To Carmel McCaffrey, growing up in Dublin, Ireland, meant tumbling into the car with her parents for day trips to ancient monasteries and burial grounds older than the pyramids in Egypt. As a little girl running on beaches, she listened for the echoes of the 11th-century battles between Irish King Brian Boru and the Viking invaders.
"You could feel the spirits scattered throughout the land," she says. "The ancient Irish, to me, were everywhere."
Now, two decades after emigrating from her homeland and eventually settling in Carroll County, McCaffrey has mined her experience and her pride in her country to help produce a multimedia exploration of the island nation's roots. The Johns Hopkins University instructor was the consultant on a Public Broadcasting Service film, In Search of Ancient Ireland, and she is co-author of the recently released companion book.
Leo Eaton, the film's producer and book's co-author, says McCaffrey brought an invaluable personal touch to the projects.
"Carmel gave me a real sense of place," says English-born Eaton, a veteran producer of documentaries who works out of his Carroll County farmhouse. "I distilled her knowledge from the ground we walked and the places we saw. We traveled with the greatest archaeologists, historians and folklorists to the spots where history happened."
A different story
It is a history that might surprise some who know Ireland only as a land of struggle and famine. For most of the Middle Ages, Ireland was an intellectual capital of Europe and a keeper of the continent's culture. What's more, it enjoyed a Golden Age, the relics of which fill Irish museums.
"This is the story of Ireland not known in the U.S., a good story worth telling," McCaffrey says. "We are inviting readers into a different world - a world of the Irish that they can't see as a tourist."
Terry Golway, staff writer at the New York Observer and author of For the Cause of Liberty, an Irish history that begins with the Viking invasion, said few researchers have tackled the country's earliest times.
"Irish histories invariably begin in the 12th century," Golway said. "This book goes back to the period that people have forgotten and one that they should really study. It is a very neglected part of the Irish story. There really is not a whole lot out there like this or with as much depth."
The film and book trace Ireland's history from 9000 B.C. to A.D. 1167 - 100 centuries that took the country from the end of the Ice Age to the first British invasion. But the search began about four years ago in Carroll.
That's when Eaton developed the concept for the film and, he says, "needed somebody local that I could rely on for Irish research." His wife, Jeri Eaton, had taken a course about Irish culture taught by McCaffrey at Carroll Community College, and she introduced the two.
McCaffrey teaches Irish history and literature - she is considered an expert on Oscar Wilde, the 19th-century playwright and author.
Leo Eaton has made films for PBS, the British Broadcasting Corp. and the Discovery Channel. He had little difficulty securing financing from PBS and Irish television, he said.
"Ancient Ireland came to me because no one has ever put together the roots of Ireland from the Neolithic Age to the Norman invasion," he says.
McCaffrey said she would assist, but only if Eaton agreed to go to Ireland with her and talk to the scholars.
From Dublin's museums to isolated monasteries along the coastline, the collaborators covered McCaffrey's sites and interviewed some of Ireland's most renowned historians.
"This is a place where you cannot divorce history from the landscape," Eaton says. "Everything is so rooted in place, far more than in America, which is so new."
They visited Tara, once the royal center where many of Ireland's high kings were crowned and where Brian Boru once ruled. McCaffrey says she had Eaton crawl through tunnels underneath the remains of elaborate tombs known as dolmen.
There they studied the carvings etched into the walls millennia ago. The drawings show how communities gathered at those huge gravesites for religious rituals and celebrations.
Monasteries also were at the core of ancient Irish of society, and to this day are repositories of the country's history.
"The monks were actually family men, married with children," McCaffrey says. "They were brilliant scholars who brought light to the dark ages. They documented life, and gave us a wealth of information full of serious history."
From 1000 B.C. to 900 B.C., Ireland's culture was sophisticated and affluent, they say.
"Ireland was absolutely the intellectual center of Europe because of its unique love of learning and scholarship," says Eaton. "This small island's impact on world culture makes it incredibly important."
And its inhabitants were people of considerable means, McCaffrey says.
"Ireland still has more gold from the Bronze Age than any other country in Europe," she says.
Eaton remained in Ireland to film for a year, while McCaffrey made several trips back and forth. Both knew a book was in the offing.
Discovery of truth
Their research debunked a few myths and uncovered the truth behind many legends. St. Patrick, for example, became the patron saint of Ireland more for the letters he wrote and the wealthy landowners that championed him than for any of his deeds, they say.
McCaffrey does not tolerate stereotypes of her countrymen. She decried "high-handed mocking descriptions" and "Irish bashing" in one American tourist's account of an ill-fated trip to Ireland that was published in the Washington Post travel section.
"The image of the hot-tempered, lazy Irish drunk owes its origin to the British press ... of the 19th century, which sought to explain away or rationalize why the Irish were not happy members of the British Empire and wished to leave it," she wrote.
With 40 million Americans claiming some strain of Irish heritage, the duo's work appears to hold wide appeal. PBS broadcast the three-hour series in June and earned ratings that were about 33 percent higher than the network's prime-time average. The series also was broadcast in Ireland.
Eaton is off to Mexico for a documentary about national music. McCaffrey is lecturing at Hopkins and appearing at book signings on weekends. But when asked about a possible sequel on Ireland, both say, as the Irish might put it, "there's been talk."
"You have to hold onto your past," she says. "Talking and writing is a link to Ireland for me. I always feel a pull to go back."