Browse Items · Digital Derg: A Deep Map

"A melancholy silence shrouded the scene"

"I remember a strange Easter Sunday spent on Saints' Island, not indeed with any hope of finding archaeological confirmation of its history, but simply in communing with the past..."

"Unconcernedly the Easter sunshine poured down on that scene of desertion and decay"

"The land [of Saints' Island] was cultivated at one time. The marks of the furrows were clearly to be seen at the early season of which I speak..."

Tags: agriculture, Alice Curtayne, building, decay, easter, fauna, flora, isolation, lichen, monastery, moss, overgrown, ruins, Saints Island, twentieth century, weeds

"You will find instead only stumps, bumps, and conquering armies of weeds, cruel in their strength"

"Do not visit Saints' Island with expectation of finding carved stones, a clear ground plan of ancient buildings, or examples of early Christian masonry..."

Tags: Alice Curtayne, bramble, cultural memory, cultural trauma, destruction of built heritage, disappointment, inaccessibility, isolation, John O'Donovan, lichen, monasticism, negative description, nostalgia, overgrown, ruins, sadness, twentieth century, weeds

"On prizing up a few loose stones, one exposes heaps of enormous bluebell bulbs, white and skull-like in shape"

The rampant flora overgrowing Saints' Island

"Briars encompass it so thickly, and with such aggressiveness, one cannot approach within five or six feet of the mound"

"In the middle of this desolation [on Saints' Island] is an enclosure thickly overgrown with briars, to which barriers of nettles almost prohibit entrance..."

Tags: 'Celtic' monasticism, Alice Curtayne, bramble, burial, graveyard, inaccessibility, monastery, monasticism, overgrown, Saints' Island, St. Dabheoc, tomb, twentieth century, weeds

The Franciscans

"The Franciscans took up the charge of St. Patrick's Purgatory when it was the most persecuted and derided institution of the Irish Church..."

Tags: Alice Curtayne, Catholicism, eighteenth century, Franciscans, neglect, penal times, pilgrimage, Protestant critique, purgatory, ruin, secret worship, seventeenth century, Station Island, suppression, twentieth century

The 1795 disaster

"The end of the eighteenth-century history of Lough Derg is sadly remembered because of a particularly bad boating accident..."

Tags: 1795 disaster, accusation, Alice Curtayne, boating, disaster, drinking, drowning, eighteenth century, Friars' Island, malfeasance, pilgrim, pilgrim crossing, poteen, Station Island, twentieth century

An omen of disaster prior to the 1795 accident

"As a boat was being loaded with passengers at eleven o'clock, an elderly man arrived at the shore and urgently signalled to his son to come away with him..."

Tags: 1795 disaster, Alice Curtayne, boating, disaster, dream, drowning, eighteenth century, Folklore, omen, Oral History, pilgrim, pilgrim crossing, pilgrimage, supernatural, survivor, twentieth century

"There were boats at hand, and presence of mind, even among the onlookers, could have averted the tragedy"

"Ninety-three people were then crowded into an old and leaky boat, despite their protests. The fact that the boatmen were drunk made the passengers still more uneasy..."

Tags: 1795 disaster, accusation, Alice Curtayne, drinking, drowning, Friars' Island, inaction, incompetence, malfeasance, onlookers, Oral History, panic, pilgrim crossing, Station Island, twentieth century

Burials on Friars' Island, in Templecarne, and further away

"About twenty of the victims were buried on Friars' Island, where fir-trees on a mound show their grave to-day..."

Tags: 1795 disaster, Alice Curtayne, burial, Connacht, drowning, Friars' Island, graveyard, mountains, pilgrim crossing, pilgrims, poverty, Station Island, Templecarne Graveyard, twentieth century

Browse Items (75 total)