Round Towers,

Bells,

and the Emperor’s Water clock

by

Hector McDonnell

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INTRODUCTION

The round towers of Ireland are by far the largestrelics of the ancient Irish church. Some are overthirty metres tall. They were always built as partof monastic sites, and while some still dominatethe landscape around the greatest ancient Irishmonasteries, others now stand completely alone, asall other traces of the monasteries that built themhave vanished. They are as pure an expression ofgeometry as architecture can offer, their slimstone and mortar cylindrical bodies topped withconical stone cap roofs. Usually they arefreestanding, though a few are incorporated intochurches, in particular at two of the mostimportant of all Irish monastic sites, Glendaloughand Clonmacnoise. These towers are extremely enigmatic. The Irishchurch built on a very modest architectural scale,and its churches are normally very small indeed.Why then should so many monasteries have built suchimpressively tall towers? This book will try togive some answers to these puzzles.

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NEAR EASTERN CONNECTIONS

Missionaries from Britain and Gaul ChristianisedIreland in the fifth and sixth centuries, but thestory of the round towers will lead us to the NearEast, so it is as well to know how longingly theearly Irish Church looked eastwards beyond Rome tothe Holy Land.

Irish high crosses were inspired by pilgrims’descriptions of the Jewelled Cross of Saint Helenaoutside Jerusalem, while their central circles camefrom Coptic Egypt. Even more remarkably the onlyaccurate plans of the Holy Land’s early churches

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were made on Iona, from the accounts of Arculph, aGaulish pilgrim, who was shipwrecked there on hisway home, while several important features of earlyIrish illumination, such as crosses embedded infields of interlace, were derived from SyrianChristian sources. Equally astonishingly Rahan, anearly Irish church, has Armenian architecturalfeatures, probably because a nearby monasteryhoused Armenian monks. They had come as fugitivesfrom Islam, as did others whom Charlemagne employedas architects. Indeed the only high crossescomparable to those of the British Isles are foundin Armenia and Georgia.

ABBOTS, CROSSES AND ROUND TOWERS

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The towers must at least predate their firstmention in the annals, the burning of Slane’s clogteach in AD 950, and we know the identity of twotower builders. Cormac Ui Cillin, who died in 964,the “comarb of Tuaim-greine”, built both its church andclog teach, and Colman Conailleach, abbot ofClonmacnoise, 904 - 921, was called the “joy ofevery tower,” suggesting he built several. Colmanwas a busy man, as he also sculpted the Cross ofthe Scriptures at Clonmacnoise according to thehistorian Françoise Henry, who said “In Irishmonasteries, as in Benedictine ones, manualoccupations alternated constantly with spiritualexercises, and manual work often took the form ofart or craftsmanship.”

These two architect-builders were abbots, the leaders of their spiritual communities, and clearlythey would only have erected their towers for a serious religious purpose.

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MILLS, MORTAR AND MONASTERIES

Irish monasteries were genuine centres of knowledgeand inventiveness. In the sixth century theyencouraged an agricultural revolution, with Roman-style tools, mills, cattle and crops. Later, one ofthem, Nendrum, built the earliest tidal mill in theworld. These advances went on hand in hand with theproduction of spectacular artworks, like the Bookof Kells, and the High Crosses, the largestsculptured monuments of ninth century Europe.

It is therefore not so surprising that themonasteries threw themselves so enthusiasticallyinto something so novel as tower building in theninth century. The use of mortar had just reachedIreland, so the towers appear during a generalarchitectural revolution, the building of thecountry’s first big churches, such as the cathedralat Clonmacnoise.

Today these towers often stand in obscure places,but a thousand years ago these were prestige sites,

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places like the tiny hamlet of Armoy, in countyAntrim, which was then the capital of a kingdom,Dalriada. Several other towers have similarorigins, though many more stand forlorn, thereasons for their existence being lost beyondrecall.

DOORS AND WINDOWS

Nearly all the towers have entrances well aboveground level. This is usually explained as being sothe defenders of the monastery could pull up theirladders during an attack. However some have groundlevel doorways, and others are so high that any

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ladders tall enough to reach them would not fitinside.

A few doorways are carved, but the towers arestriking for their simplicity, contrasting starklywith the monasteries’ ornate high crosses. Thewindows are also simple, some square, some round-headed, some triangular, marking the changes fromthe angularity of early Irish forms to the curvesof the Romanesque.

Margaret Stokes felt the towers’ high entrancesmust have European origins, as later, Romanesque,keeps in Germany have them, and in fact at LakeChiemsee there is a early ninth century keep whoseentrance is a full storey above ground level. Sothese elevated doorways were a defensive feature inEurope long before the first Irish ones.

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CASE STUDY no. 1

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CASE STUDY no. 2

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GEOMETRY

The approximate height of twenty-six towers isknown. Three are exceptionally short, and oneunusually tall, but the rest average out at nearly100 Roman feet, while all the base circumferencesaverage approximately 51 Roman feet. Seemingly thebuilders wanted to produce ‘perfect’ proportions,ideally towers 100 feet high and 50 feet round.

The four top windows are usually oriented, roughly,towards the cardinal points of the compass, and thetowers also taper, as do many other ancient Irishstone buildings. At Rattoo the diameter shrinks bya quarter, while at some the taper is very small;so it looks as though the builders simply made thetowers get thinner as they got higher, without anyprecise rule.

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One further surprise: their elegant stone andmortar conical caps were not part of the originalconcept, for the annals describe several towerslosing their roofs in storms. Presumably these wereof slate and wood, but that after a number ofdisasters the builders devised the solid vaultedcaps we now see.

SITING

The towers’ positioning also followed a pattern.They usually stand at a distance, and at an angle,

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to the western end of the monastery’s mostimportant church, with their doors pointing at thechurch entrance. This inspired one historian topropose an explanation:-

Groups of pilgrims would visit a monastery, see itsholy sites, adore its religious images, and attendits rituals. The tower’s bells would ring out forthe more significant moments, and then, from itshigh doorway, the monks would display thecommunity’s holiest possessions to the crowd asthey emerged from the church.

Such monkish theatrics are quite plausible. It wasa normal part of church ritual to create drama forthe faithful. The annals reveal that ancient bells,crosiers, relics and manuscripts were stored in thetowers in times of danger, but perhaps they werekept there anyway, and were only brought out fordisplay.

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BUILDING IN THE ROUND

Like the towers themselves virtually all otherIrish buildings had circular plans. The Irish livedin wattle and daub houses that were always round,as were the raths, their palisaded forts. Indeedonly the churches were the exceptions to this rule,They were rectangular, and the earliest were tiny,but after mortar arrived much larger churchesappeared. It was only these, and the round towersthemselves, that were built with mortar.

Hoists, pulleys, and scaffolding were devised toraise stones and mortar to higher and higherlevels, and the holes for scaffolding beams arestill visible in some tower walls. A furtherproblem was that the types of available stonevaried enormously. Some areas had plentifulsandstone, which could be neatly carved and shaped,but in others there was only iron-hard basalt orgranite, though even here the larger stones werehammered and worked to fit the tower’s curve.

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ANCIENT DESTRUCTION

Some towers vanished so long ago that we only knowof them through references in ancient annals:

“AD 950 The cloicteach of Slane was burned by the foreigners (theVikings of Dublin), with its full of relics and distinguished persons,together with Caeineachair, Lector of Slane, and the crosier of thepatron saint, and a bell, the best of bells.” (Annals of the FourMasters)

“1121 A great wind-storm happened in December of this year, whichknocked the conical cap off the cloicteach of Armagh and causedgreat destruction of woods throughout Ireland.” (AFM)

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“1126 A great hosting by Connor MacFergall O’Loughlinn, togetherwith the people of the North of Ireland, went to Meath. They burntTrim, both cloicteach and church, and these full of people.” (Annalsof Ulster)

Armagh’s tower of 1121 was the second one builtthere. Lightning destroyed the first in the 990s,the second probably survived until the 1640s.

SURVIVAL

Today some seventy-three round towers still exist.Most are ruinous, others were never finished, ofsome only foundations remain. Several disappeared

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in relatively recent times. The Protestant bishopof Raphoe knocked his down in the 1630s, to makeroom for his palace, Killeshin’s was demolished ‘inthree days’ work’ in 1703, and in the early 1800stwo wealthy brothers were restoring a ruined churchat Downpatrick as the Anglican cathedral butdisagreed violently about its round tower. Onethought it an excrescence, the other that it was animportant relic of Ireland’s Christian past (SaintPatrick’s supposed tomb lay beside it). However hewas called away on business, so his brotherdemolished it, and used the stones for rebuildingthe church.

Other towers disappeared less dramatically. Thefallen drum at Maghera was carted off as buildingmaterial, while a tower that appears in early viewsof Dublin, the “Old Tower of Michael le Pole”,succumbed to the town’s expansion. By thenineteenth century a red brick schoolhouse stood onthe spot, which has now given way to the leveltarmac of a car park.

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SPECULATIONS

Antiquarians often plunged into round towerspeculations, but their ideas were usually morepeculiar than enlightening: -

The towers were built for ancient Irish anchorites;unlike St Simon Stylites their hermitages had roofs, because of the constant rain.

Danes built the towers. They had built allEngland’s prehistoric monuments, so they must havebuilt these towers too. Did they not anywayintroduce all that was sophisticated of early Irishculture, from interlace to filigree? (This solutionconveniently avoided attributing any ingenuity tothe native Irish.)

Then two young men, William O’Brien and MarcusKeane, were deeply inspired by the towers’ phallus-like outlines. O’Brien proposed that they werelingams, remnants of an enormous Hindi-Irishcivilisation, Keane that the towers came from agreat Cuthite empire that covered all Eurasia andAmerica at the time of Nebuchadnessar. There were

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therefore Cuthite round towers in India, Ireland,ancient Mexico and Peru, though the Cuthites’addiction to human sacrifice ultimately alienatedtheir subjects, and Keane’s weighty tome is noeasier to read than O’Brien’s.

MYSTERIES

These bizarre antiquarian speculations have leftsome questions that refuse to go away.

Why are the towers so high? Were they monkishlookouts, for spying out approaching attackers? Orsemaphore stations? Or the central spike ofenormous sundials? Or the housing, and amplifiers,of enormous bells that hung within? And would you

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originally have seen each tower’s nearestneighbouring tower from an upper window, so thatthey could communicate with one another?

And what of the towers’ high entrances? Were theybuilt against Viking attacks? Traces in the masonryof stout doorjambs and boltholes show that theywere intended to be defensible, and the annalstales of burning towers, and immolated abbots dateback to Viking times, so But why were several builtin areas the Vikings controlled? And what then ofthe civilising Danes who built them?

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SEARCHING FOR SOLUTIONS

In the 1870s a remarkable woman, Miss MargaretStokes, pointed out that there were some veryancient round campanili beside the Byzantinebasilicas of Ravenna. But why should the Irish havecopied them? Miss Stokes looked desperately for anexplanation. Perhaps there were once similar belltowers in northern Europe, which wandering Irishmonks could have seen them more easily. But why hadthey all disappeared?

Miss Stokes found one round medieval tower inBrittany, and then noticed that many largeRomanesque churches had round towers attached totheir western facades. They were centuries laterthan the earliest Irish ones, and housedstaircases, but externally they looked so similarthat she could not believe there was no connection.But what? Where were the earlier ones in Europe,apart from the examples in Ravenna, and why shouldthe Irish have even known about them? The rest ofEurope would have trekked to Ireland and thencopied its towers, nor was it plausible thatIrishmen built Europe’s big Romanesque churches, asthey failed to build anything on that scale athome.

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RAVENNA’S ROUND TOWERS

The story of Ravenna’s towers is as follows.

The Lombards had captured Ravenna from theByzantines in the 750s, and given its basilicas tothe monastic communities who erected roundcampanili beside them. Originally these were simplestructures, with brick arches for apertures, asindeed some still are.

In 856 the archbishop of Ravenna, John VIII (850-878), moved the relics of the city’s patron saint,San Apollinare, from the basilica at Classe intoone inside Ravenna itself, (now called SanApollinare Nuovo) because Classe, once the greatharbour of Roman and Byzantine fleets, was dying,and its harbour had silted up. (Venice would soonarise to take its place). At San Apollinare Nuovoan annular crypt was excavated to house the relics,and a tall campanile built beside it, bothimitating ones at the relics’ old home in Classe.

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The tower has a dedication to the archbishop carvedinto an upper window, dating it between 850 and878. Other round campanili were also dramaticallyheightened, possibly to compete with the appearanceof their new rivals, the first square bell towers.

COUNTING THE HOURS

The campanili rang out the “hours”, and this wasthe formula the Irish copied – building towers thatwere, in essence, public clocks to call the monksto prayer at the correct times. (The word “clock”originally meant a bell.) Some hours had greatsignificance, like the Ninth Hour (Noon), at whichChrist died. St Benedict regulated that the day’s

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work should only stop for prayers and food then, atNoon, which is why Noon slipped backwards to midday(which is really the Sixth Hour). Hired labourersdo not work without a lunch break.

The ancient time system gave twelve hours to theday and twelve more to the night, so theyconstantly grew longer or shorter. Sundials helped,as did the stars at night, and the monks also hadmarked candles and clepsydrae – which poured waterfrom one container into another. The problem withall timekeeping devices is that they do not changewith the seasons.

These towers are Europe’s oldest monuments tomodern time. The monks’ search for accuracyultimately caused the invention of clockwork, thedeath knell of the old “hours”.

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CHARLEMAGNE AND THE ROUND TOWER

The Irish were not alone in being inspired byRavenna. Charlemagne visited it in the 780s,demolished several Byzantine buildings, andtransported their parts to Aachen to build a“Roman” palace there, with an imperial chapelimitating the greatest Ravennan church, San Vitale.

The round campanili impressed him too, for roundbell towers were then built at two of his greatestecclesiastical buildings. St Riquier, in northernFrance, (circa 790) had four round towers, whileFulda (790-819), has a circular foundation by itsentrance for another one. Humbler churches like StJohannisberg (circa 800-900) followed, which had asingle circular belfry at its western end.

Even more remarkably a plan was drawn up about 810for a new monastery at Sankt Gallen with twofreestanding round towers set at an angle to thechurch entrance, echoing the Irish geometricalrelationship between church and tower.

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A DISLIKE OF CONTROL

Charlemagne also reformed his empire’s monasteries,initiating modern Benedictine centralised order anddiscipline. But Ravenna was outside his empire, andtherefore beyond his control. It now belonged tothe Papacy, and continued to follow “OldBenedictine” ways, with each abbot deciding on hisown monastery’s regulations. Does this explainRavenna’s many towers? Did each community proudlybroadcast its own hours to emphasise itsuniqueness?

Ravenna was the most prosperous town of ninth century Italy, and would have seemed a particularlysafe and civilised haven for the Irish, as the restof Europe was ravaged by warfare. Celtic monastic rule was also untouched by Charlemagne’s reforms, and as the city was part of the Papacy its monasticsystem clearly had papal blessing, thereby suggesting that the old monastic ways of Ravenna

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were superior to Charlemagne’s reforms. So the belltowers which came to Ireland brought a political message: a papal seal of approval on Ireland’s monastic system.

THE ROUND TOWERS OF NORTHERN EUROPE

There were round bell towers being built in Europefor more than a hundred years before the firstIrish clog teach, and apart from in Ireland the roundversion continued to be popular for a time in otherperipheral areas, such as Denmark, Poland and northGermany. However they are to be found most

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prolifically in East Anglia, whose last king, StEdmund, was a prince from the Carolingian court,who was adopted by the previous king and came toEngland in the 850s. He brought with him a largeGerman retinue, and it must have included anarchitect, for they started a round tower industry.There are now 220 East Anglian churches with singleround belfries. This idea spread northwards too,going as far as the Orkneys.

Nor should we forget St Riquier, for its roundcorner towers inspired the standard embellishmentof the larger Romanesque church that MargaretStokes noticed; there is hardly a Romanesquecathedral north of the Alps which does not have itsround towers.

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CROSS FERTILISATIONS

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LIGHTHOUSES AND MINARETS

Probably the very first round campanile was at SanApollinare in Classe, which stands on thefoundations of the port’s Roman lighthouse. Did thebuilders imagine they would revive Classe’s ancientgreatness – with the tower being the newlighthouse, built in Christ’s name:

“the true Light, which lighteth every man thatcometh into the world?”

There are intriguing Islamic precedents. Minaretswere also early public clocks, proclaiming “hours”of prayer, and were first built only shortly beforethe campanili, in the eighth century. The wordminaret originally described a lighthouse, butacquired its modern meaning after the Arabsdedicated Egypt’s vast minaret, the Pharos atAlexandria, to the glory of Allah by making itsuppermost storey a mosque as well as the lighthousebeacon of the Seventh Wonder of the World. (It wasalso the tallest building in the world until NewYork’s skyscrapers.)

“Allah is the Light of the heavens and the earth.The similitude of his Light is as a niche wherein

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there is a lamp. The lamp is in a glass, the glassis as a shining star.”

MINARET CONNECTIONS

In the eighth century Islamic knights calledMurabitun, captured the coastline west of Egypt fromthe Byzantines, and at each important harbour builta fortress called a ribat to guard it, with acylindrical minaret on a corner tower. These were thefirst purpose-built minarets, and doubled asreligious public clocks, lighthouses and sighting-points for ships. Moreover diplomatic and tradingmissions sailed, on the Caliph’s authority, toSouthern Gaul and Ravenna from the harbour ofSousse (which had its own ribat and minaret).

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Inevitably therefore news of the minaret, and itsdouble function, must have quickly reached Ravenna,and really no further incentive would have beennecessary to inspire the building of a rival,Christian minaret, the campanile at the port ofClasse.

There were of course many earlier lighthouses,including cylindrical ones like Chimaros on Naxos,but a more important antecedent is a very earlypublic clock, the octagonal Tower of the Winds inAthens.

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THE EMPEROR’S WATER CLOCK

Inside the Temple of the Winds’ was a hydraulicallyoperated statue which pointed at a slowly turningpillar marked with curving lines indicating thehours’ length. This got round the problem of thechanging hours. It was the first of many Greek andRoman public clocks, and inevitably expanding Islamencountered them, in particular one at Gaza withtwelve doors, through which a statue of Herculesemerged at the appropriate hour, while lightsappeared behind each door at night.

The Arabs realised that water clocks could helpwith their own hours of prayer, and after theybuilt Islam’s first great mosque at Damascus theyerected a clock there which mimicked Gaza’s, withtwelve doors, gongs sounding the hours, and lightsburning at night. Now, as Charlemagne and Harun-al-Rashid, Islam’s caliph, constantly wooed each otherwith gift-laden embassies Harun sent the emperor in806 a copy of the Damascus clock (as well as anelephant). On the hour a “cymbalum” sounded, and ahorseman appeared at a doorway. Moreover anotherone was acquired by Ravenna.

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TIME WATCHING

Was it Ravenna’s water clock that the campanilicommemorated, proclaiming how their monasteriestold time better than any other ones?

Islam and Christianity each emphasised theirsuperiority by keeping their “hours” differently.As Christian time started with sunrise, Islam tookthe hour before dawn, and as the Christians usedbells Islam employed the muezzin. However bothfaiths adopted towers to tell the time.

Irish timekeeping depended on sundials dividing theday into three or six divisions, and at night theyprobably used candles like King Alfred, who burntsix every night, for someone “kept watch”.

672 AD A thin and tremulous cloud in the shape of a rainbowappeared at the fourth vigil of the night on the sixth feria precedingEaster.

878 AD There was a lunar eclipse on the ides of October, thefourteenth of the moon, about the third watch.

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It would have made no sense to devote so muchenergy to tower building if time keeping was nottaken seriously, so someone always “kept watch”,and observed the happenings of the night sky.

BELLS

Early Christian bells looked like cowbells and wererung by hand, but the round towers’ bells wereheavier, cast bells. An Irish law tract evendefines a bell ringer’s status: “Noble his workwhen the bell is a clog teach’s, humble when it is ahand bell.”

Bell casting was invented in the eighth century,and the process was a jealously guarded monasticsecret, so the towers were also by-products of anew technology. Surviving Irish cast bells are not

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more than a foot high, but Margaret Stokes rang asmall dinner bell from a clog teach’s windows – andit was heard half a mile away.

Ravenna’s bell towers still function, but Englishsoldiers melted down Clonmacnoise’s bells in 1552for cannons, and presumably any other bells too. Anancient law ordered ships to provide ropes for thelocal clog teach, so bells were probably rung much astoday, hung high in the towers and pulled frombelow. A few clog tigh, such as Dromiskin and Balla,have been reused as bell towers in recent times, sotheir ancient purpose has not entirely disappeared.

A LEANING TOWER

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To finish this tale we return to Italy. During therenaissance of religious thought and churchbuilding of the 12th century, Pisa undertook a grandecclesiastical complex, reviving the spirit ofearlier times. As in many great towns with ancientChristian buildings, (Florence and Siena spring tomind) Pisa was to have a threesome of structures –cathedral, baptistery and campanile - and thePisans took as their model the most ancientexamples of these in Italy, the buildings ofRavenna.

And so it is that the Leaning Tower of Pisa isround. From its uppermost arches still hang thetower’s bells, but no one would dare ring them now.

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GAZETEER

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