First there was Belderrig in north Mayo and, nearly a quarter of a century ago, Louis Marcus brought a team to photograph and comment on the wonders that the local schoolmaster had been responsible for opening up to the nation. He had for long been suspecting a pattern to certain stones that stood up out of the bog. He followed this up and so did his son, now the distinguished archaeologist at University College Dublin, Seamus Caulfield. Excavation revealed that these stones marked boundaries of a field system of Stone Age farmers, who worked the land, it was then thought, about 2,500 BC. The walls served a dual purpose - they cleared the ground for tillage and marked out the bounds of each family plot. Louis Marcus's cameraman, Bob Monks, registered the lazybed-like traces of a cultivated plot; also beneath the turf was found an oval enclosure in which farmers built their wooden houses. Since those days, one of the most original and striking of all our heritage centres has been built, a few miles eastward. It is more, it is spectacular not only in its siting but above all in its conception, design and in its building materials. The Ceide Fields Centre is the work of Mary MacKenna, the Office of Public Works project architect for the centre. You will have read that it was the stage for a musical event of some significance organised by Duchas, the Heritage Service, on June 12th. Charlie Lennon - maybe you were fortunate enough to be there - played his latest work Ceide Fields, one of the eight events in the ongoing Millennium Project Ceol Reoite: Frozen Music. This to celebrate different monuments and historic properties. There are magnificent sites to be celebrated, but this Mayo edifice - and surrounds - has something outstanding.
It is perched near huge cliffs where seabirds plane around a bay over a blue sea, where you can stand behind a railing on the cliff edge and hope, in vain, to get a glimpse of Iceland, and beyond it, Greenland, which are directly north of you. Admittedly at quite a distance. This has something which even the most compelling inland treasured monuments can hardly equal. Go and see. It will lift your spirits just to behold. And inside the building are also wonders.
Frozen music, we are told, comes from a dictum of Goethe: "Architecture is frozen music." Charlie Lennon and other musicians have the compensatory promise in a German rondo, which tells us that heaven and earth must pass away, but the work of the musicians lasts forever. Y