RTE No 20 Interior - Road to Emmaus Journal

Road to Emmaus Vol. XII, No. 2 (#45)CROAGH PATRICKwas also good for Britain and we got fantastic help from the British archeologiststo get started. Whatever computer programs we needed, they wereours. They were just brilliant.So, between the jigs and the reels, we developed a very effective way ofmapping large blocks of land. We mapped about 100,000 Irish sites, andfound 10,000 new ones: many were early Christian churches, and some wereearly Christian monasteries, generally consisting of a little church, a graveyard,an enclosure, road access and a series of earthworks. We were able topick up a vast array of new sites, but never got to publish them fully becauseMurrisk Abbey, near the base of the pilgrim’s path, 1990.our job was to document and map them and to put planning constraintsaround them, feeding into a whole system of governance and protection.I’d already known there was a lot out there because I’d found over fortymegalithic tombs just in this area. When I’d gone to university I was told,“There’s nothing of archeological interest in Connemara.” This was one ofthese statements academics love to make when they haven’t bothered to doany field work in forty years, but because I grew up here, where there’s a lotof Irish spoken and we have many place-names associated with monuments,Confession at the summit, 1951. Courtesy Harry Hughes.as well as a myriad of stories of the síogí (Shee-Oh-G-EE) fairies associatedwith the sites. If you’re open to hearing all that, you’re bound to find something.I’d been finding sites every day of the week, virtually, so I brought thatknowledge to the other parts of Ireland that I worked in.I also gave lectures wherever I happened to be working. There’d alwaysbe a shy character in the back who’d never put up his hand, and I’d wonder,“Why does that guy look so uncomfortable, now? What’s he doing at thelecture?” I had a great nose for picking out people who were bursting to tellyou something, but didn’t have the confidence to stand up. It was great gettingthese stories. One wonderful man we met, a postman, was a self-taughtexpert in medieval Latin and could read it fluently. He came to us very timidly,overly-respectful, as if we knew everything. He knew about one hundredtimes more than us about medieval landscapes and all of these sources.So with all of this we started fitting in with amateur archeologists, historiansand place-name specialists.All of this fed into our work, but Croagh Patrick was particularly excitingbecause it had never been done before. Jerry Walsh, who also worked for us2425