Among the Irish cemeteries we have already visited I have tried to
distinguish the monastery that became a town—Clonmacnois; the
monastery that remained a monastery—Glendalough; and now, with Cashel,
we come to something different again.

Cashel has no ecclesiastical tradition like that of the other
two. It was never a monastery, but a provincial capital, founded, if I
understand my friend Professor Binchy rightly, by Irish settlers
driven out of Roman Britain in the third or fourth century who
abandoned the old Munster capital and made a new one which they called
by a Roman name.


SCHOLAR KING

Its great figures are laymen, like Feidlimid, the King /diarbo obair
neniaithe athrigad Connacht cen chath acus Mide do mannrad/, “to
whom it was a day's work to unking Connacht without a battle and
subjugate Meath,” and Cormac Mac Cuileannain, the scholar-king whose
death produced a whole literature of stories and poems about himself,
his wife and her other husbands.

By the year 1100 Cashel had outlived its usefulness, because by that
time Munster had two large towns, Cork and Limerick, that could be
used as capitals, and in 1101 Murtagh O'Brien made an outright gift of
it to the Church to be used as Canterbury to Armagh’s York.

The Round Tower probably dates from that time. About thirty years
later Cormac MacCarthy, the King of Desmond, built there the most
beautiful church Ireland had ever seen—some people would say the most
beautiful Ireland has ever seen.

I don't think it was unique among Cormac's buildings, for rotting
away in the churchyard of St. Finnbarr's Cathedral in Cork you will
find some beautiful archstones that look like the work of his masons,
and in Lismore there is a bit of carving from a doorway that probably
belonged to one of the two churches he built there.

But the Cashel church acted as a model for the rest of the country.
You can trace masons who worked on it, operating westwards through
Killarney and Kilmalkedar and northwards to Clonkeen and Roscrea,
until finally the churches that derive from it covered the whole
country as far as Derry.

“Tax not the royal saint with vain expense.” Cormac was that sort of
man. The author of "The Vision of Tundale," a pious man who was
shocked by Cormac's involvement in a political murder and a love
affair, sent him to Hell, but only for a day each year, and even in
Hell permitted him to be served by the scholars and poor people he had
served in life.

He was the closest friend of St. Malachy, who told St. Bernard of
Clairvaux all about him, but quite clearly told him nothing about
Cormac's weaknesses.


WHITEWASHED ART

His great church is no model now, except of how not to treat great
buildings.

This is the greatest single building in Ireland, and it is treated as
no self-respecting farmer would treat an outhouse.

I admit it has been whitewashed by the Board of Works which a good
farmer would do, but not if it involved obliterating a twelfth century
painting of the Day of Judgment. This was still visible when I was a
young fellow; it is not visible now.

As you see from our picture of the front, two great holes have been
torn in it, and the rain driving inside has obliterated one of the
capitals and is ruining the delicate carved arcading of the walls (Our
photographer took one photograph of a capital that is still
comparatively intact, and another of the ruined one). The townspeople
have provided the excellent floodlighting, but there is no lighting
whatever inside, so that you can't even see the damage that has been
done, and for lack of any system of heating the walls are covered with
slime and lichen.

As for the exterior, I can only assume that the Board of Works
specially imports the weeds to cover it. One glance at the photograph
of the great north doorway should make you despair of our shoddy
pretence of caring for the Irish language or anything else Irish.

Theophilus Bolton, on becoming Archbishop of Cashel, was so thrilled
by Cormac’s Chapel that he wrote to Swift inviting him to come to see
it, but Bolton's successors were worthy predecessors of the National
Monuments Council, for they unroofed the cathredral, held services in
the Courthouse and finally built the pretty little Georgian church in
town. 

Do not leave Cashel without going to see the present Protestant
church, for built into the corners of the churchyard wall to the west
are four of the most beautiful monumental statues anywhere, looted
from the old cathedra!.

Nobody knows who the 14th century sculptor was, but I have a vague
recollection that once in a West of England church I saw the head of
an effigy very like these.

Into one corner someone with a sense of humour if not of poetry built
in the statues of a knight and a lady who still face one another
smilingly across the centuries as if mocking gently the accidents of
Time and Faith, and the sheer beauty of the flowing lines can still
take my breath away.

Perhaps they are smiling because they feel that one day they will go
back to the old cathedral where their bones are scattered, but the
female of the species asks sourly where in God’s name you could put
them there.

A few of the old stones have been harmoniously rearranged in mock
tombs in the transept, but our photographer shows how the rain drips
on them, wearing them away. In the graveyard, at least, the great
statues are built into the wall, where some of the rain falls outside
them, but in the most famous building in Ireland there is not as much
as a roof to protect them.


FALLEN COLUMN

What sort of country is ours and what sort of people are the officials
of the Board of Works?

Three weeks ago I reported in my first article that the beautiful
Horsemen column in Clonmacnols had fallen and was
smashed. Naturally. I thought this was news, but I have since
discovered that the accident was reported to the Board of Works in
August of last year.

To me, of course, Cashel is an old story. To wake up and look out on
the cathedral flanked by its two great abbeys, the Dominican and
Cistercian, is like waking up in Vezelay or Mont Saint Michel. There
the resemblance ends,


OPEN SEWER

Beside Hoare Abbey we discussed the problem of getting to it with a
very intelligent farmer who said: “Well, it's a question of whether
you want to get there wet and dirty or only wet. If you don't mind
getting there wet and dirty, you can approach it from this side and
cross the town sewer—an open sower, mind you. If you don't mind
getting wet you should cross the wall by the second telegraph pole,
aim for the big bush and then continue by the white stone. Mind you,
it's remarkable the number of people who brave it every year.”

I liked the word “brave,” but I felt my friend the photographer didn't
like it in the least, and eventually his attttude communicated itself
to me: if this to how you keep national monuments, you can damn well
keep national monuments.

Cashel is our greatest disgrace as it is our greatest monument.

“By Goom!” one of a group of Lancashire lads said to us of Cormac’s
Chapel, “If we ’ad that in England, you would not be able to see it
for the crowds.”


POLITE LETTER

From almost every angle the view is spoiled by Scully’s Cross, a
Victorian addition that must have been the pride and joy of its
builders. I know I should demand that it be blown up, but in Ireland
there is no simple solution to anything, for the head of the Scully
clan, who lives in America, is a regualr reader of this paper and has
a much more intelligent interest in Cashel than the Board of Works.

But I do think that if the local group which arranged for the
flood-lighting were to write nicely to Mr. Scully, telling him that
the proper place for the cross was a museum of Victorian works of art,
they might find him a sympathetic collaborator.

Sunday Independent, 1964-06-21, pp.18-19