Showing posts with label Co Wexford. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Co Wexford. Show all posts

Friday, April 17, 2020

Dunbrody Abbey




If whole, Dunbrody Abbey would be astonishingly beautiful.
As ruin, it stands, vestige of a medieval past, stripped of context;
its magnificence magnified by isolation, a gemstone outcrop
in a pasture, now lichened to the colours of the Irish sky.

Occasional flourishes in the stonework coax imagination’s
wooden scaffolds, ladders, ropes and pulleys to be assembled:
ribs must fan across vaulted ceilings, capitals must crown the columns,
grotesques and gargoyles must emerge, trespassers from the walls.

And though a melancholy breath pervades the ruined passages and doorways
from the devastation wrought by men, now smoothed by centuries’ weathering,
and the ceiling of sky that portends change and the eventual passing of all things,
its splendour prevails, and like sun dazzling on water, the old walls enchant.

Wednesday, June 29, 2016

Among the Ruins





If it was whole, Dunbrody Abbey would be beautiful. However, the ruin stands, like so many monastic ruins throughout  Ireland, a magnificently sculpted limestone outcrop in the middle of a field; majestic in its isolation and its remains; lichened to the colours of the Irish sky; colours that nature knows befit the Irish landscape .

If it was whole, all that it is would be before you. As it is, you must rebuild, refurbish, re-carve.  Here and there small ornamental flourishes survive in its stonework; imagination kicks in, but it is too great a task to restore all that wonderful ornamentation; enough to know that it was there. Searching out these small details becomes a treasure hunt.


If it was whole, the roof would exclude the sky and the light; the lancet windows would be of stained glass not of moving clouds, the floor would be darkly flagged, the recesses as black as caves. Today it is  a flood of  glorious daylight.