But the earliest Irish (or more correctly Scotti, or Scots) left more than cleared plains in their wake; they left us their great monuments: stone fortresses like Dun Aengus, Dun Conor, Aileach and Staigue : dolmens, stone circles, standing stones, court tombs, passage-graves and burial chambers that litter the landscape. Crowning them all in its majestic splendour is Newgrange and sister shrines Knowth and Dowth set in the lush landscape of the Boyne Valley, our own Valley of the Kings -a stones throw away from Royal Tara.

From the coming of Christianity to Ireland through to the end of our Golden Age with the Viking incursions and the later Norman Invasion the Irish landscape was moulded with a newer, more symetrical, more architectural style of monument. The genealogy of this movement can be traced from its earliest origins in the beautiful but tiny Gallerus Oratory through to the magnificient Cormac's Chapel on the Rock of Cashel and the wonderful, but later Christ Church cathedral in Dublin.

With the deliberate repression and destruction of the Celtic church in Ireland and mainland Europe over the centuries by the Roman popes, (using everything from treachery to mass-murder to achieve the total Romanisation of northern Europe) one of the most beautiful religious movements ever to draw it's inspiration from the teachings of Jesus was suppressed so throughly its voice was stilled forever.