The remains of Slane Friary, on a hill overlooking the modern village of Slane in Co. Meath, can be clearly seen from the road as one approaches the village from Dublin. This is the main road to Derry and western Ulster. At Slane it crosses the River Boyne just a few miles to the west of Brú na Bóinne — the bend of the Boyne — where the river turns in a U-shape before resuming its eastward journey to the sea at Mornington. Within the U lie the Neolithic sites of Newgrange, Knowth and Dowth, the first of these being one of the true wonders of Ireland.
As old as the Egyptian pyramids, Newgrange is a passage tomb, a burial site. It is 11 metres high and over 80 metres in diameter, with a corbelled roof that has kept the interior dry for nearly four millennia, this in a country with abundant rainfall. A series of gutters carry rainwater to the margins of the tomb, where it runs off harmlessly. The tomb is aligned to the rising sun on midwinter day, for on that day and that day alone a lightbox over the entrance admits the rays of the sun, just breaking the horizon to the east, to flood the full length of the entry passage and to strike the back wall of the central burial chamber. The unknown pastoral people who built this and other extraordinary structures long antedated the Celts.
The Celtic peoples who occupied Ireland from about 300 BC and created a common linguistic culture throughout the island also established themselves in this lush river valley and its environs. This is rich limestone land, perfect for the pastoral rural economy of the Celts, as it had been for all the peoples that preceded them and whom they had obliterated from history. The royal site of Tara — seat of the kings of the southern Uí Néill — lies just 15 km to the south west. This was a provincial centre of some importance, although its later inflation into the seat of the high kings of Ireland was a nationalist whimsy: there was no such centralised authority in Celtic Ireland. Tara had been a site of military and strategic importance in pre-Celtic times, for like Cashel in Munster it commands a stunning view of the flat country all around and is therefore a formidable defensive position. It has evidence of human settlement from as far back as the 3rd millennium BC.
For all the early inhabitants of Ireland, this was a landscape worth possessing. So it is no surprise that the story of Christianity in Ireland starts here, albeit with what is certainly a fable. According the legend, St Patrick converted the local king at the hill above Slane to Christianity by showing him a shamrock and explaining that the trefoil leaves in the one plant represented an image of the unity of the Trinity.
According to the ballad, St Patrick was a gentleman — he came of dacent people. True. He is for the most part a figure of mystery, although the shadow of the real person is discernible. And this is for a reason: that he is the first figure in the history of the island to leave us a written record of any kind. In his case, he has left us a record of himself, a kind of displaced autobiography.
Two fragments are all we have, but they are undoubtedly the work of his hand. So, who was he? He was the son of a Romanised British family, born in the early fifth century, who had been captured by Irish piratical raiders and sold into slavery. His family were Christian, like all the late Roman elite, metropolitan and provincial alike. Having eventually escaped back to Britain, he dreamed that he was being recalled to Ireland to evangelise the island for Christ.
He was probably not the first Christian missionary in the country but he was certainly one of the most potent. His mission was confined to the northern half of the island: the southern half contains no verifiable Patrician sites. And the two documents he has left us? The first, and more important, his Confessio, is the text from which we can patch together the outline of his life. The second, the Letter to Coroticus, is a bitter protest against the depredations of a British chieftain whose troops came ashore in Ireland and slaughtered newly evangelised Christians, an outrage that Patrick might have felt with particular keenness given his own earlier experience at the hands of the Irish.
So this is the ambiguous man who stands before the sub-king above Slane, some time in the early fifth century, and convinces him of the Trinitarian version of Christianity. Or doesn’t. Almost certainly, this is the purest myth and there is not a shred of evidence in support of it. Which is important: because the point of Patrick is not that we can prove that he did this or that, or even that he was the national evangelist, but that he was the first living, breathing human being on the island of Ireland of whom we have a secure record, however tentative. Before him, all is conjecture, heroic myth and uncertainty. Here is flesh and blood: a real person.
The French have a marvellous phrase, les lieux de mémoire: the sites of memory. Slane is Ireland’s first such site, not because of what happened here (it didn’t) but because of how it has been remembered. When Patrick converted the king — so the story goes — it was Eastertide, the most sacred moment in the Christian calendar. And here, on the hill above Slane in the early fifth century, he lit the first Paschal Fire ever seen in Ireland: the light upon a hill that kindled a tradition still living today.
The Hill of Slane is also the site of the earliest documented mention of a round tower, that most distinctive of early Christian structures, in the Irish annals. No trace of it remains, it having been burned by the Vikings.
The story of Patrick and the Paschal Flame may be a myth, but it is an enabling one. On this site, important since pre-history, occurs the first narrative event in the history of Irish Christianity. And even if that narrative was fiction, it was no less powerful for that. Here, not long after Patrick, St Erc founded a monastery which subsisted for the best part of a millennium until the Franciscans established a friary in the early sixteenth century, just a generation or so before friaries and monasteries got it in the neck from Henry VIII. The church there finally closed as a place of worship in the early eighteenth century, and it is the ruins of this late medieval/early modern ecclesiastical complex that you see from the road as you drive north towards Slane.
