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Volunteer excavations on Lismore uncover the early monastery of Lios Mòr
Lismore volunteers led by Argyll Archaeology found burial grounds and precious-metal working at Lios Mòr, a monastery founded in the sixth century. Their Antiquity paper weighs the site, long known mainly from records and tradition, against Britain's major monasteries.
The Scientist · Science desk
What happened
- Before this work, Saint Mo Luóc's monastery was known from records, place names and local tradition, with very little archaeology to confirm its extent or significance.
- The project began when the Lismore Historical Society set out to investigate the island's 13th-century cathedral.
- Excavation and geophysical survey also found early buildings and high-status craftworking areas as well as the burial grounds.
- Bob Hay, a former island resident, organised the funding and the volunteers.
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Why it matters
- constraint The public account does not tie the metalworking to a century. It cannot yet say whether the wealth belonged to Mo Luóc's early community or built up over the seven centuries before the cathedral.
- capability Lismore can now be compared with Iona and other Dal Riata churches on physical evidence of craft and wealth, where before only written sources placed it.
- precedent A historical society that raised money and volunteers and ended with a paper in Antiquity is a model other communities near documented but unexcavated church sites can copy.
Clare Ellis of Argyll Archaeology, who led the excavations [4], set the question narrowly. "The research aimed to determine whether the site of the later medieval cathedral at Lismore was also the location of Mo Luóc's early monastery, and to assess the scale, nature and status of the settlement," she said [6]. The design could have failed. Had the cathedral been built on fresh ground, the search around it would have come up short.
Establishing status is harder than establishing location. In my view the precious-metal working is the strongest part of that case, and the release describes it as rare evidence. The release also says the full set of finds shows Lismore was far more than a small island church [8]. The authors conclude the island held an early medieval monastery of considerable wealth and influence [9].
The thing this account doesn't tell you is when. The press release does not include radiocarbon dates, a burial count or the size of the surveyed area. Mo Luóc founded the monastery in the sixth century [4]. The cathedral dates to the 13th [5], about seven centuries later [1]. Workshops from the ninth century would still count as early medieval, a period the release puts at roughly AD 400 to 1000 [2]. They would support the same headline while telling us less about the founder's own community.
Confidence varies most on the comparison. Iona led a surge of monasticism in Dál Riata, the Gaelic kingdom that took in Argyll, most of the Hebrides and part of County Antrim [3]. Gordon Noble, a University of Aberdeen professor and co-author, said: "We can now see that it was a thriving center of worship, craftsmanship and learning, whose importance may have rivaled some of the best-known monasteries in early medieval Britain" [10]. The release puts it more firmly, calling Lismore's community comparable to some of the most important monastic sites in Britain and Ireland [12]. The paper's own title ends in a question mark: "A major monastic centre?" [7]
Bob Hay said: "The discoveries at Lismore demonstrate the value of community-led archaeology in advancing academic research" [13]. Local volunteers and the Lismore Historical Society, he said, "played a central role in investigating the site" [13].
What to watch
- Radiocarbon or artefact dates in the Antiquity paper that place the precious-metal working in Mo Luóc's own era or in later centuries.
- Further excavation that measures the full extent of the burial grounds and the monastic settlement around the cathedral.
- Direct comparison of Lismore's craftworking evidence with Iona's in follow-up work.