- Only book available on this specialist subject.
- Gazetteer gives an overview of (possible) remains of Templar history in Ireland.
- Historical inaccuracies, sloppy editing and excentric choices may confuse or annoy reader.
- Gazetteer not readily suitable for the tourist or amateur field researcher.
- No description of current state of sites is given, directions for visitors are very basic.
- High price reflects specialist interest.
- 216 pages, available in hardback and paperback versions.
- Contains black and white illustrations, color photographs and some sketched maps.
- First published in September 2006.
Michael J. Carroll's "The Knights Templar and Ireland" is not beyond redeem - it can be a useful volume to start off your own research. Should you want to find relics, there cannot be a better place to start than the more than ninety places Carroll mentions as having Templar connections. Though you may wonder why for instance Dungeel is included twice. This is just one example of sloppy editing, repetitions are frequent, so are typos and grammatical oddities. Or frankly nonsensical parts - on page 26 a white mantle with a white cross seems to be suggested as the habit of the Hospitallers. Such are the pitfalls of DIY-publishing.
Other pitfalls are less obvious - Carroll's research draws from popular sources and contains nothing new on the Templars per se. But when on page 45 Carroll states that the "venerated head" was mistaken for "the head of Jesus" a mention would have been appropriate that according the basic Christian belief relics of Jesus Christ's body are extremely rare, a head being impossible. Serious students of the subject may shake their own head here.
I would also question the choice of illustrations - open to debate at times. The illustration of templars being burnt at the stake in a chapter dealing with Ireland is totally inappropriate.
Other odd choices plague the book at times. Why, for instance, does Carroll call the last Grand Master "James de Molay" first, then switches to the common "Jaques"?
In the chapter on "Templar Myths and Legends" Carroll seems to have been mystified himself - the "Sword of Destiny" was always a spear, Tara was not dug up by grail-searching freemasons but by ark-searching "British Israelites" and his quick re-hashing of the Roslyn and Mary Magdalene conjectures smacks of jumping on the "da Vinci Code" bandwagon.
A very basic primer to Templar history in Ireland - albeit at a high price.
