What’s being done to preserve our monuments?
Pitifully little as far as I can see.

Irishmen have a most peculiar approach to art and literature, based,
I suppose, on historic circumstances. The complacent Irishman will
tell you that “we got on fine without them” and the embittered
Irishman, that “we never had anything decent in this rotten
country?” Both are difficult to reply to because they are cut off from
the literature of early times by the barrier of language and from the
architecture and sculpture of later times by the destruction of the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

The importance of the “Shell Guide to Ireland” by the two
Michaels—Professor Michael Duignan and Michael Lord Killanin—is that
by a rare combination of scholarship and taste it takes almost
everything of beauty and interest in Ireland and relates it to Irish
history, so that the boy or girl who packs it in his rucksack or
the motorist who carries it in his car is never likely to
forget that for a considerable portion of its history this was a
very civilised country indeed.

He will also discover, seeing the condition of many of these great
monuments of ours, that posterity is not so likely to describe us as
civilised.

Twenty years ago, in a series of articles for this paper, I pleaded
that something should be done for our monuments. Something has been
done; but, compared with the scale of the task, it is pitifully
inadequate.

With this book to guide you, you can test the truth of such
propositions for yourself. Over the last week-end I tried it out
on a favourite trip with Athlone as a base.

POINTING THE WRONG WAY

I took in Clontooskert, which has a beautiful fifteenth century
doorway; Clonfert, which has a wonderful doorway and east window;
Cionmacnois, which has Dervorgilla’s Chapel and the Cathedral, the
latter with another beautiful doorway by the Clontooskert sculptor,
and ended with my earliest loves, Roscrea and Monaincha. I was left
with the impression that the editors had hardly missed a trick and
with a renewed admiration for Irish art, particularly that of the
twelfth century.

But I was also left wondering how any race that calls itself
civilised could permit its most beautiful buildings to remain in
such a state.

Outside Clontooskert was a Bord Failte sign, carefully pointing the
wrong way—not a unique feature of Bord Failte signs. Apart from the
fine doorway, inside the church are remains of what seems to have been
a fifteenth-century groined chancel screen; the rest of it seemed to
be lying about on the ground. It would probably take two masons a week
to put together, but this, the Office of Public Works would tell you,
would not be “maintenance” but “restoration.” In other words. “Thou
shalt not kill but need’st not strive officiously to keep alive.”

‘WHAT MEN WILL DO ...’

Twenty years ago in Kilfenora churchyard I took a penknife to a
peculiar hump in the ground and laid bare part of the shaft of a
twelfth-century sculptured cross. Since then, thanks to one local
resident, that cross has been re-erected, but if you follow the advice
of the editors of this book and look at half a dozen sites like that
of Seir Kieran you will realise that it isn’t one cross but scores of
crosses and not one old church but a dozen of them that are lying
round you covered with grass and nettles.

We are an unthinking people but we are also a pious one, and what
scientific excavation of early Christian monasteries would reveal
simply does not bear thinking of. “It makes me mad to think what men
will do and we in our graves.” says Browning, but why we should let
the job wait until we are in our graves is something I do not
understand.

On the credit side, since I wrote those articles 20 years ago
Clonmacnois has been beautifully laid out. The ornamental wall with
the old gravestones built into it is an inspiration that should
become a convention, but there is still not so much as a scrap of
paper to tell visitors that two kings of Ireland are buried in the
chancel of the cathedral.

The cows still leave their droppings and rub themselves on the
sculptured stones, and what is much worse, some local fathead has
started a tradition of “spanning” the great Cross of the
Scriptures. If this is not stopped there will soon be no cross, and I
can think of no way of stopping it except to  beg my readers to
spread a new tradition that anyone who spans the cross with his arms
is liable to meet a sticky end.

Dear reader, will you spread that legend?

It is not a joke. In Monaincha I found a fine early gravestone smashed
to pieces, and the edges of the stone showed that this had not
happened in the fifteenth century. The abbot that tombstone once
covered was an aristocrat and a scholar, and it would simply not have
occurred to him that Irishmen could ever smash his tombstone just for
fun.

EXPLORATIONS BY BICYCLE

This masterly book has already directed my attention to dozens of
lovely things I missed in my own explorations on a bicycle,
particularly to the fine Irish stained glass in otherwise
uninteresting churches. The best thanks you and I can offer to the
editors is our own list of the innumerable small errors that
inevitably occur in such an encyclopaedic work. I append a few of my
own notes, fully aware that I may be wrong.

I /know/ there is no such place as Rath Luire, which merely means
“Ireland,” and I /suspect/ there was no such person as “Amanda
McGettrick Ross.” I /know/ there are archstones of the twelfth-century
cathedral of Cork in the grounds as well as the chapter house, and I
/suspect/ that when the editors bury King Turlough O’Connor on the south
side of Clonmacnois Cathedral they are mistranslating /Toirrdelbach
don leith deis di/. which may mean “on the south side.” but is more
likely to mean “on the right-hand side” looking from the altar, that
is the north.

I am also doubtful if “Taghadoe” really means “Tua’s House,” or indeed
if there ever was anyone called Tua. I think it may mean “The House
of the Silent Man.”

One final blast of protest. The present writer’s, name is given 
both as “Frank O Connor” and “Michael O Donovan,” neither of which
is correct. When I want to ask either Professor O Duignan or Lord
Kill Anin how to spell my own name I shall do so. In the meantime, it
remains as above, apostrophe and all.

Sunday Independent,  1962-05-20, p.11