The line has always been at our service--tool and companion on our journey into being, it has measured, mapped, woven and wriggled its way through our lives, its quicksilver flexibility fueling our discoveries. We harness lines to make our world, to bind language into time, to connect and protect, surround and select. They are our means for bringing our imagination into existence, our will manifested. Ancient societies were fascinated by the magic and poetry of the line, for within the patterns it described they saw the face of eternity, those qualities we name numbers. To study number is to study permanence--numbers are forever, they do not change, they are change. Traditional geometry studies the quality of number in space using cord, compass and straight edge. It is rooted in the idea of a cosmos embroidered with number by causal intelligence. As true philosophers, Celts, Druid and Christian, lived in a world of vision, seeing nature as both living presence and vast book, written in a language of symbolic analogy (sometimes known as "the language of the birds" or "the green language").

This vision of meaning in nature is nowhere better expressed than in the flowing ornament and rigorous geometry of Celtic art. So join us as we follow the adventures of line through the Celtic world, as it winds its way from prehistory to the first books. Tracing its path we will see into the minds of the Celtic artists, unfolding their intent and imaginings, reconstructing their technical mastery and its strictures, and learning through practice to join the action of hand, eye and heart, and see a glimpse of an immanent reality.