was Ireland's second Cistercian abbey, founded in 1147 by Murchad Ó Máel Sheachlainn, King of Meath, as a daughter house of Mellifont and, as it turned out, the only Cistercian house Meath ever got - its formal name, Abbatia de Beatitudine, translates roughly as the Abbey of Bliss. Work your way round the south-east and south-west corners and you're tracing the outer wall of what was once a much bigger complex; the site of the west range, where the lay brothers would have lived and worked, is now just a footprint in the grass, its buildings long gone. The cloister is the reason people come: rebuilt in the 15th century in Ardbraccan limestone, its arcade of gothic arches is carved with a small portrait of Bernard of Clairvaux, the Cistercian order's founding voice, tucked into one of the pi...
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Archaeology 360: Hill of Tara, Co. Meath

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Stand on top of Tara and you're standing on the spot Irish tradition insists was the seat of the High Kings of Ireland - though don't come expecting a castle; what you're walking over is a scatter of grassy earthworks that ask a bit of imagination of you. Start where this video does, at the Banqueting Hall (Teach Miodhchuarta), not really a hall at all but a long, parallel-banked avenue at the northern end of the hill, thought to be one of the last things ever built here. Head down past the Sloping Trenches (Claonfhearta) and Rath Chaelchon, a huddle of Bronze Age burial mounds ringed with ditches on the hill's northwestern slope, then on past the Rath of the Synods - once a multi-ringed enclosure that turned up Roman trinkets when excavated, and which was badly torn up in the early 1900s by treasure hunters convinced the Ark of the Covenant was buried underneath. The big grassy ring at the centre of it all is Rath Righ, the Enclosure of the Kings, roughly a kilometre r...
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