Sacred Ireland by Jon Michael Riley Ireland1 | Page 2

Introduction

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Above: Jesus on O’Connell Street, Dublin. The Parnell Monument is right of center.
Opposite: The Lia Fail stone at the center of Tara, County Meath.

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This presentation represents a hypothetical design for a book of photographs (with short explanatory text ) on
Ireland’s sacred places. The spiral binding is only for convenience and is not meant to suggest the final product.

t around 4 million people, Ireland is one of the
smallest countries in the European Union. Yet
this island of green is dense with rich
layers of history, legend, folk sagas, heroes
and villains, saints and spirits, colonization,
skirmishes, uprisings, famines, plagues and
wars of independence. Most have left artifacts,
some sort of visual evidence that are the
stories of this land, and they are dotted all
over Ireland.
For this book I have chosen to examine
four distinct layers of sacred places. First are
those of pre-history, the early stone (Mesolithic
and Neolithic) and bronze ages; second
are those of the Christian era, the myriad
ecclesiastical and monastic sites; third are the
many holy wells and places of pilgrimage,
like Croagh Patrick, Station Island, or St.
Brigid’s Well, which embrace both preChristian and Christian sacredness and represent
a vernacular, or folk, approach to the divine; and
fourth, places of great national importance, even
sacredness, to the birth of the Irish Republic, and
the securing of Irish sovereignty.
The earliest artifacts in the landscape are difficult to
date because they were left by people who settled Ireland

well before the Celts, who arrived on this island around
1000-600 BC. Many of these ancient sites are visible beside
roads filled with speeding BMWs and trucks filled with
building supplies for another housing estate or a Tesco
shopping center.
Throughout Ireland today there is a real problem
with unfettered growth while at the same time maintaining
and honoring the sacred landscape. A good example of this
dynamic issue is the new Motorway being built on the very
edge of Tara, once the most important place in
all of ancient Ireland. Being one of the crown
jewels of Irish heritage - the royal seat of the
Irish kings - the road construction has been
controversial to say the least.
These sacred places, anointed by
reason of age, mystery, longevity or some
sublime design, seem to be everywhere
in Ireland. This is attested to by a careful
scrutiny of any 1 inch-to-1 kilometer
Discovery Series map. Barrows, raths,
standing stones, holy wells, abbeys,
hermitages, monasteries, famine and battle
sites, notable birthplaces and monuments are
densely arrayed across the land.
I frequently struggle to grasp the profoundness
of this prolific layering of the ancient and the
contemporary that persist right into the wi-fi age of the
21st century. A few years back, while photographing the
dramatic Kilclooney Dolmen in County Donegal, I saw in
the distance a work crew laying fiber-optic cable alongside
the small, rural R261 road so that schools, homes and the
local pub could access the internet. This juxtaposition of the
very old and the new is everywhere in Ireland.
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