St. Dympna’s 17th century church is on the southeast coast of Achill Island. But the name in the GPS is a bit of a misnomer. This is the new church. An early church, established by St. Dympna, sprang up in the 7th century.

According to Catholic and Orthodox tradition, Dympna was born in the seventh century to a petty king, a Celtic pagan, and a devout Orthodox Catholic mother. When she was a teenager she consecrated herself to Christ and took a vow of chastity. Then her mother died and her father starts to go a bit mad. The story gets Shakespearean from there and Dympna goes on the run, sailing to modern Belgium. One story tells us she settled there and began to care for the sick and the poor. Somehow her father found out about this, so he pursued her, killing her travel companion, insisting she return home. She refused, and he killed her. They built a church in her memory in Belgium in 1349, and people from across Europe made the pilgrimmage for more than a century, seeking help. For more than 500 years they’ve cared for psychiatric patients — but they are considered boarders, living and thriving within the community. More than 4,000 boarders were there in the 1930s. But that’s in Belgium. Here, the roofless church is surrounded by the Kildownet cemetery, with the Kildavnet Castle nearby.

There is a T-shaped altar at the eastern end of the church, and a number of medieval stone crosses in the graveyard. Two have been repurposed as gate posts.

Down by the water line sits St Dympna’s Holy Well. Dip a ribbon in it and wrap it around your head to cure a headache. Taking a few sips are said to ease your toothache. In this way, the well has helped heal the area, so they say.

You can’t see it from this angle, but this marker is tilting at an unfortunate angle. I hope someone fixes that soon, it has a great look to it.

I’ve never seen markers decorated this way, but there are a few of this in that cemetery. I don’t know if it was just a moment of time, or a regional trend. Maybe the memory of a certain personality drove the colorful limestone treatment.

That 7th century church also became the site of a 16th century church ruins largely thought to have been built by Grace O’Malley. She lived up in the castle and her people needed a house of worship. The ruins we see — as the sign calls them, the present ruins — may be that of an 18th century church.

I love this about Ireland. “You threw that building up in the 1700s? Maybe you’ll get a sign. Maybe. We’re not going to expand a lot of energy figuring out the details though. It’s only from the 1700s, after all.”

Some of the older markers we see here are believed to date to about the time of these present ruins. Some of the graves mark people that died in the Drochshaol, the Great Famine of the mid-19th century. Others are unmarked, or are recognized by a single, half-buried stone.

On the northern side of the church is a low wrought iron gate, and it marks where those young people who died in the Scottish fire, or out in the bay. We just learned about them at Dumhach Bheag. They all rest together with their names all on a single marker.

There’s still a humble stone altar inside the roofless church. People go in and stack rocks on it. I bet it’s a site to see at night, with the stars above, just the stones and the water in sight.

We continue on our way along the western coast of Ireland. We are driving the Wild Atlantic Way.

Our next stop is Dumhach Bheag, which is a beach. We’re going to see quite a few Bheags, I think.

Dumhach Bheag sits at the northern edge of Clew Bay, which is shaped like a rectangle, and you’d sail to the east, and pass Clare Island to get to the open ocean. Before that, though, you’d go by the hundred-plus small islands, drumlins, which were created by glacial action which creates elongated hill shaped like half of an egg shell, or the backside of a spoon. When you have a bunch of them together, as they do here, they’re called swarms, and this is a ‘basket of eggs topography.’

The beach is near the village of Mulranny, a former winner of a ‘European Destinations of Excellence’ award. They have a heather festival each summer. The local population is only 315, but at one time the Nobel Prize winning biochemest Ernst Chain (penicillin) and the actor Desmond Llewelyn (Q, from James Bond), each had homes here.

The railway linked Dublin, on the other side of the island, to the coast in 1894, as had been prophesied. Two centuries earlier, a seer named Brian Rua O Ceabhain told of a line to the nearby island. The story goes that he saw smoke and fire and iron-wheeled carriages. Maybe it’s not so far fetched. He was said to have been born in 1648. The first known tracked transport in England began in the mid 16th century. Then again, James Watt only patented a design for a steam locomotive in 1784, with the first working model produced later that same year. It wasn’t until 1804 that the UK had its first full-scale working railway steam locomotive. But, hey, talk enough, you’ll say something bombastic that turns out right. So maybe that’s not spooky.

But this is. Rua O Ceabain said that the first and the last trains would carry the dead. The first train moved the remains of 32 people who’d drowned when their boat capsized in the bay. And then, in 1937, a special train brought home the bodies of 10 young people who died in a fire in Scotland.

The line closed two weeks later.

Visitors who like to hike will enjoy the trip up the nearby Corraun Hill, which tops out at just 524 meters, and offers beautiful views of the area.

Only we’re not hiking just now. There are still sites to see, and the next one involves the 16th century, and shifting European powers.

We’ve come to the Burrishoole Friary, the ruins of a Dominican friary founded in 1469 by Richard de Burgo of Turlough, and built on the sly, without papal blessing. About a generation, and two popes later, Pope Innocent III forgave the brothers there, which must have come as some relief, whenever they found out about it. Slack, in the 15th century, was notably unreliable. Maybe some communication issues were why they didn’t get the initial node from Pope Paul II. Or it could be that de Burgo didn’t bother to ask. Until that forgiveness, though, the whole community was at risk of being excommunicated. That must have been a tense 17 years.

But the Dominicans had been around here for more than two centuries, by then. They knew what they were getting into and they were used to building houses.

It’s a beautiful and peaceful space. The exterior of the church and the eastern wall of the cloister remain, while the other structures have long since been destroyed and removed.

The grounds cozy right up to an estuary of the nearby bay, and there’s just one road leading people past the place today, but it was once a much more lively, and profitable, and controversial place. Politics and religion have always worked with and one another in these parts, and when the Dissolution of Monasteries came in the 16th century, they were at risk again. At some point it became a military base. And at other moments in history it was seen as a source of income. The water meant dozens of English ships visited each year. The land is good. There was an iron mine. Fishing was profitable.

By the 18th century the abbey was in ruins, with the collapse of its roof in 1793 marking the start of its decline.

The grounds of the friary continue to serve as a cemetery. It is also a national monument.

Inside the husk of the building are graves and memorials, as if nearly every square inch was to be given over to thoughts of the dead. This is not uncommon in Europe, though I think of it more in churches that are still in service today.

As you move through the grounds, and through the silent old stone building, you notice the markers aging along your path, and other people’s lives can flash before your eyes. The winds and the water take away almost all of the basic details of life, and as you read what has been left of the people who have left, you are faced with the lasting and spare nature of stone.

This cross has been erected by the parishioners of Burrishoole to the memory of Father Manus Sweeney a holy and patriotic priest who was hanged in Newport June 8th, 1799 because he had joined with his countrymen in the Rebellion of 1798. His name shall be in request from generation to generation. May he rest in peace. Amen.

Manus Sweeney was a local, born of merchant stock, who came to his position to replace someone as the local curate because the previous person had been having “seditious conversation among the lower classes.” This particular part of western Ireland was comparatively disinterested in the British, and Sweeney is around during a time when the French were stirring things up. Sweeney loved Celtic monuments and antiquities, so there was a bit of a romantic, in him. Much else that is said of his regular life is steeped in folklore or embellishment. Sweeney is said to have studied in Paris, and might have been a Francophile decades before we had the word. His problem was that the French abilities in the region were beginning to wane. It’s a classic story from there, where the man of the cloth tried to rally the locals in a desperate and bold move against a dominant force. It doesn’t always work out, and so Sweeney found himself being spirited about, living, for times, in literal holes in the ground and caves, evading capture, until the English caught up to him. And so the man who one of his contemporaries, a bishop, called hare-brained, was soon put to the noose. The rebellion, which had started in May of 1798 was largely over by October. Too small, too localized, too unorganized. And after the French suffered defeats on land and sea, the Irish were gripped even more tightly by the British, and here we have Sweeney’s marker, which remembers him fondly.

We are all, hare-brained or not, a product of our times. And some people are bold enough to rise and to meet them. But not all are asked or moved or required to act in the same ways. Not too far away from Sweeney’s marker is one for woman named Mary, died aged 84 in 1991. Her marker tells us and reminds others “A woman of substance was she, what she liked most was an old chat and a good cup of tea.”

And as such we are remembered. What will that message be? I love a good cup of tea, too, but does that strike the right note for all of time? Or at least the several years to come?

We like to think that the stone is an eternal monument, but that’s our own vanity and shortsightedness, a conceit of the living. Nothing lasts about stone. Even in this peaceful place, the wind and the rains and the things that grow in it are having their way with old markers, taking on the job of slowly erasing even the most basic details of our lives.

There are a few boats pulled up on the shore, sitting in the shadow of the old friary. They look like they’re in for a nice long rest. Even that fiberglass, and the one small road, don’t take away from the idea of the peace that has come to this place. It is a place where you can feel an unknowable truth: time moves differently for the dead.