Robert M Chapple, Archaeologist

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...

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...

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...