Airship of Clonmacnoise

Though the original report, in the Irish annals, simply mentioned an apparition of ships with their crews in the sky over Ireland in the 740s, later accounts through the Middle Ages progressively expanded on this with picturesque details.

[6] Patrick, a late-11th century bishop of Dublin, gives a Latin verse account of the story which closely parallels that in the Book of Ballymote, though leaving out the intervention of Congalach and the man on the ground.

Gervase tells us that, when leaving their local church somewhere in Britain one dark and cloudy day, parishioners saw a ship's anchor embedded in a heap of stones in the churchyard and a rope leading down to it from above.

When it would not budge for all their tugging, a voice was heard in the thick air, like the clamour of sailors vying to recover the thrown anchor.

When he was about to disengage the anchor, he was seized by bystanders: he gasped in the hands of his captors like a man lost in a shipwreck, and died suffocated in the moisture of our thicker air.

And there it thus befell on a Sunday, when people were at church and were hearing Mass, there came dropping from the air above an anchor, as if it were cast from a ship, for there was a rope attached to it.

[16] The Celticist Proinsias Mac Cana instanced other Irish stories which, like the airship legend, explore "the relationship between the natural and the supernatural, between this and the other world, together with the ambiguities and relativities of time and space which were implicit in their interaction".

[17] Flying ships or boats, emblematic of the Church, sailing towards heaven are a motif found on several medieval Irish carved crosses, some dating from as early as the 8th century.

[18] The trope of fouling and recovering an anchor in a monastery occurs also in a story referenced in a gloss on an early Irish hymn, "Ní car Brigit buadach bith"; in this story the anchor belongs to an ordinary seagoing ship and the monastery lies at the bottom of the Sea of Wight.

[19] During 1896 and 1897, there were many reports across the United States of mysterious airships (then an invention then at an experimental stage of development) seen in the sky, some being vouched for by apparently reliable sources while others were clearly hoaxes.

[20] One account, printed in the Houston Post for 28 April 1897, told of churchgoers in Merkel, Texas returning home by night who came across a rope and anchor being dragged across country until it finally snagged on a railway line.

The whole report contains enough similarities to the various versions of the Clonmacnoise story to demonstrate a link, including the returning churchgoers and poor light conditions described by the Otia Imperialia (but not the Speculum Regale), and the display of the anchor and escape of the aeronaut described by the Speculum Regale (but not the Otia Imperialia).

[29] It is also the subject of the Peter Sís tapestry Out of the Marvellous, unveiled at Dublin Airport in 2014, which depicts a figure in a tiny ship in the sky which is supported by leaves of paper bearing lines from the poem.