Airship of Clonmacnoise

The airship of Clonmacnoise is the subject of a historical anecdote related in numerous medieval sources. Though the original report, in the Irish annals, simply mentioned an apparition of ships with their crews in the sky over Ireland in the 740s, later accounts through the Middle Ages progressively expanded on this with picturesque details. First the ships were reduced to one ship over Teltown from which a crewman threw and then recovered a fishing-spear. Then the scene shifted to the abbey of Clonmacnoise, and later to Britain, and the fishing-spear was changed to an anchor which snagged on some feature of a church. The sailor who climbed down to release it was also said to be in danger of drowning in the thicker air of this lower world. The story was retold by Seamus Heaney in a well-known poem collected in his 1991 volume, Seeing Things.

Origins

Several sets of Irish annals, those of Ulster, Tigernach, Clonmacnoise, and the Four Masters, all briefly mention a strange apparition; the Ulster Annals, for example, simply say that "ships with their crews were seen in the air". Though the annals differ as to the precise date, whether it was in 743, 744 or 748/9, they are nevertheless considered to be an early, if possibly second- or third-hand, description of the same event, an occurrence considered remarkable enough to be recorded. Naturally, the precise nature of these supposed ships cannot now be proved, though they have been variously interpreted as an unusual cloud-formation (such as the ship-shaped cloud recorded to have been seen by the 13th-century monks of St. Albans), a display of aurora borealis, or, by many ufologists, as evidence of an alien visitation.