Why is Glendalough so dirty, Ugly and dangerous?

County councils and Government departments have only one way of
looking at our great early monastic sites—that is as cemeteries and as
nothing but cemeteries. This has the peculiar effect of making them
all look exactly alike: that is, like cemeteries, and Irish ones at
that—all equally dirty, ugly and dangerous.

Readers will know the pattern—a bit of round tower, a couple of
small ruined churches, and acres of headstones and modern “Celtic”
crosses, among which you may at any moment get stung by nettles or
break your ankle.

In this, Northern Ireland is no better than we are. Saul
—St. Patrick’s Saul—is filthier than anything in the south, even
Lemanaghan in Offaly, which I looked at despairingly a week or two
ago, thinking of that loveliest of Irish poems that describes it

Eclais aíbinn anartach,
Aitreb Dé do nim,
Sutralla soilisi iar sain
Uas Scriptúir glain gil.

(A lovely church, a home for God
Bedecked with linen fine,
Where over the white Gospel page
The Gospel candles shine.)


PECULIAR MESS

On entering an ancient monument, you should be able to understand it,
but in Ireland not only can you not see the difference between a local
church and a monastery proper, you can’t see the difference between a
monastery and a town.

Some of these peculiar messes were towns. Most of you will know the
standard joke about every Irish village, which is the cranky old man
who says, “Ballybour is becoming a second Paris.”

This is a joke that goes back at least to the eleventh century when a
Kerry girl is made to say /is Ard Macha ar gnáthehl/—“‘Tis as bad
as Armagh with the tourists.”

With a modicum of intelligence you will deduce that at that time
Armagh was as big a town as Dublin.


NO WOMEN

Now, if you look carefully at Clonmacnois, which I wrote of last week,
you will see that it could easily be “as bad as Armagh with the
tourists.” Nobody could ever have said that of Glendalough.

The only building outside the walls of Clonmacnois is the Nuns’
Church, because though women were allowed in the monastery precincts
by day, they had to leave them for the suburbs at night. (If the
Offaly Co, Council gets its head, there will soon be no way of
discovering where the suburbs lay).

Clonmacnois is closely knit: it was a town on two main highways with
an army of civilian workers and residents, which by the 8th century
could raise a fighting force to deal with Durrow or Birr, two other
growing monastery towns. There was no need for the Four Masters to
omit details like these, because they were typical of Europe at the
time, and imply no reflection on the piety of Clonmacnois, Durrow or
Birr.


PRAYER SANCTUARY

Glendalough stands outside these conflicts. It is scattered for miles
all over the valley, from Temple na Skelllg to St. Saviour’s, and a
glance at the map should show you that under no circumstances could it
ever be a town.

Glendalough was a place where you said your prayers. The earliest
tombstones you can date from it are of the 11th and 12th centuries,
and when in the 8th century, in that wonderful poem I have already
quoted, Aengus of Clonenagh calls it /ruaim iarthair betha/—“the
sanctuary of the western world,” he was obviously speaking not of Its
scholarship, its wealth or its beauty. So far as I know, it had very
little of these.


ONE PERIOD

What does give Glendalough its distinctive flavour is that it is all
very much of one period, and that a brief one. The places you can see
are 10th to 12th century, and the 12th century accounts for most
of them.

Undoubtedly, this limitation is very closely linked with the
development of the Norse-Lagin kingdom of Dublin, which completely
upset the old political balance in Ireland, and Glendalough
disappeared with it. It is half-Norse, half-Irish, it died about the
year 1200, and the exquisite work in King’s Church, Clonmacnois and
Clonfert, and Johannes beautiful doorways in Clontooskert and
Clonmacnois have no correspondence here.

Glendalough is mainly 12th century, except for the fine old doors
preserved in St. Mary’s Reefert, and the Cathedral. Contrast, for
instance, the names of the churches in Clonmacnois which have kept
their old form like “Mael Sheehnaill’s Church” and “MacCarthy’s
Church” with the dedications of the churches in Glendalough, like “St.
Peter and Pauls Church,” “Our Lady’s Church,” “Trinity Church” and
“St. Saviour’s Church.” All of these, particularly “St. Peter and Pauls
Church.” show the influence of the Irish Reform movement and the
passionate longing to be united again with Rome.


BUILT-IN TOWERS

St. Kevin’s Church and Trinity Church both have built-in rather than
detached Round Towers, another feature of the late 12th century, as in
Ferns.

The beautiful Market Cross which you can see in St. Kevin’s Church has
a Crucifixion with a Christ fully dressed, which is characteristic of
the 12th century, and most striking of all, the monastery beside the
hotel was walled and fortified with a two-storey gate tower and a
paved road leading from it to the Cathedral.

All this, unless I am gravely mistaken, is the work of one dominating,
hard working character assoclated with the Irish reform movement, and
the only person who can possibly fill the bill is Laurence. (Lorcan or
Lorgan to you).


INACCESSIBLE

At the same time as he got masons from Dublin to rebuild the
Cathedral, St. Laurence built another small monastery for himself
about a mile down the river and it is a great pity that of many
thousands who visit Glendalough, not more than one in a hundred sees
St. Saviour’s

It is close to the Dublin road, and needs only a short foot-path and a
wooden footbridge to make it accessible, but the Board of Works and
Bord Failte prefer to make us walk a mile of flooded lane and then
descend a long field, which was first ingeniously ploughed and then
allowed to grow wild again so that a sprained ankle should be counted
as a possibility.

St. Laurence's church was "restored" in the last century by the Board
of Works and not since reconsidered. The “restoration” described by
Dr. Leask in the admirable handbook which you can buy in St. Kevin’s
Church, for 2/-, as “reasonably accurate if not entirely correct in
all particulars” you can judge for yourself from our photograph of the
east window. If the Board of Works is recruiting assistants, I have a
six year old daughter who is well up to that level of accuracy

Imagine a church built by St. Bernard—St. Laurence’s contemporary and
equivalent—being treated that way by Frenchmen!


BISHOP’S REGRET

Photographing Reefert Church, I heard the photographer call: “Get them
in!” In the picture, you can see me getting them in. The Bishop of
Croydon, whom you can see on the extreme left, said “I've been here
before. Why is it I always prefer Reefert?”

I replied: “Perhaps because it doesn't have a modern cemetery.”

He said: “You may be right but with the whole country to bury your
dead in, wouldn't you choose anything but one of the greatest sites
in early Christianity?”

I nearly said: “Chum, what the hell do you think I've been saying?”
but I remembered that you mightn't like my betrayal of our weaknesses.


LOUT'S PARADISE

But sooner or later we must face them. We are now the last country in
Western Europe where one lout or twenty louts can do what they please
with what belongs to European civilisation. He or they could do it
in England up to 1877 when the Society for the Protection of Ancient
Buildings was founded.

Nearly a hundred years later, we still have nothing to correspond with
William Morris’s organisation, and it is still open to any fool to
obliterate for centuries or forever all the beauty of the past. Our
past.

Sunday Independent, 1964-06-14, pp.18-19