Romans and Celts - Pre-Christian, Celtic Irish Background - Pagan rites and Christianity - Queen Maeve and St Brigid - monasteries and hermitic practice in Ireland - Patrick, Brendan and pagan threads woven in to the Christian pattern - St Columba brings the Irish Church to Scotland - Columbanus and his adventurous European missions - clash at the Synod of Whitby between the Anglo-Saxon-Roman dominated church and the Irish Church.

Here is the very essence of the Irish as a race, all the zeal and vigour that sent those early sailor saints voyaging with the message of Christianity to various parts of Europe; no highly organised Church but one of small groups and individuals. They were the Irish exiles for God. The author writes of the great figures of the early anchorite and monastic movements with rare understanding and gives an absorbing picture of the Ireland that was, and in doing so, of the Irish as they still are. Columbanus, chosen in our time as the patron saint of those who seek a united Europe, was one of these Irish saints who thus links the sixth century with today. This is a stimulating book in which these saints are very much alive and the author vividly recreates these two astonishing centuries of the flowering of the Irish. [from the book jacket]