For as long as he remembered, he had crossed Trawbreaga. His father Ronan had carried him shoulder high along Doagh strand, keeping away from the shifting sands for which he had a terror. He was seven when he came from the Island to the monks at Lagg.
“Connor, be still there, will you,” Ronan yelled, as the feisty curragh bounced out towards the beach of the five rocks.

It was a short trip when the winds were down. But the currents were fierce and it was always a risk at the Bar Mouth. Ronan had lived on this water. He knew its moods. He was careful. The brothers were expecting them. Abbot Colman was there on the sand. In the dunes behind him was the monastery, the stream alongside. A familiar place from visits with his father. The brothers were often in Doagh with Ronan and he in Lagg with them. Now his father had decided that Connor should stay with the monks. Letters and prayers, ink and candles would fill his days. No more trekking the island’s hills after sheep or risking his life on the ocean chasing fish.
“God and his holy mother be with you both this day,” greeted Colman as Ronan beached the curragh high on the shore below the sand hills
.
“Come here, son…you are welcome to this house.”
Colman hoisted Connor on his shoulders. The lad gazed back at the hills of Doagh - lime green and gashed with yellow. The sun was plunging towards Glashedy and thrusting a sword of white fire over the waters of the bay. He watched as his father rowed back to Doagh, the sea flashing to the dip of his oar.

And that’s how Connor remembered it. A place of changing light and mood. From the shoulders of his father abbot, from the bens of Knockamany, from the stepping stones in Malin - all he remembered was light. When the mists and rain shrouded sea and hills, when the wind terrorised Inishowen and he shivered in his cell above Lagg, his fingers black with ink copying the texts, the light still inspired him.

Eyes straining in the silver mists of a January morning, he gripped a goose feather, sharpened it with flint and scratched the words of St John - “…life that was the light of men…” And in the margin of the rough parchment he fashioned a poem. Wet ink glistened in the breaking dawn.
He was sixteen when Colman told Colmcille they had a poet in the monastery at Lagg. The great man had come around Eoighan’s headland by sea from Derry. Not one to waste time Colmcille knew his man. Within a day, Connor was told he was going to Rome. There was an Ui Neill at the Lateran with the Pope – Finbar - a friend of Colmcille from Gartan. Letters were written. Five months later Connor arrived in San Clemente.

That had been four years ago. Now it was over. He was going back to share his learning with his brothers in the territory of the Ui Neill.

“Read, read and read till your eyes burn. Listen to everything. Copy what you can,” yelled Colmcille as the boy left Wexford quay, “and get back to Inishowen to teach us!”
The Roman light entranced him. It was softer than the north. It introduced him to shadow and subtlety. It was less changeable. The colours were gentler. He enjoyed the dusky short twilight when the swifts flitted round the rooftops. The warmth lingered and he smelt the umbrella pines from the Palatine Hill.

Rome had challenged his intellect and senses. It had refined the rough drama of his Celtic personality. He admired order, law and system. Architecture amazed him. Wine from the Alban Hills had intoxicated him often and earned him a flogging from Finbar. The sun had entered his blood, roused his passion and earned him another flogging when he gave more than interest to a girl from the city. But he was learning to handle love.

Fluent in the Latin language, familiar with scripture and aware of thinking in the university he was ready to return to Ireland to teach. His mind went back to the light. Sun rise in winter, the sky in Inishowen blazing with red and orange and silver. White starlight piercing the sooty night with a thousand needles. The moon like milk spread on Trawbeaga. The prisms of colour after rain, the wind picking out the white water in the ocean. Ireland was harder than Italy, more rugged, stronger. He was suited to that and anxious to be back. His mind travelled to Knockamany, soaring over Doagh and Pollan, and beyond Binnion to the Swilly and Fanad. He was swimming off Doagh Point and marvelling at the swirls and rings in the fabulous rock formations. It was his father’s world and he was going back.

The ox carts were dragging blocks of marble from the Flavian theatre to the new house for Pope Leo on the Lateran Hill. They had been tramping the old road for months. When it rained the street was a canal and the stepping-stones became islands. Connor leaped over the cart ruts. In his imagination, he was climbing the stones at Dunargus and looking down to his glittering bay. An ox stumbled. A block caught him on the shoulder and drove him into the sodden street. He heard his father shouting for him among the quick sands. A great burst of searing light.

He was home.