The Many-headed Doorway

Around the year 1590 Elizabeth l of England wrote to Sir H. Sydney, her Deputy in Ireland,  suggesting the founding of a National Protestant University at Clonfert, on account of its central position ‘on the highway of the lordly river Shannon’.

The project was never carried out (Trinity College Dublin was established instead) but I wonder what Brendan the Navigator, who established the monastic school at Clonfert in 563, would have thought of the idea. Clonfert was his last foundation, and where he was buried after his many travels. Its school was famous, at one time it housed no less than three thousand students.

One of Brendan’s successors was Cummian Fada, or Cummian the Tall, who took a leading part in the famous Celtic v Roman controversy over the date of Easter. His ’Paschal Epistle’, written in 632, has survived and is consider by today’s scholars as an outstanding illustration of cultivated learning at Clonfert’s university.

However if you plan to go to Clonfert don’t expect much.  There are no traces of a once great centre of learning.  It is on a secluded side street and the modest church on the site, now the Anglican cathedral, has few reminders of Brendan.  

Its one cultural treasure is a Hiberno-Romanesque doorway that goes back to 1180. What is striking is the number of heads on it. Among the six rows or orders of decorations above the doorway are a variety of animal and human heads.

The early Irish had a fascination with heads which they regarded as the 'seat of the soul' and believed that even in stone form had the ability to turn aside evil and bring about good fortune. On Clonfert’s doorway the heads guard the space between everyday outside concerns and the sacred space within but bring pre-Christian Ireland and Christian beliefs together.

It is said that the 11^th century church was built on the grand scale to reflect the fact that it was to stand beside Brendan’s grave. However the grave itself is easy to miss in a walk around the grounds and a sign inside the church itself suggests that the exact location is unknown.  

Brendan selected Clonfert as his place of burial, or as he called it, his ‘place of resurrection’. He was in Annaghdown on the Corrib visiting his sister Briga when he died in 577. Fearing that local people might steal his body for relics he arranged to have his remains returned to Clonfert, concealed in a luggage cart and accompanied by only one monk.

My own search to understand Brendan also ended at Clonfert and on my way home I had much to think about.  

Photo:   The many-headed doorway