Lights, cameras, film crews . . . and now a link with Harvard University. Wherever he is, St Colman must be dancing for joy over new interest in the monastery he founded at Mayo Abbey.
The early Christian pilgrimage site, the setting for the film version of John McGahern's novel, Amongst Women, will be the subject of a £40,000 research programme conducted by international botany specialist Dr Janice Fuller, who is from Cork. Dr Fuller, a research associate at Harvard, has taken up a Forbairt Science Fellowship at NUI Galway.
"[It's] the most exciting development since the Ceide Fields," says Prof Michael O'Connell, who will oversee Dr Fuller's project at NUI Galway's department of botany. The study should yield valuable information, he says.
The study ties in with the Mayo Millennium Project, a local initiative owing much of its energy to a farmer, Mr Joe Brett. A LEADER and FAS-funded scheme has been compiling an archaeological inventory, with a view to establishing a visitors' centre in the 1845 Famine church built within the monastic site. The work involves archaeological expertise and is directed by Ms Maura Begley, archaeologist Ms Carmel Joyce and Mr Stephen Goldrick.
Along with Iona, Lindisfarne and Inishbofin, the abbey outside Balla village, Co Mayo, is referred to in the writings of the Venerable Bede. St Colman, who was of the Columban tradition, spent his youth in Iona and Lindisfarne and brought Saxon monks to the "new" monastery which he built.
Dr Fuller has specialised in the impact of early European farming settlements on the eastern US landscape. She will apply pollen analysis to investigate long-term changes brought about by human activity and climate oscillations in central Mayo. Her research will be based on cores from the bogs and lakes around the abbey. The results are expected to yield a record of up to 15,000 years of environmental change.
Much of the area around the abbey, including Norman and Augustinian sites, is relatively unspoilt, and has great archaeological potential, according to Prof O'Connell. The information gathered will be used in the proposed visitors' centre, which he supports. So if the McGahern film doesn't do it, the project will also attract visitors to a part of Ireland that is overlooked.
