Robert M Chapple, Archaeologist

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...

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...

Swing your view around this 360 shot and you're standing on Bocan Hill above Culdaff, Inishowen, in the middle of what was once a formidable ring of standing stones - somewhere around thirty of them, if the early antiquarians are to be believed, though only seven still stand today, the rest toppled or broken by time, farming, or both. Look for the pair of tall entrance stones on the northwest side, still reaching close to two metres, and you'll get a sense of how imposing this circle - some 18-20 metres across, depending on whose tape measure you trust - must have been when whole. An 1816 report tells us diggers found graves and earthen urns tucked inside the ring, which is about as close as we get to knowing why it was built at all; officially it's filed under Bronze Age with a Neolithic whisper, and unofficially it's been dubbed a "sun temple," its axis reputedly lined up east-west towards Slieve Snaght and, on a clear day, all the way to Jura in Scotland. W...

In 2019 The Keeper of Irish Antiquities threatened to send both the Director of the National Museum of Ireland and the Chief Archaeologist after me, but neither had sufficient backbone to either approach me or reprimand their errant employee. Now it's the back end of 2024 and there's still no end in sight. So I'm thinking it's time to resolve this. For this reason, I'm calling on  Michael MacDonagh , Chief Archaeologist at the National Monuments Service of Ireland, and Lynn Scarff , Director of the National Museum of Ireland, as well as the entire Board of the NMI ( here ) to show some forlorn modicum of actual leadership and reach out to me with a workable solution. I would point out that such a solution must include a full apology and retraction of the curel, hurtful, and simply untrue remarks made by  The Keeper of Irish Antiquities; answers to the questions repeatedly posed but unanswered by The Keeper of Irish Antiquities; as well as payment for my time in do...

I don’t know who first came up with the idea of canning worms – taking, say, 500g of worms and placing them securely inside a tin can. It’s clearly a terrible product, but it has given us a really useful phrase. The idea that you can start off trying to solve a problem only to discover that it’s a whole lot worse than you ever imagined. Well … I had what I thought was a simple problem. Andrew Bevan, a lecturer at University College London’s Institute of Archaeology, had published a paper that relied in part on work that I had done, but had chosen not to give that work appropriate credit in the resulting paper. I initially thought that talking to him about it would make him see that he had done wrong and that he could be persuaded to make amends. That proved fruitless, with Bevan insisting that my work didn’t deserve to be listed in the bibliography. I took my complaint to his university who, after prevaricating, ignoring, and general gaslighting, found that his actions didn’t meet the ...

If you've travelled with me on this 3D, 360-degree tour of Kilmacduagh, Co. Galway, you’ll have seen the O'Heyne's Church [ here ] and The Glebe House & Temple Mary [ here ] (and if not, why not? … go back & check them out … I’ll wait!). Well, now it’s time to move on to the concluding part and visit the Round Tower and Cathedral – the twin jewels of this delightful monastic site. The most striking element of the site is obviously the Round Tower. It dates to the 12th century and, standing 34m tall, it is the tallest surviving round tower. Famously, the tower deviates from the vertical and is often compared to the Leaning Tower of Pisa, mostly by people who’ve never been to Italy or seen a picture of just how much either tower actually leans. The Cathedral building has a long and relatively complex history of construction, expansion, and renovation. It appears that the west wall of the Nave is the oldest surviving portion of the building and a blocked doorway (11th-...