Another World

If you want to escape to another world you don’t have to take a plane, you can just get a boat with an outboard engine to Inis Cealtra. Known in English as ‘Holy Island’, it is an uninhabited island on Lough Derg on the Shannon, near Killaloe.

What gives it an ‘other world‘  feeling is not just isolation.  You can walk across its 50 grassy acres in less than five minutes though visiting its round tower, five churches, a holy well, bargaining stone, celebrity grave and relics of past pilgrimages will engage you for more than an hour. Most days, only birds will disturb the silence.

The ‘founder’ of Inis Celtra in 520 was Columba of Terryglass though when he arrived there already  was a ‘holy man’ living on the island, the hermit Mac Creiche, and a ‘tree whose juice had the flavour of honey and the headiness of wine’ (no longer there!).  An angel told Mac Creiche to leave the island and find another place for his hermitage!

Columba is better known for Terryglass where he later ran a strict and learned monastery which produced  invaluable  manuscripts in the Irish language such as the ‘Book of Invasions’ and ‘The Cattle Raid of Cooley’. That devotion to recording history have begun at Cealtra which was to produce its own manuscript treasures.   

Columba’s third successor in Cealtra was Stellan to whom Pope John IV sent a letter in 640 about the date of Easter. (I wonder how long it took to arrive.)

Next was Caimin (d. 653) whose high reputation attracted students from all over Ireland. He is the person most associated with Cealtra and the only one with a church named after him there. No one I met knew about earlier or later personages.     

Caimin wrote a commentary on the Psalms, collated with the Hebrew text. At that time the psalms were the most read texts in Ireland since they were recited every day in the monasteries. After him came Coelan (690 – 750) who wrote a life of St Bridget in Latin verse.

The hermitic tradition was renewed by Cosgrath who lived and died in the round tower there in the 10th century.

Corcran the Cleric, abbot in the early 11th century, was ‘known as the most celebrated ecclesiastic of Western Europe for religion and learning’.

Beside the 11th century ‘Saints Graveyard’, where monks slaughtered by marauding Vikings were buried, is the recent grave of Edna O’Brien, a representative of more recent novelists and poets. She died in 2024.

Cealtra’s association with so many saints was probably why pilgrimages to the island were popular over the centuries. In the week before Easter 1846 15,000 people gathered there. The festivities were considered too boisterous however and the pilgrimage was stopped for ‘excessive celebrations’.

The monastery had already been closed long before then, with the Reformation, and Cealtra begun to take on its present peaceful atmosphere.  

Go and experience it as soon you can because work is underway (of which some locals strongly disapprove) to build a Visitor’s Centre, car park and modern recreational facilities.