The Legend of the Airships of Clonmacnoise: What Really Happened in the Skies Over Ireland in the Year 743 when a Man Came Floating Down from the Firmament?

From time immemorial the site at Clonmacnoise in central Ireland on the banks of the storied River Shannon has been considered a mystical and spiritual place.  Clonmacnoise, literally translates from ancient Gaelic as, “Meadow of the Sons of Nois” , named in honor of the offspring of a mythical figure in the  Pagan lore of prehistoric Ireland.

In the year 544 missionary Saint Ciarian founded a Catholic Monastery at the site of Clonmacnoise.  Today, Saint Ciarian, along with the much more well known Saint Patrick and Saint Columbia is considered to be one of the “Twelve Apostles of Ireland and Scotland”, those church fathers who first brought Christianity to the British Isles.

During his lifetime in the sixth century Saint Ciarian was renowned for his love of learning, knowledge of scripture and his vast collection of manuscripts.  Due largely to Saint Ciarian’s reputation as an intellectual and bibliophile, within a few decades of its founding, the Monastery at Clonmacnoise became known as a center of early scholasticism and theologians from all over Europe visited the site.

 Beginning around the year 600, the monks and scholars who lived, worked, studied and prayed at Clonmacnoise--to honor the world that God had made--began to write yearly histories called “Annals” that recorded events in Ireland, and the greater world at large.  The scholastic monks wrote in these annals each and every day and each and every year right up until 1408, only eventually stopping just around the time that the site of the Clonmacnoise Monastery was finally abandoned.

St, Ciarian

Not just at Clonmacnoise, but in monasteries all across Ireland during the early medieval period monks--to honor God, creator of the world--kept similar histories or annals to record the events of their time.  Even today, scholars still use Irish Annals kept by medieval monks as valuable and trustworthy primary sources for research on a wide variety of historical subjects.  But there is one particular event recorded in the Annals of Clonmacnoise that make them stand out from all the rest.

In the Clonmacnoise Annals for the year 743 something most unusual--something that if it were taken at face value would change our entire understanding of human history forever--was recorded by the monks that lived at the site.

The passage written that day about what happened during morning mass by the monks and scholars of Clonmacnoise concerned a seemingly ordinary summer Sabbath Sunday during the 8th century.  This passage in the Clonmacnoise Annals would go on to survive in Irish consciousness for over a thousand years and be told and retold for countless generations until fact almost became indecipherable from fiction.

On that day in 743, early on a bright Sunday morning right when the parishioners from the nearby town were literally packed into the stone walled chapel on the grounds of the Clonmacnoise Monastery, a large object--or a fleet of objects--crossed the skies above the church and blotted out all of the sunlight that was coming in through the stained glass windows.

As the Priest, with his back turned to the congregation, droned on and on in Latin that nearly none of the lay people from Clonmacnoise could understand, those worshippers sitting shoulder to shoulder in the pews began to raise their arms and point upward through the windows to the sky outside.

The people started to shout, “Look Father!  A ship!  Ships in the sky!”  Their medieval minds instantly associated flying objects in the sky with the only self-propelled craft that an eighth century mind could possibly conceive of--a sailing ship.  The Bishop, who was conducting the mass, stopped mid-sentence, and along with the rest of his flock ran outside and stood frozen and looking up in amazement, transfixed, on the green grassy churchyard at Clonmacnoise.

Any event that interrupted an early medieval mass so completely during the early Medieval Period, right in its tracks, was certainly noteworthy for all of posterity.

Clonmacnoise Church yard today

Soon hundreds of townspeople and dozens of monks were gathered on the lawn outside the church and looking up at what they believed to be a fleet of flying sailing ships so dense in the sky above that it blotted out the sun.  

And here is where what was recorded in the Clonmacnoise Annals for the year 743 got even stranger.

It was written that as the crowd stood out on the churchyard and looked skyward a giant, glowing “anchor attached to a long chain” fell from the ship that was directly above their heads.  The glowing chain embedded itself in the ground of the church yard and was dragged along a great distance by the giant “airship” before it finally came to a stop after it embedded itself in the huge wooden door that marked the entrance to the church.  Witnesses said, for the next nearly seven hundred years, that you could still see the marks of the anchor cut deep into the wooden door.

The monastic report went on to say, in true Biblical prose, that, “A man came swimming down from the firmament and tried to free the anchor.”  It sounded, according to the written record, as if this “man” simply descended from the sky all on his own from within a flaming ball.

It was said that this man, a being that the Clonmacnoise Annals of 743 referred to as a “sailor”, upon reaching the ground appeared to have difficulty breathing as if he were “drowning” in the air itself and that the Bishop himself urged the crowds of onlookers to step away out of fear that this visitor from above may suffocate.

The people attempted to capture the “sailor” of the airship that had descended to earth but the Bishop commanded the congregation to let him go lest he might die, and then, just as quickly as they had appeared the “airships” the “sailor” who fell from out of the sky and even the glowing anchor which had embedded itself so forcefully in the door of the church at Clonmacnoise were said to have all vanished.

The only thing that remained to ever prove that something unexplainable had happened in the year 743 at Clonmacnoise were the splinters in the church door and the eyewitness accounts recorded in the Annals for the year 743.

Now, it would be very easy to just dismiss this tale from the year 743 of airships from the sky visiting the monastery at Clonmacnoise as nothing more than a folk-tale created, and perpetuated by over-active imaginations and passed down--like a bad game of telephone--from generation to generation.  It would be easy to say that the airships at Clonmacnoise were nothing more than a sort of mass hallucination, or hysteria, perhaps caused by ingesting bread poisoned by a fungus such as ergot which was known to happen not infrequently in medieval Europe.  You could also say that the Airships at Clonmacnoise were nothing more than a misinterpretation of some then unknown celestial phenomena, which today would be easily explainable with science, or that the whole thing was simply made up by some creative monks, or bored scholars who wished to make their Annals for the year 743 more exciting.  And, the incident of the Clonmacnoise Airships may have been one, or all of these things, but it is interesting to note that in reality the historical sources tell us that the Airships at Clonmacnoise in 743 were simply one in a string of “Airship” or UFO sightings across Ireland during the eighth century.

The same airship, during the same time period, was recorded in the annals for the church at the nearby monastery of Telltown.  The annals for Ulster, some distance from Clonmacnoise, mention a similar event in about the same year and state that, “Ships with crews were seen in the air.”  

An Irish Annals collection called the Book of Leinster from the same century, perhaps retelling the airship sighting at nearby Telltown recorded that, “Another miracle of the same assembly (occured) the sighting of three ships floating in the air above them while the Irish were celebrating the assembly of Donmall son of Murchad.”

In the instance of the Book of Leinster it would appear as if the monks who wrote the text were attempting to imply that the visits of the airships were somehow a chastisement, or a punishment from God, for those who still clung to the ancient Irish pagan practices.  But all moral implications aside, it would appear that there is at least enough written historical evidence, from reliable texts, to assert that something definitely unusual did occur in the skies over Ireland during the middle of the eighth century.

Seamus Heaney

What that was, no one can say for sure, but it’s remarkable how the Legend of the Airships of Clonmacnoise has so indelibly left its mark on Irish culture and Irish history.  As recently as the late 20th century, in the late 1990s famed Irish poet and playwright Seamus Heaney conducted academic research into the “Airships at Clonmacnoise” and wrote a poetic ode entitled “Tower of Light” to the story that he had learned in his boyhood, showing that the sighting of the Airships of Clonmacnoise as first recorded by Irish monks in the Annals of 743 is still alive and well and being passed on from to generation.

Supposed “Airship” sightings were relatively common throughout the medieval period and occurred at regular intervals up until the 20th century--one of the the most famous cases being the great “Airship Craze” of circa 1896-1910--that gripped the entire western world.  And just last year people all across the east coast of the United States reported tens of thousands of sightings of mysterious drones in the skies above, so maybe, when it comes to the Legend behind the Airships of Clonmacnoise, fact is stranger than fiction.