The whole roster
All guides
Twenty-one pieces, filed by material. No dropdowns: everything on the site is on this page.
Manuscripts
Vellum, pigment and the labour of a page.
- A page that still resists reproductionThe densest gospel-book decoration works at a scale that defeats the naked eye and still defeats most printing — interlace held to a fraction of a millimetre across a whole carpet page.Read
- VellumCalfskin prepared as a writing surface, and how many animals a gospel book cost.Read
- The pigmentsWhat the colours were made from, and which ones travelled a very long way.Read
- Insular majusculeThe script itself, and how it is dated.Read
- The carpet pageA full page of ornament with no text at all.Read
- Errors and correctionsScribal slips, and the marks made to fix them.Read
High Crosses
Scripture carved for people who could not read it.
- Scripture as picturesPanels of carved narrative arranged so a viewer could be walked through them, on monuments standing in the open for a thousand years.Read
- The ringed crossThe form itself, and the structural argument for the ring.Read
- WeatheringWhat a millennium of rain does to sandstone, and why some faces survive.Read
- The base and the capThree or four separate stones, and how they were joined.Read
- Dating a crossStyle, inscription and context, and how uncertain the result usually is.Read
Metalwork
Bells, reliquaries and the shrines made to hold them.
- The bell and its shrineA plain iron hand-bell, and the elaborate casing made centuries later to enclose it as a relic.Read
- Iron then bronzeThe earlier bells are riveted sheet iron; the later ones cast.Read
- Filigree and granulationGold wire and grains applied at a scale that needs magnification now.Read
- The reliquaryHouse-shaped boxes built to be carried and displayed.Read
- HoardsObjects buried for safety and never recovered, which is why we have them.Read
Settlements
Towers, cells and the shape of a monastic site.
- The shape of a monastic siteAn enclosure, a church, cells, a burial ground and a boundary — the standard elements and how they are read from the ground.Read
- The round towerTall, tapering, with a doorway above head height. What the evidence supports about what it was for.Read
- Beehive cellsCorbelled dry-stone huts built without mortar or timber.Read
- The island sitesSettlements placed where getting there is the point.Read
- The vallumThe enclosing bank that marks the boundary between inside and outside.Read