III.1.2
THE "SCATTERED" PLAN OF THE
EARLY IRISH MONASTERIES
These early Irish monasteries were usually set up in a
circular or ovoid enclosure surrounded by a wall of stone
or earth with a ditch outside—not very different in appearance
from the old Iron Age ring forts (the so-called
cashels) many of which in fact appear to have been taken
over by the Irish missionaries and converted into monastery
sites.[7]
Within such an enclosure there was a church, in
general of very modest dimensions, and loosely scattered
around it, without any fixed architectural order, the beehive
huts for the monks, as a rule inhabited by two,
occasionally by more—as well as a place for eating, a guest
house, a kitchen, and a school.
When the community outgrew the size of its original
church, rather than replacing it by a new and larger one,
the monks added another church and yet another one if
further growth demanded it. Since the majority of these
buildings were constructed in timber, they have left no
visual record whatsoever; and if it were not for the fact that
on the isolated and wind-swept islands off the west coast of
Ireland trees and thatch were not available, the monks
thereby being forced to build in stone, we would live in
total ignorance of the layout of these early monastery sites.
The best preserved among these stone-built monasteries is
the cashel of Inishmurray Island, off the Sligo coast (fig.
195). It consisted of an egg-shaped enclosure measuring
internally about 175 feet in length and 135 feet in breadth,
The enclosure was formed by a dry-built masonry wall that
varied at its base in thickness from 7 to 15 feet and rose to a
height of well over 13 feet. It shelters the remains of three
rectangular oratories of modest size, a circular school house
and two beehive huts. To complete the original appearance
of this settlement, one would have to add to the reconstruction
shown in figure 195 a few more dwellings for monks as
well as buildings indispensable for community use, such as
a refectory and a kitchen, which have left no trace on the
site.
Monasteries of this type—or to be more precise, their
timbered equivalents—must have been a common sight in
sixth- and seventh-century Ireland and England as well as
at all of those places on the continent where Irish missionaries
established new monastic communities. It must
have been that same type of settlement with monastic
dwellings loosely dispersed around an oratory that St.
Columban and St. Gall had founded at the upper end of
Lake Constance and that sprang up in the wilderness of the
upper Steinbach river, where after Columban's departure
for Italy, St. Gall had formed a cell that in the centuries to
follow was to become one of the greatest Carolingian
monasteries.
Irish monasticism, like that of the Egyptian and Syrian
monks of the desert after which it was modelled, was based
upon the concept of individual self-discipline of holy men
living either as hermits or in loosely connected groups. The
architectural layout of the Irish monastery mirrors this fact
as clearly as the ordered architectural enclosure of the
Benedictine monastery reflects the highly organized community
life established by the Rule of St. Benedict.
