Carmel McCaffrey > Quotes

“It is not essential to "walk the ground" in order to write history, but when one has an opportunity to do so, the past comes alive in a completely different way.”
― Carmel McCaffrey, In Search of Ancient Ireland: The Origins of the Irish from Neolithic Times to the Coming of the English

“God got angry at humanity for daring to build a tower to reach heaven. He made everyone speak different languages so no one understood anyone else. But this Irishman went around and talked to all the different people—unfortunately the story doesn't say how he did this—but he and his colleagues took the best bits of all the newly created languages and put them back together to create Irish. The inference is, 'We should write in Irish because it's made up of all the best bits of language created by God at the Tower of Babel. It's really the original language, so they must be speaking Irish in heaven.”
― Carmel McCaffrey, In Search of Ancient Ireland: The Origins of the Irish from Neolithic Times to the Coming of the English

“Ireland has the oldest literature in Europe in a native language.”
― Carmel McCaffrey, In Search of Ancient Ireland: The Origins of the Irish from Neolithic Times to the Coming of the English

“Today the Book of Kells is housed in Trinity College, Dublin, where it is displayed to tourists in its own interpretive center at the university. The book is in a protective glass case, and a new page is turned each day.”
― Carmel McCaffrey, In Search of Ancient Ireland: The Origins of the Irish from Neolithic Times to the Coming of the English

“In forts built for war, defensive ditches are always on the outside to stop enemies getting in. At religious sites, ditches are placed inside the banks to stop supernatural powers within the circle getting out.”
― Carmel McCaffrey, In Search of Ancient Ireland: The Origins of the Irish from Neolithic Times to the Coming of the English

“Chemical properties in the peat stop anything from rotting, so bogs are the "bank vaults" of Irish history, protecting whatever is put in them. A bog-cutter recently described finding a slab of butter, still edible after more than a hundred years.”
― Carmel McCaffrey, In Search of Ancient Ireland: The Origins of the Irish from Neolithic Times to the Coming of the English

“When we view these enormous stone monuments today we see them in gray stone, but this is not how they once were.”
― Carmel McCaffrey, In Search of Ancient Ireland: The Origins of the Irish from Neolithic Times to the Coming of the English