Celtic Christianity and Sacred Ireland Pilgrimage with Paul Kingsnorth

We depart this evening on our overnight transatlantic flight to Ireland, the island the early monks called ‘the edge of the world’ – and where the faith took root with a depth and wildness unlike anywhere else in Christendom. Dinner and breakfast are served on board as we journey toward what Paul Kingsnorth has called ‘the last place in Western Europe where the old Christian imagination still breathes in the landscape itself.’ Rest well – our pilgrimage begins at dawn. We work with restricted group airfare rates, which do not enable us to reserve specific seats; if you wish to have a seat assignment on the plane, please book your own air, and we will book the land arrangements.

Céad Míle Fáilte – a hundred thousand welcomes! Upon landing in Dublin, we collect our luggage, clear customs, and meet our professional tour guide and driver in the arrivals hall. We board our private motor coach and begin the westward journey toward Galway, the great Atlantic city that will serve as our home base. Our first stop is the town of Athlone on the River Shannon, a natural gathering point for Irish monks for over a millennium, where we stretch our legs and enjoy a leisurely lunch. Those who wish may visit Seán’s Bar, documented as one of the oldest pubs in the world, its walls dating to around 900 AD – a reminder that the Irish have long understood the sacramental value of gathering, story, and hospitality. We arrive in Galway by late afternoon, check into our hotel, and gather for a welcome dinner where Paul awaits us. Dinner and overnight in the Galway area. Meals: D

After a full Irish breakfast, we have the first of Paul’s teaching sessions at our hotel. Drawing on his books, his essays, and his own remarkable journey from environmental activist to Christian contemplative, Paul explores the Celtic monastic tradition – why men and women fled to the wild edges of Ireland not to escape the world, but to see it more clearly, and how that ancient impulse speaks to our own bewildered age. Lunch is included at the hotel. The afternoon is free for personal reflection, journaling, and quiet exploration of Galway’s storied streets. Pilgrims may wish to visit Galway Cathedral, whose vast interior holds a striking tenderness, or walk the medieval lanes of the Latin Quarter, or follow the River Corrib down to the Spanish Arch and sit quietly before the Atlantic. Dinner is at leisure. Overnight in the Galway area. Meals: B. L

This morning we cross into County Clare for a day among its sacred landscapes, a day shaped by what Paul calls ‘the old practice of attending to the particular: this stone, this well, this name.’ Our first destination is The Burren, one of the most extraordinary limestone landscapes in Europe. Its vast, pale pavements, cracked and fissured, alive with wildflowers growing from the crevices, were described by one Cromwellian surveyor as having ‘neither water enough to drown a man, nor a tree to hang him, nor soil enough to bury him.’ The Celtic monks saw it differently: a place stripped of distraction, where the rock itself seemed to preach. Paul leads us in reflection among these ancient stones. From The Burren we visit a constellation of sacred sites that have drawn pilgrims for over fourteen centuries: the ruins of Kilmacduagh monastery and its leaning round tower; the holy well of St. Colman, its waters long believed to carry healing; Temple Cronan, a small 12th-century oratory of such simplicity it seems to have grown from the earth; and St. Brigid’s Well, one of Ireland’s most venerated pilgrimage sites, marked by a stone grotto and centuries of quiet prayer. In the late afternoon, we take a boat cruise along the base of the Cliffs of Moher, 700 feet of sheer Atlantic coastline, a view that the monks would have known as the very edge of the known world, beyond which lay only God. We return to Galway for dinner and overnight. Meals: B. D

Today we travel to Clonmacnoise, Ireland’s most important monastic site and one of the great centers of early Christian civilization. Founded by St. Ciarán in 545 AD on a bend of the River Shannon, Clonmacnoise was for centuries a place of scholarship, art, and prayer, producing illuminated manuscripts, training missionaries who carried the faith across Europe, and sheltering kings who wished to be buried close to such holiness. We walk its walled enclosure slowly, among the high crosses, the round towers, and the ancient grave-slabs whose carved faces have gazed at the Shannon for a thousand years. Paul reflects here on the monastic vision: a turning away from worldly things towards a deeper engagement with Christ, an insistence that beauty, prayer, and manual work belong together, a vision he has called urgently necessary for our own time. We continue south to the town of Killaloe on the shores of Lough Derg, where the 12th-century St. Flannan’s Cathedral stands above the lake. We enjoy afternoon tea overlooking the water – unhurried, a gift of time – before returning to Galway for dinner and overnight. Meals: B. Afternoon Tea. D

After breakfast, we travel by coach to Rossaveel and board the ferry for Inishmore, the largest of the Aran Islands – one of the most significant pilgrimage destinations in all of Celtic Christianity. Inishmore sits at the outermost edge of Ireland, where the Atlantic begins in earnest, and it was here that St. Enda established the first monastic school in Ireland in the 5th century, long before St. Columba sailed to Iona or St. Columbanus crossed to Europe. The island shaped an entire generation of Irish saints: Ciarán of Clonmacnoise, Brendan of Clonfert, and Jarlath of Tuam all sat at Enda’s feet. After a pub lunch, we join a minibus tour to Dún Aonghasa, the great prehistoric stone fort perched 330 feet above the Atlantic on a cliff edge – a place of vertiginous prayer. We gather here as the monks once did, at the meeting point of land, sea, and sky. We return to Galway for dinner and overnight. Meals: B. D

This morning we bid farewell to Galway and set out on one of Ireland’s great pilgrim roads, heading southeast through the Irish midlands. Our first destination is the Rock of Cashel, a dramatic outcropping of limestone rising suddenly from the Tipperary plain, crowned with a cluster of medieval ruins that rank among the finest in Ireland. Here, according to tradition, St. Patrick baptized Aengus, King of Munster, in the 5th century. The ruins that remain are extraordinary: the round tower, the Romanesque Cormac’s Chapel with its richly carved tympanum, and the Gothic cathedral whose roofless nave frames a sky that seems to have been placed there deliberately, as if the builders understood that the sky, too, is a kind of ceiling. After a leisurely lunch, perhaps in the charming medieval town of Kilkenny, a short detour off the route, we continue east toward County Wicklow and the monastic valley of Glendalough. Founded by St. Kevin in the 6th century, Glendalough, ‘the valley of the two lakes,’ is one of the most atmospheric monastic sites in all of Ireland. Kevin came here as a hermit, seeking solitude in a cave above the upper lake, and found instead that others followed; what began as a flight from the world became one of its great gathering places. The setting is unforgettable: a green valley flanked by wooded hillsides, two still lakes reflecting the sky, and the ruins of the monastic city clustered around the famous round tower that has stood here since the 10th century. Paul reflects on Kevin’s paradox – the hermit who became an abbot, the man who fled community and built one – as one of the defining tensions of the Celtic tradition. We arrive in Dublin for dinner and overnight. Meals: B. D

We begin our final full day with a visit to Trinity College Dublin, founded in 1592 and one of the great universities of the English-speaking world. Its cobbled quadrangles and sweeping lawns have an unhurried grandeur, and it is fitting that our pilgrimage should end here. For Trinity’s Old Library houses what is arguably the most beautiful object to survive from the age of Celtic Christianity. The Book of Kells, created by Irish monks around 800 AD, is a gospel manuscript of almost incomprehensible artistry. We spend time in the Long Room of the Old Library as well, which will be closed at the end of 2027 until 2030 for renovation. After lunch at leisure, we visit the Guinness Storehouse, a landmark of Dublin’s industrial and cultural heritage. Set within the original fermentation building of St. James’s Gate Brewery, where Arthur Guinness signed a 9,000-year lease in 1759, one of history’s more optimistic acts of faith, the Storehouse takes visitors through the craft and history of Ireland’s most famous export, culminating in a glass of perfectly poured stout in the Gravity Bar, with panoramic views across the city. The afternoon is then free for personal exploration: the Georgian squares of Merrion and Fitzwilliam, the Chester Beatty Library, a walk along the Grand Canal, or simply the pleasure of sitting in a Dublin pub as the evening comes on. Tonight we gather for our farewell dinner, a celebration of what we have seen, heard, and carried within us across the width of Ireland. Overnight in Dublin. Meals: B. Special Farewell Dinner

After breakfast, we transfer to Dublin Airport for our return flights home. We carry with us the memory of stone walls and Atlantic light, of ancient prayers said over the same wells for a thousand years, of a faith that has survived at the edge of the world by staying close to the earth, to community, and to God. As Paul has written, the task before us is not to restore the past but to recover a way of seeing, and Ireland, for those with eyes to attend, remains one of the great schools of that vision. Safe travels, and may this pilgrimage continue to bear fruit in each of our lives. Meals: B