is inevitably known as “Ireland’s Alcatraz”
because of its intermittent use as a prison for 1,300 years.
It includes a solitary-confinement cell
where a prisoner, sometimes a child,
was chained to the wall by an iron neck-collar for weeks.
For at least the first five centuries of its use as a prison,
monks elsewhere in Ireland voluntarily sought solitude
and isolation, sometimes unsheltered on Atlantic islets
(kept alive by mussels and gulls' eggs);
sometimes deep in the primeval forests (none of which
has survived the Anglo-Norman-English-Scottish
incursions, invasions and extractions);
sometimes underground;
sometimes in corbelled stone or wattle-and-daub huts
which they built beside holy wells,
and in which no artefacts have been found...
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