In May 1976, RTÉ aired a news segment about an explorer named Tim Severin who was preparing to do something extraordinary. He was going to sail from the Dingle Peninsula in County Kerry to Newfoundland — retracing the legendary voyage of St Brendan the Navigator — in a boat built entirely from materials available to a sixth-century Irish monk. Ox hides. Ash and oak. Wool grease. Two miles of leather thong.
I was ten years old and I was absolutely enthralled.
Fifty years later, I still am.
The Brendan, as the boat was called, completed the 4,500-mile crossing in just over thirteen months, passing — as St Brendan himself may have done — by the Aran Islands, Iona, the Hebrides, the Faroes, Iceland and Greenland before reaching the New World. She now rests in a glass boathouse at Craggaunowen in County Clare. If you haven’t visited her, you should.
Years later, I happened to catch a BBC programme by Dan Snow called How the Celts Saved Britain — and around the same time discovered the book that probably inspired it How the Irish saved Civilisation by Thomas Cahill — and the fascination was reawakened.
From a windswept monastery on the Aran Islands to a library in the mountains of northern Italy. From Aran to Bobbio.
That is what this blog is about.