With the Book of Kells at its centre this wide ranging film explores how the greatest Irish work of art to survive from the middle ages came to be made on the edge of the then known world. It reveals how native Irish artists took designs from the Eastern Mediterranean and Northern Europe and amalgamated them with their own craft traditions in metal working and stone carving to create a work which was so astonishing in the elaboration of its invention that for centuries it was considered to have been the work of angels.