Mayo's hidden gems are well worth exploring

What places can you visit in Mayo that will give you a real sense of its history? The county is full of interesting sites from the ancient to the modern but many of them are impressive while being hard to make sense of. If the idea of exploring our past through a few day trips appeals, it’s worth considering which sites can tell you the most about particular periods of our history, and where in time you might start. Over the course of three articles, I’ll make a few suggestions as to places you can visit this summer which shine a real light on central aspects of our history. Let’s hope the sun also shines while you visit them.

Now we all know that the county is full of impressive remains from the distant past, whether that is the extremely well-known Céide Fields or the almost endless collection of neolithic structures and remains. You can literally trip over them as you are out and about. There are less well-known and hidden gems to be found everywhere, such as the historically recent forts like the one at Kilcashel in Kilmovee. I visited it during the Covid period and it is a really remarkable place, up on a height and dominating the area around it. You cannot help thinking that the person who put it there must have had the same eye as Monsignor James Horan had when he stood on Barnacogue and imagined an airport.

You could spend a lot of time on those sites, but I find that the challenge with them is there is a lot of speculation about why they were built. Existing as they did in a time before written records, archaeology can tell us a fair amount about the lives of those who built such sites, but understanding their motivations is harder.

So, for these pieces we will stay within the range of the last 1,000 years or so.

Where to begin? A good place to start is Killala, a really interesting location with a Round Tower, a cathedral and a lovely setting. A religious centre since at least the time of Patrick, its Round Tower was probably built in the 12th century. When you visit, you can’t help but be impressed by it, but there is much to puzzle out here too. Looking at the tower, you inevitably wonder why people would have spent so much time and resources on building it. When you consider how long it would have taken, and all the limitations on these people in terms of their technology, why would they have bothered? And it isn’t just Killala - there are five Round Towers in Mayo, as is well known, some larger than others but all maintaining essentially the same design. Where there is the same design there must be a pattern of behaviour.

That takes us back many centuries, before the Normans arrived in 1169, to consider the power structures and who was in charge. The local Gaelic chieftains would have ultimately commissioned the Church to build these structures. How did they concentrate the means to do that? What was the Church trying to say by building them? We were all taught at school that they were built to protect monks against Vikings, but the era of Viking raids was coming to an end when they were being built.

And whatever about Killala, you would have been a fair sailor to get a Viking Longship up the Moy to Meelick, or an even better one to find a way to sail to Turlough, or Balla, or Aghagower. And anyway, with only a little fresh water, you wouldn’t survive any kind of siege sitting up there for long. It seems unlikely then that they were defensive structure or refuges.

Could they have been a place to store things? When you stand in Killala, and look up, it seems a long way to go with a narrow enough warehouse at the top. But maybe that means that the stuff up there was valuable, and you didn’t need to be a Viking to mount a thieving raid. At the same time, most of the Round Towers would have been protected by some local chieftain, and the form of justice for thieves was, shall we say, more robust than it is now. On that basis, round towers being some kind of secure locker seems less likely.

So, a reasonable guess is that they were some form of bell tower or some way of marking territory, or signalling authority, or all of those things at once. When you look at them in that context, you can see with clearer eyes. Our part of Ireland at that time was a long way from the centre of civilisation, but it was by no means cut off. The Christianisation of Ireland following the days of Patrick placed Ireland at the centre of what was going on, not the periphery. Ireland and our part of it became quite literate, and the monks would have had a pretty good idea of what was going on in other parts of Europe. They would have had a more than fair idea of what Rome was like, and even more so, what it had been like in the days of the Roman Empire.

Appreciating that, you can look at the Round Towers and imagine them like the Obelisks of Egypt, themselves copied by the Romans. You can imagine the early tradition of the Church, where men sat in silent contemplation on the top of tower-like structures, and by their piety became figures of devotion and their locations places of pilgrimage. This was all known about in the Mayo of the era of the Round Tower. And if you go an old Italian city today, you will see what they call a campanile, a large tower-like structure in the middle of their cities, often built in the Middle Ages when those Italian cities were fabulously wealthy. And then you realise that in the cold, dark and wet west of Ireland, people were building things much the same – maybe a little less elaborate – around the same time, and for probably the same reasons. Go into the Front Square of Trinity College, and you will see a campanile, built many hundred of years after people in our part of the world were building them in Killala, and Balla, and Meelick. So we are not so peripheral after all – something to reflect on as part of your Killala visit.

Our next stop will take us forward a bit, to the era after the Normans had arrived in Ireland but before the modern English were yet in charge. The Normans had landed in 1169 and they fairly quickly extended their power across the country. Not surprisingly, they went for the best land first and there they settled in the biggest numbers. Kilkenny, Wexford, Kildare, Cork – that was where the most powerful families went. But some came west too, and that story will bring us to next week’s starting point: Burrishoole Priory.