by Bryan Sykes
One negative consequence of this lucky escape was that there are no written histories of Ireland from the Roman period. Not until the arrival of early Christians in the fifth century AD, and of St Patrick in particular, did written accounts, however unreliable, begin to appear. St Patrick himself is credited with the authorship of the earliest documents in Irish history, written in Latin: the Confessions, which defines and defends his mission, and one other, a short letter excommunicating the soldiers of a British chieftain who had murdered some of Patrick’s converts. Neither account throws much light on life in Ireland at the time – nor was that the intention. None the less, the beatification of St Patrick and his emergence as the supreme cult figure, which in many ways he remains to this day, did lead to further accounts of his life and his Christian mission by later authors. The early ninth-century Book of Armagh is the culmination of these and it established the primacy of the See of Armagh in the Irish Church.
The three centuries following St Patrick’s death in AD 493 are rightly regarded as a golden age in which Ireland became one of the most important religious centres in the whole of Europe. It was from Ireland that missionaries set out to convert the pagan tribes of northern Britain, establishing Columba’s monastery on Iona in AD 563 as a stepping stone. From Iona the monastery of Lindisfarne, off the Northumbrian coast, continued the mission to the eastern side of Britain. Irish missions to continental Europe were equally successful and St Columban, not to be confused with Columba, founded monasteries at Luxeuil in the Vosges mountains of eastern France and at Bobbio in the hills of the northern Apennines in Italy in the late 600s. Other Irish monks sought the opposite – a life of austere contemplation – and their search for solitude took them to increasingly remote destinations. They found what they were looking for on rocky islands off the west coast of Ireland, in the Western Isles of Scotland and even as far north as Iceland. Their journeys across the wild seas are all the more remarkable for having been undertaken not in well-constructed galleys but in curraghs – light boats with only shallow drafts and made from wooden spars covered in tarred animal hide.
But still, despite the intensity of religious devotion and scholarship, the written accounts are more or less completely bare of historical content. Even so, it is fairly clear that the reputation of these early saints was linked to the fortunes of the political dynasties to which they became attached. An association with the cult figure of St Patrick himself was the ultimate claim to authority and influence, and the opportunity was not overlooked by the first of the invading Anglo-Normans. In 1185 one of these barons, John de Courcey, arranged for the ‘discovery’ of St Patrick’s remains at Downpatrick and their removal to Armagh. This is very reminiscent of the fabricated discovery and ceremonial reburial of King Arthur’s bones by Edward I at Glastonbury a century later. Clearly, in the medieval period, any association with long-dead cult figures could be used as a claim for historical legitimacy.
Rather as in England, with the loosely based fiction of Geoffrey of Monmouth, history was written for a purpose. The Irish equivalent of Geoffrey’s History was the Leabhar Gabhála, the Book of Invasions, compiled from earlier writing in the late eleventh century. Even though, just like Geoffrey’s History, it is a clear attempt to link Irish history to the familiar events of the classical world, it managed to create a compelling narrative for the origins of Ireland and of the Gaels which became extremely influential as an origin myth for the Irish. And it still is. However accurate or inaccurate it may be as a record of Irish origins, we must still bear it in mind when we sift the record of the genes. Deeply held origin myths, however richly embroidered, have a habit of being right.
Although the Leabhar Gabhála was doubtless compiled by Christian monastic scribes, in common with the written versions of other rich mythologies in Ireland, there was no conflict or contradiction in recording the pagan myths of their native or adopted land. The phenomenal success of Irish Christianity owed a great deal to the sympathy it showed to ancient traditions and rituals and to their preservation in written form. The Irish Christian monks became the conduit of ancient knowledge, the filidh, and their success lay in their ability to create a seamless continuity between the rich mythical traditions of pagan Ireland and full-blown Christianity.
From our point of view, the Leabhar Gabhála chronicles four mythical phases of immigration. As you can imagine, all four involve great battles and heroic struggles as each wave of new arrivals ousts the former occupants. The last of these phases was the invasion of Ireland by the Gaels, bringers of the language and the alleged ancestors of today’s Celtic population. Indeed the principal purpose of the Leabhar Gabhála is to explain the presence of the Gaels in Ireland.
According to the Leabhar, the Gaels were descended from the sons of Mil, also variously known as Milesius and later by the, perhaps significant, epithet of Míle Easpain, or the ‘Soldier of Spain’. Mil was killed on an expedition to avenge the death of a nephew who had been killed by the Tuatha Dé Danaan, the previous occupiers and masters of Ireland. It was left to Mil’s three sons, Eber, Eremon and Amairgen, to defeat the Tuatha and conquer Ireland. When the brothers could not agree on the division of the island between them, Eber was killed by Eremon, who became the first High King to reign at Tara. Mil’s wife, Scota, was also killed in the expedition and the Gaels of Ireland, considering her to be their ancestral mother, called themselves Scots for that reason. Certainly the Romans referred to them as Scotti as well as the more familiar Hibernii.
According to legend, the ultimate ancestor was one Fennius Farsa, a Scythian king who lost his throne and fled to Egypt. Ancient Scythia was located north of the Black Sea in what is now the eastern Ukraine, between the two great rivers, the Don and the Dnieper. Once in Egypt his son, Nial, married the pharaoh’s daughter, and she had a son, Goidel. The whole family was banished from Egypt for refusing to join in the persecution of the children of Israel and wandered throughout northern Africa, finally crossing the Pillars of Hercules to settle in Spain, where they prospered.
Many years later, from a watchtower on a cliff top, one of Goidel’s descendants, Ith, saw a land far off across the seas that he had not noticed before. ‘It is on winter evenings, when the air is pure, that man’s eyesight reaches farthest,’ explains the account of the vision in the Leabhar Gabhála. Although it is quite impossible ever to see Ireland from Spain, Ith wasn’t to know this and he set sail with ninety warriors to explore the newly sighted country. He arrived at the mouth of the River Kenmare, one of the deep indentations in the coast at the extreme south-west of Ireland. From there, Ith tracked northwards until, at last, he encountered the Tuatha Dé Danaan, the race who inhabited Ireland. The meeting went well at first until the Tuatha began to doubt Ith’s motives for sailing to Ireland and, from his fulsome descriptions of the climate and the fertility of land and sea, suspected that he intended to invade. They killed Ith, but spared his companions, who then returned to Spain with their leader’s body. Ith’s uncle Mil vowed to avenge his nephew’s murder and set sail with his eight sons and their wives, accompanied by thirty-six chieftains, each with a ship full of warriors. With his sons at his side he defeated the Tuatha. Mil was himself killed in the battle, but his sons survived. The defeated Tuatha Dé Danaan also chose their name from their own ancestral mother, Dana. The Tuatha were a race of gods, each with their own special attributes and each as colourful as any gods of the classical Greeks. After their defeat by the Milesians, the Tuatha Dé Danaan fled to the Underworld and established a kingdom beneath the ground – a kingdom from where they were still able to harass their conquerors by depriving them of corn and milk, eventually forcing an agreement which divided Ireland into upper and lower parts and in which the Tuatha Dé Danaan are to this day the guardians of the Underworld.
In their own conquest of Ireland, the Tuatha Dé Danaan had ousted two groups of earlier occupants – the Fir Bholg and the Fomorians. After their defeat the Fir Bholg, a race of pre-Celtic humans, were banished to
the Aran Islands in Galway Bay. Unfortunately, the Leabhar Gabhála does not say where the Fir Bholg had come from. The implication is that they had been there all the time. In this respect, the Fir Bholg resemble myths in other parts of the Isles about a race of aboriginal inhabitants, usually described as being short and dark, who were subsumed by later ‘waves’ of Celtic arrivals.
The Fomorians, being divine like the Tuatha Dé Danaan, were altogether more difficult to defeat. Led by the terrifying Balor of the Baleful Eye, whose gaze alone caused instant death, the Fomorians were a race of demons. Balor’s one weakness was the prophecy that one day he would be slain by his own grandson. Despite hiding himself away on Tory Island off the Donegal coast and keeping his daughter away from men, she nonetheless became pregnant and bore triplets. Balor threw all three of his grandchildren into the sea, but one, called Lugh, survived. He grew up to lead the Tuatha Dé Danaan against the Fomorians and, in fulfilment of the prophecy, killed his grandfather Balor with a slingshot through his one, baleful, eye.
Lugh went on to feature in the best-known myths of the Ulster Cycle, which records the continual struggles of the Ulaid, the Ulstermen, against the neighbouring province of Connacht. He becomes one of the many suitors of the notoriously promiscuous Queen Medb. No man could rule in Tara without first mating with Queen Medb. Fiercely competitive, as well as promiscuous, Medb’s rivalry with one of her many consorts, the King of Connacht, leads into the most famous of all Irish myths, the Taín Bó Cúalnge, the Cattle Raid of Cooley. At first sight, cattle raiding might appear to be too prosaic a topic for a major myth, but remember that cattle were as much a badge of prestige as gold or jewels. Cattle raiding was an endemic occupation in Ireland as elsewhere in the Isles – and it was a failed cattle raid which led indirectly to the defeat of the giant Albion by Hercules.
The Taín Bó Cúalnge begins as Medb and the King of Connacht, in bed one night, decide to compare their material assets to resolve which of them is the richer. One matches the other until only a single item separates them. Ailill, King of Connacht, is the owner of a magnificent white-horned bull Findbennach, something that Medb does not possess. In vain she searches her own lands for a beast of comparable magnificence. Then she hears of a great brown bull, Donn, and arranges to borrow it from its owner. Things start to go wrong when her soldiers brag that they could have seized the bull with or without the consent of the owner, who, overhearing their boasting, cancels the arrangement and hides the bull. Queen Medb decides on a disproportionate response and invades Ulster, precipitating a lengthy war between Connacht and Ulster. To escape the fighting, the great bull Donn is sent to Connacht for safety but, unwisely, bellows loudly as he arrives in his new home. His bellows disturb Findbennach, and he challenges Donn to a duel to the death. Their fight takes them all over Ireland until Donn eventually manages to impale his rival on his horns. Though he wins the contest, Donn does not survive to enjoy his victory and dies from exhaustion.
Forgive me for relating the Taín Bó Cúalnge at such length. It portrays the intense feuding and futile rivalry between the rulers of the different parts of Ireland more vividly than any purely historical account. And these are rivalries that might just have a genetic effect. The Taín also involves another super-hero of Irish myth, Cú Chulainn. The son of Lugh, slayer of Balor of the Baleful Eye, he is fostered as a child by two other heroes with somewhat exaggerated attributes. The first, Ferghus mac Roich, has the strength of 700 men and a prodigious appetite. He can consume seven pigs, seven deer, seven cows and seven barrels of liquor at one sitting – and he requires seven women at once to satisfy him. When Ferghus is killed, while bathing with Queen Medb and thus temporarily distracted, another hero, Conall Cernach, takes over as Cú Chulainn’s foster-father.
Conall is the great champion of Ulster, who boasts that he never sleeps without the head of a Connachtman (severed presumably) resting beneath his knee. After foster-parenting like this, no wonder the boy grows up to be a super-hero. Naturally he is brave, beautiful, strong and invincible, and his chariot, helpfully, possesses an invisibility blanket to be used in the heat of battle. His weapons too are magical. His barbed spear, Gae Bulga, never wounds, only kills. In the war between Ulster and Connacht precipitated by Queen Medb’s cattle raid, he kills vast numbers of her soldiers single-handed. His technique in battle is to transform himself into a berserk demon. His body spins round within his skin, his hair stands on end and one eye disappears into his head while the other bulges enormously. Small wonder his enemies are driven mad with terror.
Cú Chulainn is destined for a short though glorious life. By accidentally eating dog flesh one day, he breaks a vow that he made when a young man. His power drains away at the height of battle, his weapons fall at his feet and the Morrigan, a coven of divine destroyers, perch on his shoulder in raven form. Realizing he is no longer invincible, the Connachtmen pluck up the courage to approach and cut off his head.
As well as powerfully portraying the intense rivalries in early Ireland, the myths and heroes of the Ulster Cycle still exert their effect today. It is no coincidence that a bronze statue of Cú Chulainn, cast in 1916, the year of the Easter Rising, stands today in the hall of Dublin’s main Post Office, which was itself the principal battleground of the Rising and the place where the Republicans held out for longest against the British. Myths are powerful things. And they often contain more than a grain of truth. But as well as these rich origin myths, there is an abundance of solid, archaeological evidence of Ireland’s past.
The first signs of human occupation in Ireland are at Mount Sandel, situated on a bluff overlooking the River Bann in County Antrim. The site at Mount Sandel has all the signs of containing a substantial dwelling, with large numbers of round holes dug into the ground. Though these holes were filled by debris long ago, their outlines are clear. These are post-holes and they were dug to hold in place the wall timbers of a house. The wood itself has long since rotted, but the holes remain and, from their arrangement, the outline shape of the building can be made out. The house was round and, from the angle of the post-holes, the timbers were inclined inwards, suggesting a structure resembling a large tent 5.5 metres in diameter. Unsurprisingly, nothing remains of the roof, but plenty of later structures are known where the space between the roof timbers was covered by skins, twigs and reeds and there is no reason to think Mount Sandel was any different. Within the house there is a large square hole, probably a central hearth, and outside there are further pits, probably used for storage.
The large numbers and the variety of food remains found at Mount Sandel certainly suggest that it was used as a base camp throughout the year. There are hundreds of salmon bones, which show that the site was occupied in the summer when the salmon, fresh from the sea, pushed upstream to their spawning grounds. Huge numbers of hazelnuts and the seeds of water lilies, wild pear and crab apple show that the site was used during the autumn harvest of wild forest food. The remains of young pigs, which are born in the late autumn, are the sure sign of winter occupation. Overall, it looks as though this was an almost permanent base from where the occupants ranged over a 10-kilometre radius to cover the river, the estuary and the coast. Everything they needed was within a two-hour walk.
Carbon-dating of animal and fish bones found at the site reveals that Mount Sandel was occupied about 9,000 years ago, making the dwellings the oldest houses in the whole of the Isles. There are plenty of flint tools at the site and they are dominated by the small sharp flakes known as microliths. These were struck off a central core of flint and then fashioned for a number of different uses. Some were square in shape, with one or two edges finished sharply for use as cutters and scrapers. They were used for slicing animal skins and then stripping away the subcutaneous fat ready for drying and making up into clothing. Others were shaped to a sharp point for making holes in skins in preparation for sewing with sinews removed from the hind legs of deer. There are also hundreds of small flakes, some no more than a centimetre long, delib
erately sharpened along one or two edges for use in composite tools such as arrows and spears. Like the roof timbers of the houses, the wooden shafts of these implements have rotted away so that only the stone remains.
The date of 9,000 years ago and the style of the material remains place Mount Sandel squarely in what is referred to as the Mesolithic period, otherwise known as the Middle Stone Age. The occupants may even have been exact contemporaries of the ‘younger’ of the Cheddar Men. Archaeologists divide the Stone Age into three phases. The oldest – the Palaeolithic or ‘Old Stone Age’ – covers the period from when the very first stone tools were discovered in Africa, at least 2 million years ago. They were not made by our own species, but by other types of archaic humans long since extinct. Our own species, Homo sapiens, does not make its appearance until about 150,000 years ago and the arrival of our ancestors in Europe about 45,000 years ago marks the beginning of the final phase of the Old Stone Age – the Upper Palaeolithic.
This phase lasted until the end of the last Ice Age, 13,000 years ago. The period between the end of the last Ice Age and the adoption of agriculture is known as the Mesolithic. Each phase is linked to a particular fashion of stone tool, and the microlith is the typical style of the Mesolithic. It is very much smaller and more refined than the larger flints of the preceding Upper Palaeolithic. Even so, the boundaries between the different phases are very fluid. For example, the scrapers of the Mesolithic are very similar to the scrapers of the Upper Palaeolithic.
At the time when people were living at Mount Sandel, the whole of the Isles was still connected to continental Europe. This does not mean the inhabitants of Mount Sandel did arrive overland, only that it was possible to do so at the time. The ice had begun to retreat 4,000 years before the main occupation of Mount Sandel, and the colonization of the Isles by the earlier Cheddar Man and his contemporaries had begun at least 3,000 years before. However, the earth wobbled once again in its orbit and there was a sudden and severe ‘cold snap’ between 11,000 and 10,000 years ago, which may have forced the human occupants back down south and cleared the Isles once more. The boundary of the ice, which had retreated to more or less its present latitudes, began to spread south again. The sea was frozen right down to northern Spain and the plains of northern Europe reduced once again to barren and inhospitable tundra. But, very fortunately, this cold phase – known as the Younger Dryas – lasted only for about 1,000 years. At the end of the cold snap the earth began to warm up very suddenly and humans could once again resume the occupation of northern Europe, this time for good – or at least until the present day. At first the landscape was bare of trees, rather like parts of northern Scandinavia today. Large herds of reindeer and wild horse roamed across the open plains once more. By the time Mount Sandel was occupied, the landscape was filling with trees as the temperatures rose. This warming was not a gradual process: the temperature literally shot up from bitter cold to very mild within less than a century. Around 9,500 years ago the average temperature was as high as, or even higher than, it is today.