As you sweep around this turn in the river Shannon, you get the round towers, the churches and everything. You get the first idea that this is a really substantial monastic foundation.

 

How did we arrive here at the height of its power, what would we have seen coming around the bend?

 

Well, if you believe the sources, there were several thousand people live here already, in the 6th and 7th centuries, so you can imagine a pretty dense settlement. There would have been an obvious, substantial farming element. This would have looked a very prosperous economic unit. 

 

And there would have been markets. Some people would have been coming both by land and here on the sea as well on the water. And the whole place would have been a pretty much, a bustling, bustling kind of place. 

 

And not just trade, of course, but the whole business setting down in text. 

 

A place like Clonmacnoise would have had this thriving school of people who were coming here not only from other Irish monasteries, but we know people would have been travelling from either England or even from continent Europe. 

 

From that far away?

 

Oh yeah, we had a reputation of scholars all the way back and certainly it was the place to be in the 7th century. If you wanted higher learning, if you wanted advanced knowledge of the Bible or grammar, or something like that, then you came to Ireland. 

 

Perhaps the greatest bequest of the monastic tradition in Ireland was literary. The monks transcribed the Bible and set down in writing ancient laws, but not only in Latin--they developed a written form of the people’s Celtic tongue. Religious and legal texts were translated into Gaelic by intellectual elite. Ireland has the most abundant, vernacular literature in Europe. One of the greatest examples is the Lebor Gabála érenn, the Book of Invasions, an imagined history of Ireland.” 

 

This extraordinary book is the first written story of Ireland. It purports to tell the story of how the Irish came into being. The tales here come from the 7th century and they would have a profound impact on the way the Irish came to see themselves.