I am interested in the ways in which western Europe emerged from the shake-out of the decline of the Roman Empire, and this is the area of most of my teaching and research. I like to work with both archaeology and text sources. I set up the Bernician Studies Group with Max Adams under the former Explore programme and this group too has arisen, phoenix-like, from the collapse. Under this banner, we are engaged on study and a field research project in the Irish Republic, in County Donegal. We are looking at both site-specific detail and wider landscape settings of a group of early monasteries on the Inishowen peninsula. We have been led to this area by our interest in understanding and exploring the networks of information exchange which operated across the early Christendom of western Europe. One of our BSG members coined the term Ecclesiastical Superhighway for the operation of these networks. It’s a good metaphor; and we can extend it to the idea of the nodes or hubs through which information is transmitted: these are the monasteries.
