Partying Like It’s 999
By Dorinda Fox
I spent one day at Inismore in the Aran Islands off the coast of Galway, Ireland in December 2009. The Aran Islands were occupied by the Romans when they attacked Ireland thousands of years ago. There is an area at Inismore called the Seven Churches where the Romans built Catholic churches on top of a sacred Celtic site. Stonework from both cultures is still apparent in the ruins.
Apparently most everyone who died in Inismore until about 1940 was buried in the surrounding graveyard.
Ireland was enduring one its coldest winters in recent history. We could not go the normal tourist destination of the fort so the tour guide took us to the site of the Seven Churches. The tour guide explained that the churches had functioned as a training facility for nuns and monks who then went in to Europe to establish universities. As a university professor it felt strange to stand where other professors had learned and worked 2000 years before.
I thought that the society in which I work as a university professor was vastly different than the society in which the nuns and monks worked. Those professors who trained as Inismore were after
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Thank you for using my late husbands’ work in your essay. We were friends of a member of the Forbes family, who directly benifited from the banana trade,and to whom the poem was dedicated.