by Bryan Sykes
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, deliberately 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 kn
own 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.
The sea ice retreated way beyond the Shetland Isles and the sea level rose again as the ice melted. First Ireland was separated from the rest of the Isles at around 8,500 years ago. That put a stop to the colonization of Ireland by some land animals and explains why there are no moles, lizards or snakes in Ireland. That is, of course, unless you prefer to believe, in the case of snakes, that it was St Patrick himself that banished them. These animals, though, did have time to establish themselves in Britain before it was eventually cut off from the European mainland by the rising water levels in the North Sea 500 years later, about 8,000 years ago.
By now the Irish landscape had changed from tundra to an open forest of birch trees. As the temperature continued to rise, this open woodland slowly changed to a thicker cover of hazel and, by about the time the Isles became completely severed from the rest of Europe, they were covered in a mature forest of elm, lime and oak. The herds of large mammals moved north if they could, but in Ireland their way was barred by the sea. Many, including the magnificent Irish elk, with antlers some 3 metres across, became extinct. They were replaced in the now dense forests by wild pig, red and roe deer and the aurochs, the ancestor of modern domestic cattle, and by a host of smaller mammals like squirrel and pine marten. From the remains at Mount Sandel and other Mesolithic sites, it seems that anything that moved risked being roasted on the campfire. The ideal places to live were near rivers, such as at Mount Sandel on the River Bann, or by the sea. Here you could have the best of both worlds. Fish and shellfish from the sea and rivers, hazelnuts, pork and venison from the forest. Not a bad life at all. All the best shoreline sites accumulated huge mounds, or middens, of discarded shells built up often several metres high.
From the overall size of individual Mesolithic sites, archaeologists estimate that the number of people occupying them was quite low, possibly just single nuclear families. There was not the same need to join together in hunting bands of twenty or so as there had been in the colder, tundra phases. Then the main prey had been the herds of large and dangerous animals like bison, which called for organized ambushes and teamwork among the hunters. Neither was there any need to move over large distances to keep up with the herds as they migrated from summer to winter feeding grounds. Though many Mesolithic sites that have been found were obviously temporary, used for just a few days, others, like Mount Sandel, were occupied for long enough to make it worthwhile building the timber-framed houses.
Though the inhabitants of Mount Sandel were certainly hunter-gatherers, they were not above manipulating the environment to make life easier. They deliberately created open glades within the forest to encourage hazel trees to grow. They did not need to fell the mature elms and oaks to do this, but merely to ring-bark them and wait for them to die and be blown over. By stripping away a continuous band of bark from around the trunk, the capillaries that carry water to the leaves are disrupted and the tree begins to die. The next winter storm may blow it to the ground. The unremarkable life of the Mesolithic hunter-gatherers continued at Mount Sandel and elsewhere in Ireland for thousands of years, leaving little trace on the landscape and few permanent signs, shell middens apart, for archaeologists to follow.
Meanwhile on continental Europe radical changes were under way. From modest beginnings in the Middle East, farming was beginning its unstoppable march towards the Isles. Ten thousand years ago in the Fertile Crescent, in that part of what is now Syria and northern Iraq that is drained by the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, people had learned how to cultivate wild grasses and how to replace hunting with domestication. Farming ushered in the New Stone Age–or Neolithic, to distinguish it from the hunter-gatherer Mesolithic–with a whole range of new stone implements for farming. They also made pottery. The invention of agriculture seems such a small change in the tactics of subsistence, yet it has led to the complete reshaping of the world into its modern form. Whole books have been written about this, and I will resist the temptation to go off at a tangent, restricting myself instead to the implications for our remote ancestors, and for the gene patterns that await our scrutiny.
Carbon-dates from farming sites and the comparison of different pottery styles show that agriculture spread through continental Europe by two principal routes. The split probably came as the first farmers reached the Balkans and the lower Danube from Turkey around 8,500 years ago, about the time that Ireland finally separated from Britain and the residents of Mount Sandel were tucking into yet another bowl of limpet soup. One group of farmers headed north to reach the great Hungarian plains, then, after a thousand-year pause, moved rapidly north and west along the major river valleys of the Oder and the Elbe towards the Baltic and the North Sea. They needed to clear thick forest to make enough space for cultivation. This they did by ring-barking and burning the dead trees and undergrowth, thereby fertilizing the soil with ash. By 7,000 years ago they had reached northern France, southern Belgium and The Netherlands.
Meanwhile the other group moved along the Mediterranean coast of Italy, southern France and Iberia. By 7,500 years ago they had reached the Atlantic coast of France. At each point along the way, in the forest and on the seashore, each group of farming pioneers encountered the earlier Mesolithic inhabitants, but there is no archaeological evidence that their interactions were anything but peaceful. Just as in Irel
and, the highest density of Mesolithic hunter-gatherers was around the coast, rather than in the dense inland forests. In several places, particularly around the coast near Lisbon in Portugal, Neolithic farming communities lived fairly close to Mesolithic settlements and carbon-dating shows that both were occupied at much the same time. However, the newcomers chose sites a little way away from the estuaries favoured by the hunter-gatherers, instead setting up camp inland on higher ground between the main river valleys. As they were not competing for the same living space, this reduced the potential for conflict.
In Ireland the same process of peaceful co-existence seems to have accompanied the arrival of farming communities. There were thriving Mesolithic settlements all around the coast, some of which, like Sutton in County Dublin, had been occupied for long enough to accumulate enormous middens of discarded shells over 100 metres long. They certainly would not have thrown in the towel as soon as the first farmer paddled round the coast. At Ferriter’s Cove on the Dingle peninsula in County Kerry, the presence of polished stone axes–which, like pottery, are a reliable signal of the Neolithic–among the otherwise Mesolithic remains at this shoreline site, shows that the hunter-gatherers were in contact with farmers. Cattle bones at the site also show this interaction. So, in Ireland, just as elsewhere in Atlantic Europe, the transition to farming from hunter-gathering was gradual and piecemeal and did not necessarily involve sharp changes in the make-up of the Irish population.
These signals of the arrival of the Neolithic in Ireland are small and subtle, noticed only by the professional archaeologist. How different, then, from the gigantic stone structures that also appeared in Ireland 1,000 years later. These are the jewels of Irish archaeology, drawing tens of thousands of visitors each year to stand in awe and reflect on the grandeur, the construction and the purpose of these magnificent structures. The Oxford archaeologist Barry Cunliffe has studied megalithic structures in the Isles and also in Brittany and along the Atlantic coast of France and Iberia. Rather than a phenomenon solely linked to the Neolithic and the spread of farming, Cunliffe traces their origin to the shell middens of Mesolithic Portugal. Within the piles of shells accumulated over centuries on the banks of the River Sado, excavations have found human remains that have all the appearance of being deliberate ritual burials. The middens are enormous, some over 100 metres in diameter and several metres high, and within some of them over 100 burials have been discovered. Further north, on the southern coast of Brittany, later dated midden graves have been found lined with stone. In others, bodies were buried with personal ornaments such as drilled sea shells and stone pendants. Traces of red ochre show that, like the Red Lady of Paviland, the bodies were covered in this pigment, the purpose of which may perhaps have been to restore the flush of health to a lifeless corpse.