Things To Know
Mists of Time
From Dublin to Kerry
Islands and Lakes
Traveling North
The Gaelic Lifestyle
Divided Ireland
The great open spaces of the peat country as seen from Sligo Bay
© AA Photo Library
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Mists of Time
Ireland claims with pride that it was a “land of saints and scholars” when the rest of Europe was deep in the Dark Ages. It
is often described as a Celtic country, with all the myth-making that goes along with that term. The Celts are seen as being
a distinctive lost race of Iron Age people who, in the face of first Roman and then Anglo Saxon aggression, retreated into
Scotland, Ireland, Wales and Cornwall in England, from where they passed down the cultural values of their time. They did
not call themselves Celts, and the term may be only a convenient label, but what is certain is that the influence of the earliest
Bronze Age and Iron Age cultures survives on the peripheries of the British Isles. This is especially true in Ireland, where
the evocative Gaelic language, still heard today, is its greatest expression.
There are thousands of prehistoric sites in Ireland: on the remote western seaboard, on the Beara peninsula, in County Kerry,
and at exceptional places such as the Brù na Bòinne burial complex, in County Meath north of Dublin. Even where they are ruinous
and vestigial, these ancient sites are hauntingly evocative.
You will find within the same landscape the music, song, wit and drama of Ireland that have been enshrined in hundreds of
films, songs, dances and stories. A sense of the past is intense here; it has shaped Ireland in a seminal way, for better
or for worse.
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