The Travelers Guide to Sacred Ireland
The best guide to Ireland available at last
Sacred ireland by Cary Meehan is available again on Amazon, Apple Books, Kubo, and Overdrive, which you know as the library reading app Libby.
For years it’s been out of print, and if you looked for it, you found only scams. Now you can get put it on your phone in seconds for about $15.
Years before I first came to Ireland I found Sacred Ireland, an oddly shaped thick paperback at Bookshop Santa Cruz. It became the key that unlocked Ireland for me, bringing me deep into the island, far from the coach tours and Blarney. Meehan’s book gave me three important aspects of Ireland all other guide books lacked: context, comprehensiveness, and coherence.
Meehan’s Sacred Ireland taught me a history of Ireland embedded in the landscape I had arrived in with reverence and total ignorance. It was this book’s more than 200 different sites that taught me to appreciate the variety of the sacred, from ruined churches, to a solitary tree, or a holy well covered with a tea tray in the middle of the forest. And it was this book that taught me how to think about Irish spirituality, which seems to be an intersection of the sects of Christianities, the shadows of a pagan past and light of a pagan present, and a continuous human connection with the Irish Otherworld: enternal, co-existing, potent.
Meehan made the wise choice to not update the book from its 2011 version. All of the sites are much easier to find now; many of them have webpages devoted to them. But unlike any other guide, Cary began writing each site description while she was present, smelling the moss, feeling the rain, hearing the birds as she attempted to capture each sites unique energy. Nothing like it has ever been attempted, and probably never will again.
Get your copy, and tell your friends.