- Okay, so, it's my pleasure this evening
to introduce Jim Gallagher, our speaker for tonight,
who's going to be talking about his favorite places,
in terms of archaeological remains, in Ireland.
Now Jim gives me an opportunity to say some things
about Jim that I've learned recently.
Jim got his PhD from Southern Methodist University
in Dallas, Texas, in 1977
and joined the faculty at UWL shortly thereafter,
where he spent his entire teaching career,
retiring as Professor of Archaeology
and Director of MVAC in 2002, I believe.
That was the end of my first year.
So I had the pleasure of getting
to teach with Jim for a year.
And at that point he became Professor Emeritus.
Now, early on in Jim's fieldwork he did work in Egypt.
He also conducted some interesting ethno
or archaeological research in Ethiopia,
studying the manufacture of stone tools
among contemporary Ethiopian populations.
When he came to LaCrosse
he began conducting local fieldwork,
including research up at the
current location of Valley View Mall,
where a number of archaeological
remains were uncovered.
And that research, conducted in the late 1970s
and the early 1980s,
really was the first intensive archaeological research
that was going on this in this region.
It was from that context
that the Mississippi Valley Archaeology Center
was founded, that Jim founded
and was the founding executive director.
Even after retirement Jim has continued to travel,
it's one of his loves.
Including leading a number of walking tours to Ireland.
And I think we're going to see some images
of those experiences here tonight.
So please help me welcome Jim Gallagher
in presenting his favorite archaeological places in Ireland.
(audience applauding)
- Thank you very much, Tim.
Thank you very much, Tim,
and thank you all for coming out tonight.
I appreciate the invitation very much
from the Mississippi Valley Archaeology Center
to show you some pretty pictures.
And I'll say, "Mile failte",
which is "a thousand welcomes" in Irish.
There are a number of survivors, I mean alumni,
of some of these walking trips that are here,
and I'm especially happy to see them.
If nothing else, their presence here will,
how should I say?
Increase the "truthiness" quotient of the presentation
since they're actual eyewitnesses.
As Tim mentioned,
I've had the pleasure to lead a lot of these walking tours.
A lot of the images that you'll see here
have been taken on these trips.
So, here we are!
One of my biases that will become
immediately apparent is that I love Ireland.
I think it's a wonderful place to visit.
The people are incredibly friendly
and have an enormous sense of hospitality.
The country is small, it's easy to get around in.
The food, as of recently at least, is marvelous.
It's a fine place to be.
My bias is that I feel the best way to see it
is to be on foot as much as possible.
And if you're in a car,
to ditch the car as much as you can
and take some walks into the hills.
If you're, God forbid, in a tour bus,
there's probably not much you can do.
(audience laughing)
But walkers will experience, really, the full range
of Irish culture in a way
that is very difficult to do otherwise.
My goals for the talk are fairly simple.
I want to show you some of the best parts of Ireland that,
if you're thinking about a trip to Ireland,
that you might like to see,
and to show you a little bit of the archaeology as well
because it's really spectacular,
if for no other reason than the Irish,
unlike a lot of the Native Americans
especially in this region, built in stone.
So you get these marvelously preserved
archaeological remains that we don't really find here
in the Midwest so much.
Walking, again, is my preferred way to see the country.
It really gets you out and enables you to enjoy nature.
This is a huge field of foxglove
that I discovered in a pretty little valley
on one of our hikes.
This is a carnivorous plant called the Sundew,
and it traps insects on its leaves.
It doesn't close up on them like the Venus fly trap does;
it just sort of nicely dissolves them into an insect soup.
And whether you like hanging out or looking out,
if you're looking for really challenging hikes
such as this or just nice outings to see pretty places
that are just practically everywhere in Ireland.
Again, the Irish hospitality is wonderful.
People are so welcoming and warm,
and the food is really good.
It didn't used to be that way.
Little small towns are great.
Little villages are even better.
And one of the things that walking does
it gets you out and you get to meet
and talk to the locals.
And they love to talk,
even if the "truthiness" factor
is maybe not real high there either.
It's just great to be able to run into people and chat,
and of course, meet people in pubs
and other types of gathering,
and see kids along the way,
and, of course, experience the archaeology,
a first-hand way of seeing it.
So just as kind of a reference point,
there will be no quiz at the end here,
but when I'm talking about the Neolithic,
for example, here we're talking about
roughly 6000 years ago.
The Bronze Age, the Iron Age is typically thought
of as the time of the Celts,
much more recent than the Early Christian Period.
The Viking Age and then, finally, the Early Medieval Age.
And after that we start getting into odd things
like industrial archaeology.
I don't know anything about that stuff.
So anyway, that's just kind of a nice reference point there.
And here is where we're going to go
on this kind of one-man's-tour in Ireland.
We're going to start off here in Dublin
at the National Museum and Trinity College.
Then we're going to go just a little bit north up here
to a beautiful, beautiful river valley, the Boyne,
B-O-Y-N-E River Valley and look at Newgrange.
Then we're going to shoot across the country to Galway,
actually my favorite Irish city.
And then from there we're going to go out here
to the Aran Isles and spend a fair amount of time
on our tour out on Aran Isles.
Then we're going down here to the Dingle Peninsula,
this western-most peninsula
that sticks out into the Atlantic Ocean
down here in the lower part.
We're going to take a quick climb up Mount Brandon,
which is located out here
in the northwestern portion.
And then we're going to travel up to the Blasket Islands
out here off the far west coast of the Dingle Peninsula,
and then end up at the Skellig Islands
off here about seven miles off the Kerry Peninsula.
And that will be our tour for the day.
So, off we go!
We're going to start in Dublin.
It's a great place to start the tour
if for no other reason than almost all
the international flights now come in there.
And it's a fine city with lots of things going on.
It has a very vibrant street life,
all sorts of interesting architecture,
great theater, it has a great reputation for live theater,
and, of course, more pubs than you could possibly visit
in a lifetime and although you could try.
And lots of entertainment,
whether it's an informal session like this
or something more formal, a concert.
The first attraction here
is the National Museum of Archaeology,
which is a great, great archaeology exhibit.
It has a huge collection of Irish gold objects.
This is a golden collar
that would have been worn around the neck.
It's solid gold, hammered.
They started out with sheets of gold
and processed it from there.
It was found in a tomb.
It's the Gleninsheen Collar.
And there are hundreds of spectacular gold objects
that are in the National Museum that you can see.
There are bog bodies,
most of them from the Late Bronze Age
and the age of the Celts.
Many them, though not all,
have been ritually murdered, or sacrificed.
Strangled, garroted, bludgeoned, all sorts of...
And archaeologists know that this is the case
because they get killed three times.
So it's a ritual, sort of ceremonial thing.
And amazingly well preserved.
This guy has, unfortunately, only his torso preserved.
I think he ran into...
He did fine for the last 2000 years,
and then about 20 years ago he had a bad run-in
with a peat-cutting machine and he lost his lower torso.
These are Bronze Age artifacts.
This cauldron, which you see right here, is bronze.
Right here in the center...
I lost my arrow. There we are.
And it's used for feasting.
And the ancient Irish were great feasters.
There are in the sagas of ancient Ireland
these stories about these great,
for lack of a better word, parties that involved, of course,
lots of drinking and lots of drama
and music and song and poetry.
These cauldrons, see, these bronze cauldrons
would have been filled with cooked meat:
venison or perhaps pork or lamb.
And then just above the cauldron
you see this long thing in here.
This is a meat hook.
And the host would presumably make a great show
of pulling out especially good cut of meat
and handing it out to his most honored guest.
So I mentioned that only because
we're going to talk a little bit more about feasting
later in the program.
More objects.
These are largely from the Iron Age,
high prestige objects made out of bronze and gold,
including these sort of cloak pins here, the golden ones.
This is from the Viking Age.
It's part of a cup, with wonderfully delicate designs on it.
And this is from the Medieval Period,
the so called Ardagh Chalice,
which is mostly silver with some gold and copper
and precious stones on it.
Lovely, lovely piece.
So, the Irish National Museum is a great,
great place to visit and to start a tour
or a trip to Ireland.
This is Trinity College,
and this is the Trinity College Library.
The Trinity College Library is the repository
for the Book of Kells.
There's actually four of them,
one for each volume of the New Testament.
This is one of the pages of the Book of Kells
and it's called an illuminated manuscript because,
although it contains all the words of the New Testament,
written in Latin,
it contains all these wonderful illustrations.
The illustrations have incredible complexity
and detail and are typically a blend
of Christian and sacred symbols,
along with, for lack of a better term,
Celtic and Irish designs,
especially all these kind of curlicues and spirals
and interwoven vines and this sort of thing.
And then here's a detail of one image on one page.
They're all very intricate,
and one could spend easily half a day or more
just looking at these wonderful images
and the exhibit that they have showing
how the pages were made, how the art was made.
Moving north now, this is the site of Newgrange.
Newgrange is usually referred to as a burial chamber,
which it is, but I think as we'll see shortly,
it was also a lot more.
This is part of a very large mortuary complex
which is made up of quite a few different mounds,
standing stones, stone circles, graves, wood henges,
and three megalithic passage graves of which this is one.
There are approximately 1500 passage graves in Ireland,
and this is the largest and most well-known.
This is about 5000 years old,
which makes it older than the pyramids and,
as every Irishman will very proudly tell you,
older than Stonehenge as well.
It's very important, very important.
It's a Neolithic site.
The mound is about 275 feet in diameter.
It's surrounded by a stone circle.
You can see parts of it right here.
Originally, we know that there was about 30 to 35 stones,
but there's only about eight or nine of them that are left.
And the mound itself,
we'll look inside the mound in just a minute,
covers an area of about one acre.
It's about 44 feet high.
And the fill of the mound is made up of 200,000
(coughs) excuse me, tons of stone, all locally quarried.
With a facade, which you can see right here,
of mostly sparkling quartzite stones.
These are all held in place by 97 kerbstones
that are all along here,
and I'll show you one in detail in just a second.
Archaeologists estimate...
I have no idea how they make these estimations.
That it took 400 workers 30 years to build this puppy.
It is quite, quite a sight, as you shall see.
Here's one of the kerbstones,
filled with all sorts of typically
Celtic curvilinear and geometric patterns.
And this is the entrance,
and there are four things to note in the entrance.
The first and most important is the window box up here.
Then here is the door, the entrance,
the entrance to the passage.
Remember, I told you this was a passage tomb,
and this is the entrance to the passage.
This is a large stone that can be used
to close or block the passage.
And this is the entrance stone right here,
again with lots of geometric and curvilinear motifs.
There's lots of rock art engraved at the site.
The design that is the most common are these spirals,
especially groups of three sort of interlocking spirals.
It's almost the signature of the site.
Now here's a cut-away view.
Here's the entrance that we were just looking at.
Here's the window box here.
Here's the passage that goes back approximately 60 feet
to a large burial chamber here.
The burial chamber has three recesses, or alcoves.
One here, one here, and one here.
And in two of these alcoves there are stone basins.
And it is thought that the cremated remains of the dead
were placed for some kind of ceremony or ritual
in these basins.
And then we have a corbelled roof.
I think we'll have a better view
of a corbelled roof coming up here.
This is the passage way,
looking back out towards the door and the window box.
This is a modern electrical light here
that's been used to help keep tourists
from killing themselves.
And then this is the burial chamber,
again looking back out through the passage.
Here again we see that very typical design
of the three interlocked spirals.
And the three recesses,
well, we're standing in one right here,
and then there's one off to either side.
And then one can see the beginning
of the corbelled roof here.
The corbelled roof is all dry stone masonry.
Simply, they didn't have an arch,
but they simply laid down one course of stone,
then they laid down another course of stone,
with the top stone overhanging
some from the previous stone,
and so forth until they finally capped over the roof.
And I'll show you another image up here in just a moment.
This is looking up into the top of the corbelled roof,
and you can see each of these stones
leaning out just a little bit more than the other,
and then finally the capstone here.
This is about roughly 20 feet
from the floor of the burial chamber,
and again, we're looking up here in this slide.
Now here's another view.
Here again is the floor plan, with the entrance here,
the burial chamber, and the three alcoves here.
And here's the corbelled roof of the burial chamber here.
But here is the real kicker of the whole thing.
In this image,
the artist is showing how on the winter solstice,
December 21st, the shortest day of the year,
the rising sun, at approximately 9 o'clock in the morning,
shines in through the window box,
down the passageway,
and first illuminates the floor
of the back of the burial chamber,
then the back wall of the burial chamber,
and then eventually the whole burial chamber.
The light show lasts for about 20 minutes.
This of course is assuming that the sun is actually out,
in November, in Ireland.
[laughing]
And I can also tell you,
if you are interested in witnessing this,
the Irish tourist agency would be glad
to put your name on a waiting list,
which is now about six years long.
It is really spectacular.
And this is it actually happening.
This is the winter solstice sun
shining through the window box,
down the passageway, and into the burial chamber.
So this requires a little bit more
in the way of explanation, I think,
because, clearly, this is more than just a burial chamber
that we're looking at.
And I think calling it an ancient temple
is much more a fitting classification.
Clearly, it's a place of astronomical, spiritual, religious,
and ceremonial importance
much as the large cathedrals of Europe are.
It also happens to be a place
where important people were laid to rest.
The monument chronicles,
"when the days begin to grow longer
"and begin again the natural cycle of plant
"and animal growth and regeneration,
"and perhaps hope,
"and perhaps even to symbolize
"the very renewal of life itself after death."
So it's a big deal. And it's 5000 years old.
And it's easy to get to from Dublin.
And the only way you can get inside is by a guided tour.
And during the summer
you almost need to have a reservation in advance.
And what they'll do is they'll get you in there,
and after they give their spiel they'll say,
"Now if any of you are afraid of the dark, hang on."
And then they turn off all the lights,
and it gets pitch black in there.
And then they have some sort of spotlight
mounted in the window box to give you an effect
of how it looks on the winter solstice day.
Anyway, Newgrange is the name of the site.
Spectacular place.
We move on to Galway, my favorite Irish city.
It's a vibrant college town
with great places to eat and drink,
including McDonagh's seafood place here.
I highly recommend McDonagh's,
and I am not getting paid to say that.
And from here, about an hour out of Galway,
is a ferry terminal which runs ferries
out to the Aran Isles.
And that's our next destination on this little tour.
There are three of them.
They're all made out of mostly very ancient limestone.
At times they resemble a huge rock aircraft carrier
anchored out in the middle of,
well not in the middle or in the Atlantic Ocean.
And there are spectacular cliffs
and lots of wonderful sites to see.
Hundreds and hundreds of miles of stone walls.
You see some of the stone walls in the foreground here.
And one of the other...
We're looking from one island to the other
in this particular image.
Stone walls everywhere.
Some of the fields are about a quarter
of the size of this room.
Here are, there must be six, eight
different lines of rock walls you can see in this image.
Very rocky, and in some ways, austere land.
The locals have farmed and they actually manufactured
their own soil up until about the 20th century.
There's very little soil on these islands.
They harvested seaweed, especially kelp.
They added sand to it,
a little bit of manure from the cattle and sheep,
and composted it.
And literally, basketload by basketload
manufactured their own soil.
Very hard working and industrious folks.
They were master fishermen.
And I say men deliberately
because it was all-male occupation.
They went out in these incredibly flimsy-looking boats
that had wooden frames and cowhide exteriors.
The cowhide has now been replaced by tarps with pitch.
And they are very good boats for in-shore fishing,
checking lobster pots, and this sort of thing.
A very hard life.
There are even documents showing,
and I'm speaking specifically of an early ethnographic film
by Robert Flaherty called "Man of Aran",
showing them tying ropes to mostly young boys
and hanging them over these cliffs to collect birds
and birds' eggs for eating.
A very hard life.
And in spite of all the rock,
during the springtime there's an abundance of flowers,
wild flowers, everywhere.
And with the coming of warm weather
there's an influx of visitors
who come largely to learn about
traditional Irish culture and language.
Almost all the people, the residents of the island,
are Irish speakers.
It's a kind of holdover of traditional Irish culture.
And it is a great place.
All the modern amenities.
Plenty of nice B & B's.
Very comfortable.
You don't have to worry about roughing it.
And many parts are amazingly beautiful.
This is a wonderful, wonderful pub,
one of my favorite pubs in all of Ireland.
It would normally, originally, have had a thatched roof.
And this is the interior here.
Very rare to find old pubs like this still in existence.
A beautiful place.
And of course, archaeology.
This is a so-called wedge tomb.
You remember when we saw a picture of the golden collar.
That was found in a wedge tomb,
over on the mainland, maybe 20, 25 miles from here.
We're looking at the back of the tomb.
It's from the Bronze Age.
It would have been more covered over
and then probably the whole structure
that we see made out of stone
would have been covered over by a mound,
a pile of rocks or something like that.
This is Dun Aengus.
"Dun" in Irish means "fort",
and it is a spectacular cliffside fort
dating from the Early Bronze Age into the Iron Age.
It has... I'll get my pointer out here.
It has three concentric walls.
One here, one here,
and then an outer wall coming around here.
In addition to the three walls
and then the spectacular 300-foot cliff here,
there's also a rock defensive system.
It's called a "chevaux-de-frise", right here,
which I'll show you in just a few moments.
Here's the fort from the side.
The buttresses here are
some attempts by 19th-century Romantic archaeologists
to reconstruct this place,
and they don't belong there at all.
And this is the "chevaux-de-frise" here,
which consists of a series of stones
standing in the ground,
standing upright in the ground,
much like in the sense of a World War II tank trap.
Let me just see. Here they are up close.
So if you are an approaching warrior
and you are trying to approach
and shoot a bow and arrow simultaneously,
you're going to have a problem here.
And if you are mounted on a horse,
you're going to have even more problems here.
So, it's a very effective defensive system.
Here's the entrance to the fort.
There is not a whole lot going on out here
because most of the space would have been houses
in prehistoric times that are no longer here.
But you can see some interesting features to the walls.
There's walkways all along here,
sometimes multiple walkways.
There's another one up here.
There's stairways that go up.
There's chambers that are built into the walls.
These walls are nearly 20 feet thick, 20 or more feet tall.
And then there's this stone platform here
that quite possibly was used for rituals.
And what we're thinking here is that this site
is a place that probably originally was a political,
economic, and ritual center
for a group of people with common ancestry.
The main purpose of it was really prestige,
festivals, rituals, and feasting, again.
And one can even perhaps think
of these walkways back here
as seating spaces for people to sit and watch the,
watch the spectacles take place.
And this is simply a view from the edge of the fort,
looking down over the cliffs of Aran.
And, of course, this would have been a very
useful defensive factor to this structure as well.
Nonetheless, we think it was built more for prestige
and perhaps showing off.
Maybe like the so-called castles
on Cass Street here in La Crosse, originally at least.
So, we have one more site on the Aran Isles here
that I want to show you.
This is on a neighboring island.
This is another one of these forts.
This is a hilltop fort.
It's the highest spot on the island.
There are a series of walls that go around it,
much like Dun Aengus.
And then this is the main fort here
with the entrance way right here.
This is called Dun Connor.
There's the entrance, the walls, the interior is similar.
It has all these walkways.
They're a little bit better preserved,
and you can perhaps see the idea of them
serving as a grandstand more here.
It's got steps going up to the various levels.
And unlike Dun Aengus the previous site,
it has the remains of house foundations still intact.
There was probably more of these at one time as well.
The walls are about 15 feet thick
and they offer a spectacular view of the rest
of this one small island of the Aran Isles.
So, back to the mainland we want to go.
And off to the Dingle Peninsula.
The Dingle Peninsula is, again, a fairly small place;
it's a small island.
It's only about 40 miles long and about 10 miles wide.
There are hiking trails everywhere
and beautiful, beautiful scenery.
The folks here didn't have to make their own soil,
I'll tell you that.
And, in fact, there's a lovely little trail
that goes right down here and it winds around.
These are called old green roads
and they're basically drovers' roads,
where they would have taken cattle.
The farmers and ranchers would have taken
cattle and sheep in to local markets.
And now they are pretty much overgrown,
and they are wonderful, wonderful walking and hiking trails.
I want to take you on a...
Let's see here.
I'm missing a slide here.
I mentioned that there's lots of hiking opportunities here.
Some of them, particularly along the coast,
are really rugged and challenging,
but breathtakingly beautiful.
And there's lots of traditional culture.
The Dingle Peninsula is also an Irish-speaking region.
And lots of traditional ways,
and the language still very commonly spoken.
Some great pubs, including Mack's Pub here,
which is part haberdashery and part pub.
And the archaeology.
This is an Early Christian site.
It's called an oratory.
It would have been a prayer house.
The interior is only about 10 x 15 feet.
It's all dry stone masonry, there's no cement,
there's no mortar of any kind.
And it's using the same technique
that we saw at Newgrange.
And it's all corbelled: each layer of stone is layered
a little bit more inward until they meet up here at the top.
It's an Early Christian phenomena.
The interpretation is that a small group of monks
would have gone into here
to pray, sing, chant, or whatever.
Think of it as a small prayer house, if you will.
It is relatively watertight.
Go in there in a rainstorm and it's quite dry
after some 1800 years or so,
It was built around 12, 800 years,
it's built around 1200 AD, and it's a wonderful,
wonderful piece of Early Christian architecture.
Here I'm going to take you on a hike
that doesn't really have a lot
of archaeological sites on it.
It's got a lot of stuff kind of scattered around,
but it's just a spectacular hike.
The mountain is called Mount Brandon.
It is about a 3200 feet tall, tall by Irish standards,
but not tall by mountaineering standards,
but it is a great walk.
It has some Early Christian ruins,
a small smattering up on the top.
And we know from written records
so that it was a great place of early pilgrimages,
and that pilgrimages were conducted here yearly,
up until, I'm thinking around 1946 or so.
And it's a wonderful hike.
Here you can see us just sort of getting
our first layers off after working up a sweat
coming up to here.
And we proceed into a wonderful U-shaped,
classic U-shaped glaciated valley,
and stopped here for lunch.
Then worked our way up higher.
And these are called corrie lakes.
They are glacial lakes,
and there's a whole string of them here.
And then from here it starts to get a lot steeper.
And we go up the back of this glaciated valley,
getting up higher above these lakes.
And the scenery is getting nicer and nicer,
and then we are up at the top,
where the scenery is really pretty spectacular.
It's a wonderful outing,
and like a lot of good outings in Ireland,
they inevitably end up in a pub,
where many lies are told and it's a good time.
The next spot on our journey here is another island.
There's a set of these islands called the Blasket
B-L-A-S-K-E-T Islands.
And this is our destination out here,
it's called the Great Blasket,
it's the largest of the six or seven.
The distance across the sound here
is just a couple of miles,
but there are enormous currents,
and it's very difficult to get across here,
especially for the natives who had, again,
only these hide-covered small, flimsy boats.
To give you an idea about how treacherous the water is,
off to the, where did my arrow go?
Off to the left of the island here,
probably just a little bit off the edge of the picture,
the largest of the Spanish flotilla of battleships
was sunk in a particularly severe squall.
The result is that these islanders out here
lived a very isolated way of life.
And even more so than the Dingle,
the Aran Isles preserved a lot
of traditional Irish culture and Irish ways.
All of them were Irish speakers
exclusively up until the end.
At one point there were as many
as 175 people living on this island.
In 1953 the number was down to 22.
They were mostly elderly,
they were actually not in real good physical shape.
And after repeated insistence of the government
to move them off,
they finally relented and were evacuated from the island.
The island is now abandoned.
Locals still take boats out.
Here's the landing where the boats go out,
and you can see some of these old fishing boats,
called currachs, here at the harbor.
And we'll just go out here to the island.
The drill is to start off in these Zodiacs,
or rubber boats,
which take you out to a so-called ferryboat,
which in turn, takes you out to the island.
Here is the island pretty much as it looked
shortly after it was abandoned in 1953.
These are a couple of different style of houses
that were kind of gussied up.
And for a while someone had a scheme
of running a hostel out here, which has since failed.
And this is, if you want to call it that, the harbor.
And we'll land the dinghies here and then we'll climb up.
This is basically a ghost town.
I guess you'd call it archaeological site,
but it is pretty recent, 1953,
but it is very much of a haunting kind of place.
The people just recently left.
And I should also point out that we know
a lot about this island
because the islanders were especially gifted storytellers.
And there are about 20 volumes now
that have been published of stories of life
on the Great Blasket Islands,
dating back to the time before the locals were evacuated.
So just a few slides of the deserted village here.
This is an old storage house,
also corbelled construction again.
It could be 100 years old, it could be 1000 years old.
Beautiful, beautiful scenery.
There's a bunch of seals that inhabit,
or visit the beach down here in the front.
And, not surprisingly, it's a great place to take a walk.
And so here are our group is heading off
to walk the length of the island,
which is just three or four miles long.
There's nothing out here,
nothing but grass and a few sheep
and lots of ocean and beautiful scenery.
This is a very nice lunch spot here.
My crew knew how to pick a good place to eat.
The walking is exceptional.
We're heading back now,
going back down the trail to the so-called ferryboat.
And then repeating the drill back on the Zodiacs.
And back in on the boat, and back to the mainland.
The last site on our tour also involves
a small off-shore island,
which is not only my favorite Irish site
it's probably my favorite place on the whole planet.
It's called the Skellig Islands.
This is our ferry again,
heading out to the Skellig Islands.
There's two of them:
there's Skellig Michael and Little Skellig.
Skellig Michael is where we're headed for
because there's another Early Christian monastic site
up on the top of this island,
if you want to call it an island.
The Irish actually call them rocks, the Skellig Rocks.
This is about 725 feet tall.
And right up there, there is a monastery.
And it was inhabited in the 8th through the 12th centuries
by a number of monks and hermits
who sought peace with God
by isolating themselves from the evils of the world,
the temptations of the world,
and by literally getting themselves close to God,
as close as they possibly could, up on the top of this rock.
So what we're going to do here is we're going to land our boat
in another one of these so-called harbors right here.
We're going to walk around the back.
We're going to climb up the back
about 650 feet up to the monastery here.
So, here's the landing, here's the pier.
This is really tricky in rough weather because the boat,
of course, will be going up and down with the seas.
I've been in one of these boats
where it's gone plus-or-minus five or six feet, you know,
10-second intervals.
And so you have to make a nice leap
and then up the stairs and make way for the next person.
Then there's a lighthouse on the island,
and this a road that used to supply the lighthouse.
And so there's this nice gentle road.
This is Little Skellig in the background,
and you'll see that a lot.
But a nice gentle slope here to start heading on up.
And then it gets steep.
These are all hand-made steps by the monks.
There are 618 of them.
They're all irregular, they're quite slippery,
and they get to be very steep.
And, again, we're heading up someplace
right around here eventually.
And it's getting a little steeper now.
And whoa!
Where did these guys come from?
The island is also a bird sanctuary,
and there are, in season, nesting puffins.
And they are just as cute as they look, quite frankly.
And they don't give a hoot about walkers.
And they come right out and they kind of
(audience laughing)
look at you, and then they go back into their hole.
And they're wonderful.
And it continues to go up and get steeper and steeper.
Here's a nesting puffer here,
not coming out to look at anybody.
Now we're almost to the top.
There's a defensive wall up here.
There's Little Skellig in the background.
Two defensive walls.
And you might think, what are they?
What do they have to defend themselves from out here?
It was the Vikings.
Credit to the Vikings, they attacked successfully
this monastery several times.
And it's one of the few written records
about the monastery is that the Vikings attacked,
and in one instance they carried off the abbott.
I don't know what that's all about,
but we won't dwell on that.
So this is the outer wall.
And then inside there are a number of,
again, these corbelled huts,
they're called beehive huts, and then oratories.
And this is one of the oratories,
or prayer houses, right here.
And this is one of the beehive huts where the monks lived.
There was probably no more than 13 people
living on this rock, 12 monks and an abbott.
And then there's a later 12th-century, medieval church here.
Let's see what else we've got.
Ah! This is one of the oratories.
Again, all dry stone masonry, no mortar is used at all.
Again, a prayer house and perhaps an old garden here.
The life was extremely severe out here.
They were totally exposed to the elements.
There is a small lighthouse on the far side of the island.
The lighthouse is 175 feet tall,
and of course it has a glassed-in room at the top
with extra-heavy strong glass.
And the sea breaks out the glass
in the top of the lighthouse,
oh, about once every five years.
As the Irish would say, " 'Tis a desperate place."
And apparently just what the monks wanted,
the hermits wanted.
But they did some gardening.
Archaeologists have discovered the plots
where there were some,
some terraces and some gardening.
They ate seabirds, seabirds' eggs.
And then did some fishing.
It must have been an incredibly austere life.
Oh, damn it.
(audience laughing)
This is a cemetery here.
And there is an Early Christian cross right here,
which I'll show you in more detail.
This is probably the grave marker for the abbott himself.
And then there are some smaller stones down here.
And a bunch of quartzite pebbles!
It's interesting how a lot of these traditions
from the ancient past continue on into the present.
And one of them that goes back
at least 5000 years to Newgrange
is this placing of white quartzite pebbles in graves.
And I've seen graves as recent as
maybe early 20th-century paupers' graves
that will have a couple of quartzite pebbles in them.
It's really intriguing.
So here is the sort of the
historic downtown of Skellig Michael here.
And here's a close-up of the cross.
These Early Christian crosses
typically don't have extensions out on them
as you would expect of a crucifix-form cross.
And it's not known if this was just the style
or if maybe there was appendages here
made out of wood that are no longer preserved.
You can see a standard cross engraved on the thing,
but we don't know if this was later or what.
And a nice thingy here in the background.
This is standing in this little monastery,
looking up at the pinnacle.
And up here at the top are some more monks' cells here.
So apparently some of the guys
even wanted to get further away.
And an archaeologist friend of mine has climbed up here.
And he is an experienced mountaineering person,
and he said it was incredibly harrowing
and he would never do it again.
But there they were up there,
hermits getting as close to God as they possibly could.
It must've been a heck of a lifestyle.
The way of life here, again,
is one of asceticism and
removing oneself from the world
and its problems and becoming closer to God and praying.
And it must have been quite an experience.
So this is the road down now.
Remember, I got you up here,
now you all got to get down.
And it is hair-raising,
and as this next slide will attest.
These are two individuals here who have severe,
severe fear of heights.
And this is not something that, you know,
you hear of the two blind Irishmen
that went up Skellig Michael.
No, this isn't a joke.
These are people who are scared out of their gourd,
and they, fortunately, have their boyfriends with them.
And they got up okay but now they have to get down,
so they're going down with their eyes closed
and their boyfriends are leading them!
Good for them! Good for them!
(audience laughing)
These were not part of our tour, by the way.
This is the way down, again.
Nesting seabirds, our faithful ferry boat
waiting for us at the bottom.
And this is where we've come from.
We were up in someplace right about in there.
This is an area where there have been found
some terraces where archaeologists
believe that there were some fields.
So this island was chosen as a destination
for a small group of ascetic monks,
who in their pursuit of a greater union with God,
withdrew from civilization, such as it was at the time,
and lived up here by their wits and their determination.
Here we are, let's see, we're leaving the island here.
And on the way out we're going to go by Little Skellig,
which is a bird sanctuary.
And all that white stuff is as you might expect.
No one is allowed to land on this island.
The only people who can land
on Little Skellig are ornithologists
who come to check on the birds.
The main tenant, if you will,
are spectacular birds called gannets.
Gannets have a six-foot wingspan.
They are all-white, with black tips on their wings,
and a kind of golden head.
And there are, depending on I suppose
which you're around,
someplace shy of 30,000 nesting pairs
of gannets on this island,
of which we must be able to see at least 10,000 here.
Here's a little bit closer shot.
And it's also quite a place.
So here we are, the end of our trip, taking our boat back.
We are being escorted, in fact, by a fine gannet up here.
With its six-foot wingspan.
These spectacular ancient and not-so-ancient places
we have seen tonight are truly sources
of wonder and all.
And I feel fortunate to have been there
and to experience them.
We can only imagine how much the lives of the...
We can only imagine what the lives
of these people were like at these places,
but that is, of course,
the allure of both archaeology and of travel.
I hope you have enjoyed the trip.
And we can have some questions and answers
whenever you like.
Thank you very much.
(audience applauding)