Pollen core studies undertaken on High Island off the Co Galway coastline suggest it was inhabited before a monastic community settled there in the seventh century. Some limited arable farming may have taken place on the island towards the end of the Bronze Age, according to the research.
The pollen studies were carried out by members of NUI Galway's palaeenvironmental research unit at the department of botany, and are published in a new book on the island by Grellan D. Rourke and Jenny White Marshall. Tests were initiated in September, 1999, and analysis showed evidence of limited woodland cover. This was subsequently replaced by an area under grassland which expanded during the Iron Age.
The studies reflect the further extension of agricultural activity on the island - just over three kilometres off the north-west Connemara coast - when monks settled there in the early medieval period. The monastic settlement includes a mill system with reservoir, millpond and millraces, which indicate between 50 and 70 people lived there at any one time.
Details of that settlement, founded by St Fechin of Fore, and the background to its development are described and beautifully illustrated in the book, entitled High Island, by Rourke and White Marshall. It chronicles their involvement in archaeological work there over the past two decades.
Placed on the literary map by poet Richard Murphy, its former owner, High Island has some of the most extensive remains of an early medieval monastic community off the Galway coast. From the time the monks departed, mysteriously, in the ninth century, the outcrop of Dalradian rocks was uninhabited until a group of copper miners spent time there in the 19th century.
As the authors say, it is "rivalled . . . by few other Irish monastic sites in quantity and variety of material remains from the period, and presents an amazingly complete image of the life of these daring seafaring monks who, like Antony, sought salvation in retreat from the world". They quote an anonymous saying attributed to an Egyptian desert father to describe this passion which drove people to extreme measures: "Except a man shall say in his heart/ I alone and God are in this world/ he shall not find peace."
High Island: An Irish Monastery in the Atlantic by Jenny White Marshall and Grellan D. Rourke is published by Town House and Country House at £25 hardback, ISBN code 186059-121-3.
The more recent history of two neighbouring islands further north is explored in a Leargas documentary on RTE 1 television tomorrow night which documents the evangelical mission founded by the Rev Edward Nangle on Achill, and its outreach settlement on Inishbiggle. The Mission, produced and directed by Sheila de Courcy, is at 7.00 p.m. on RTE 1.