In around 470, Saint Brigid established the Convent of Cill-Dara in County Kildare and founded a school of art here which went on to produce the illuminated manuscript; the Book of Kildare. Another Irish saint from this era with some interesting legends was Saint Brendan. Known as the navigator it is said he discovered the Americas, sailing from his home county of Kerry, sometime in the 5th Century. Their iterary output in the Middle Ages wasn’t very great, in terms of how their commentaries on the Bible were utterly boring”

There is, of course, an abundance of books out there about ‘Celtic spirituality’ that owe rather more to the ‘New Age’ beliefs and practices than the historical Church in these islands, but Fr Ó Ríordáin says it’s important to focus on the Christian character of the Irish saints. Focus The absolution side of it was something that developed from the spiritual direction of a person,” he adds. Legacy One key area where the Irish came to excel was in Computus, and the Irish monk Cummian, thought to have been based in Munster, was a leading researcher on the subject. “By the early seventh century there are three ways to calculate when Easter occurs. It is the Irish who develop this into an entire new genre of literature on Computus,” Kelly says. was a trailblazer. Leaving home at 16 on a donkey, bringing her younger sister Fíona with her, she set up a monastic school at Killeedy (Cell Íde) and later became the foster mother of the saints of Ireland. She was a mentor to St Brendan.

I would say they are part of what we are the part of a legacy,” he says. “Liam de Paor in one of his books says that no matter what happens in Ireland today, or what people in the future do, one thing that cannot be denied or changed is that we are people who have had 1500 years of Christianity. Whether we like it or not, that’s us. Then in the 12th Century you had the reform of the Church which meant the transition from a monastic church to a diocesan structure,” he continues. “That’s basically the Norman Church – even though they had reform before the Normans came but that’s another matter, but from about the 12th century onwards you didn’t have the same approach towards the canonisation of saints.” The third member of Ireland’s trio of patron saints is, of course, St Colmcille, sometimes known as Columba, who Fr Ó Ríordáin describes as “one of those magnetic figures that kind of transcends time”.

Hagiography is fascinating, especially Irish hagiography, in particular the lives of early Irish saints. This ancient literary genre was an important way of recording the extraordinary lives of saints and the miracles and incredible feats attributed to them. After decades of industrial peat-cutting to fuel Ireland's stoves, the bog was no longer nature's healthy blanket of saturated spongy moss it once was. But, several years since harvesting ended (due to green policies), it was encouraging to see flora gaining confidence over a largely drab landscape.Many of Yeats’s life milestones happened here: he became a father, a politician, won the Nobel prize for literature and published poetry collection The Tower. The Winding Stair, which followed in 1933, is named after the moon-shaped stone steps that curve their way to the top of the keep. His friend (and the co-founder of Dublin’s Gaiety theatre) Augusta Gregory lived nearby at Coole Park, where he signed the Autograph Tree along with JM Synge, George Bernard Shaw and Sean O’Casey. Yeats also mounted a plaque on the castle walls for posterity with the words: “I, the poet William Yeats/With old mill boards and sea-green slates/And smithy work from the Gort forge/Restored this tower for my wife George;/And may these characters remain/When all is ruin once again.” While in the area, don’t miss Kilmacduagh, an impressive monastic ruin with the highest round tower in the world, which, some say, leans more acutely than Pisa’s. If you’re staying, drop by for mussels at Moran’s on the Weir. Cummian's expertise was shown in letters dating from 633 between him and the abbot of Iona, Ségéne. Cummian had changed his method for calculating the fall of Easter, breaking away from the method adopted by monasteries founded by Colm Cille and adopting the one used in Rome. This caused Ségéne to accuse Cummian of heresy. Something said briefly, as Nietzsche once pointed out, can be the fruit of much long thought, and Fr John J. Ó Ríordáin’s Early Irish Saints is eloquent testimony to this. A slim book, drawing together 15 pen pictures of holy men and women from the era when Ireland was known as ‘the land of saints and scholars’, its brevity conceals an extraordinary depth of understanding.

It was that bit more benign,” he continues. “Columbanus’ rule was tough, no questions about it, and he expected it from his monks, and wouldn’t expect anything more than he’d put up with himself.” Other saints who would have inherited pagan attributes and anecdotes would have includes St Senan at Scattery Island, who would have acquired details originally linked with the pagan river-god Seanan, he says, adding that St Ailbhe in Emly would similarly have been an inheritor of a long pre-Christian tradition. The Irish even borrowed the Roman alphabet so they could translate Latin documents and help themselves to the latest devices.Springing forward a few centuries, Ireland has contributed to global knowledge of the world around us in many other areas. Robert Boyle, a Waterford man known as "the father of chemistry", was one of the first scientists in the world to suggest that matter was not made of earth, water, air and fire (as was thought at the time) but was instead made up of smaller particles, which we now know as atoms. Maud Delap, a self-taught marine biologist who studied specimens off the shoreline of Valentia in Co Kerry, made major contributions to understanding the complex life-cycles of jellyfish and other marine life. And we are likely all familiar with the story of William Rowan Hamilton who, in a moment of inspiration, inscribed his quaternion equation on Broom Bridge in Dublin – an equation which is now core to programming 3D graphics. Christianity first came to Ireland between the 3rd and 5th Centuries and while much of Europe was plunging into the Dark Ages, Ireland provided a beacon of light. A family feud set Gobnait on her spiritual journey, which led her first to study with St Enda. (She was his only female student.) One story tells of how St Gobnait stopped the spread of plague by using honey as a cure; another states that she used her stave to draw a white line that prevented the plague entering her parish. The manuscript is written in Latin but in complicated parts it has embedded Irish where there is a need for detailed explantation. The author of the text has intentionally included Irish, incontrovertible truth it is of Irish origin. We have these beautiful numbers from the Swiss Alps. It is really magic to see these.”

The celebration of St Brigid’s Day on February 1 – the pagan feast of Imbolc – was probably intended as a symbolic gesture, Fr Ó Ríordáin says, noting that with this being seen as a hinge of the year, with the worst of the winter being over, it was a fitting day to celebrate somebody who represented a new beginning for Ireland.

Music and the Stars : Mathematics in Medieval Ireland is in book shops or available from fourcourtspress.ie