Mystery of the round tower that is 1,000 years old or more...
IN days of old, it wasn’t just the Mayans, the Egyptians, or indeed the master megalithic builders of Masehowe on Orkney, built long before Stonehenge and most of the pyramids, who could turn their hand to a masterful piece of stone-work.
Have ye ever heard tell of the Irish Monks who built the exquisitely formed round towers which are found across the land of 50 shades of green?
I took this photograph last week of the round tower at Kilmacduagh, six miles from the fabled Kinvara. It’s 1,000 years old or more, maybe 7th century, and, bar a slight Pisa-like lean only discernible at certain angles, it remains pretty much as the day it was finished, a master work.
The circumference is 17.86 metres, giving it an external diameter of 5.68m. The overall height of the tower is just about 34 meters, making it the tallest round tower in existence, it also has the most number of windows – 11. The walls are over 6ft thick at the base, underneath which lie some skeletons, confirming the tower had been built in an existing cemetery.
Keys to the Grebe House and other locks can be obtained at the Tower View B & B (across the street) with a deposit of €5.
The 7th century saint, Saint Colman, son of Duagh, established a monastery on land given him by his cousin King Guaire. According to legend, Saint Colman MacDuagh was walking through the woods of the Burren when his girdle fell to the ground. Taking this as a sign, he built his monastery on this spot.
The girdle was said to be studded with gems and was held by the O’Shaughnessys centuries later, along with St Colman’s crozier, or staff.
The girdle was later lost, but the crozier came to be held by the O’Heynes and may now be seen in the National Museum of Ireland. The doorway of the tower, facing east north east, is also extraordinary in that it is over seven metres above ground level.
This extreme height of the doorway causes some controversy in the usual assumption that an entry ladder would simply be pulled through the doorway into the tower in times of distress, but no rigid ladder of such length would fit through the tower doorway, nor would a rigid ladder fit inside the tower if it could be pulled inside.
This idea that the round towers were erected and used primarily as watch towers and places of protection is strongly debated, and some research suggests the round towers may have been designed, constructed and utilised as huge resonant systems for collecting and storing electromagnetic energy coming from the earth and skies.
Equally intriguing, Professor Callahan of the USA shows that the seemingly random geographical arrangement of the round towers throughout the Irish countryside actually mirrors the positions of the stars in the northern sky during the time of winter solstice.
Archaeological excavations at the bases of the towers have revealed that many towers were erected upon the tops of much older graves and it is known that many of the tower sites were considered sacred places long before the arrival of Christianity in Ireland.
These facts make us wonder if the ancient Irish, like the Egyptians and the Mayans I mentioned earlier, understood there to be an energetic resonance between specific terrestrial locations and different celestial bodies.
I have to confess that reading this research made me rethink what I had always taken for granted as a ‘fact’.
Most books will tell you the towers were places of refuge for the monks to hide from Vikings raiding Ireland. They were, no doubt, bell towers and lookouts for approaching raiders, but the speculations that monks escaped raiders, who no doubt knew how to smoke bees out of hives or climb the nine to 15 feet to the door, borders on the ludicrous.
Another strange thing about the towers is the dirt that fills the base below the high doors. Each door has a different level of dirt filling the base, as if they were ‘tuned’ like a pipe organ.
Some believe the towers were powerful amplifiers of radio resonance from the atmosphere generated by lightning flashes around the world. Were the Irish monks well aware of this when they built their high doors?
At every tower measured there was a direct correlation between tower door height and the strongest waves.
There is an elegant but short list of research projects demonstrating the beneficial effects of extreme low frequency wavelengths on sick people. Is this why sick pilgrims travelled to seek out the monks?
Oral tradition has it that backache can be cured by lying on St Colman’s grave behind the cathedral.