More Scottorum: buildings of worship in Ireland, c.400-950

In the period covered in this paper the vast majority or churches in Ireland were of timber or other organic materials. No fabric from any of these buildings survives and, with the exception of a few at unrepresentative minor sites, virtually no evidence for them has been recovered through archaeological excavation. A few congregational mortared stone churches were built before the mid tenth century but, as we shall see, they rarely survive either. This, then, is a paper about a group of buildings that have left very few physical traces. And yet we can discuss their form and character with a fair degree of confidence, more confidence perhaps than in the case of many of their
non-extant Anglo-Saxon counterparts. In part, this is because of contemporary textual and art historical sources, but the principal reason is the tenacity of tradition in early Irish architecture: as a result of this it can be inferred that the later (tenth to twelfth century) churches of mortared stone which still survive at many sites provide us with a good indication of what their predecessors looked like.