Country Diary: The Burren, Ireland

This year marks my 21 years as a country diary scribe. I immediately wondered how I would celebrate and decided to write a diary. So off I set to investigate what the Office of Public Works (OPW) had been doing to conserve and preserve the ruined Cistercian abbey of Corcomroe, Sancta Maria de Petra Fertilis (St Mary of the Fertile Rock), a rock set among Burren rocks, clints, grykes, in Bell harbor, hence near the sea.

I was pleased because the OPW had roofed the central and two side chapels, leaving all beneath intact. The day was dull, the sky cloud-laden, rain had been and still threatened. I had the whole abbey to myself. In his poem Ireland with Emily, John Betjeman described Corcomroe as "A ruined abbey, chancel only, / Lichen-crusted, time-befriended". The ribbed vaulting with herringbone chevron in the presbytery (main chapel) was delightful and the underlying wicker-work was still visible. Flowers in stone was the only way to describe the delicately carved, foliate capitals.

The local stonemasons of 1210-20, in an exuberance of creative energy, released from the local limestone some flowers of the Burren, poppies erect, harebells. I also detected fleur de lys and the Celtic triskele, the symbol of Manannán mac Lir, the lord of the otherworld who carried his Celtic heroes to his realm beneath the sea. The sculptors must have sneaked in the triskele, a pagan symbol, without the monks noticing. I marveled at the jug-eared, thin-lipped face carved on a column, gazed at the encircling hills remembering Yeats's description, "like a circle of agate or of jade", in his play The Dreaming of the Bones, set in this very abbey. Then I thought of another celebration, a glass of champagne that Mary Ann said we'd drink. I hastened home!