Stones of Aran
Page 54
Duach Teangumha, the third or fourth Christian King of Connacht, was defeated and killed by one of the Uí Néill who was battling his way to the High Kingship, in about ad 500. Following generations of his line must often had need of the magical assistance of their totemic lizard, that lives on in the O’Flaherty crest; tradition has it that when a chief of the Ui Briúin, weary from battle and flight, fell asleep, a lizard warned him of the near approach of his enemies by running up and down on his face and tickling him with its nails. The cognomen of Amhalgadh Earclasaigh (earc sléibhe, lizard) suggests that it was of him this tale was told. The genealogies put him at the end of the sixth century, and while his father had been King of Connacht, he was merely king of Iar-Chonnacht (West Connacht), which at that time probably meant Maigh Seola and did not include the lands west of Lough Corrib. Eight or ten generations after him comes the Flaithbheartach or Flaherty from whom the clan took its name.
The stronghold of the early O’Flahertys was a fortified crannóg or lake-dwelling in Lough Hacket, near the present Headford. Two headlines are preserved of its troubled centuries: in 990 it was “swallowed in an hour” by a great storm; in 1036 it was destroyed by the King of Connacht, and several O’Flaherty chiefs were slain. The O’Connors were the rising power in Connacht then, and the Annals recall a few grim deeds from their long struggles and treacherous accomodations with the O’Flahertys. In 1051 Maigh Seola was overrun by the King of Connacht, Hugh O’Connor “of the Broken Spear,” who put out the eyes of the O’Flaherty chief. To blind an enemy was the usual way, short of killing him, of unfitting him for kingship. In 1092 a period of peace was broken by the chief Flaherty O’Flaherty, when the O’Connor king, Roderick of the Yellow Hound, foster-father to Flaherty’s sons, during a friendly visit to him, was seized and had his eyes put out, and was consequently dethroned.
This Flaherty O’Flaherty, having installed another O’Connor in Roderick’s stead, received his own territories back in return. A description of Maigh Seola from this period lists the various clans subject to the O’Flahertys, including the O’Hallorans, O’Dalys, O’Duanes and O’Kennedys; it also names the hereditary officers to the O’Flahertys, such as the O’Canavans and O’Lees, medical “ollaves” (masters or experts), also their masters of the horse, standard bearers, brehons or judges, ollaves of history and poetry, masters of the feast, stewards and bee-keepers. However, this great following did not bring security, and in 1098 Flaherty O’Flaherty was assassinated by the vengeful foster-father of the king he had blinded.
The early part of the next century was dominated by the campaigns of King Turlough O’Connor against his rivals for the High Kingship of Ireland. The O’Flahertys were subject to the O’Connors by then, and several O’Flaherty chieftains died in Turlough’s ceaseless campaigns. The tide of battle swept to and fro, with now the Connachtmen laying waste north Munster and destroying the O’Briens’ palace at Kincora, now the Munstermen bringing devastation even into Iar-Chonnacht. A castle newly built at the mouth of the Galway river (the town did not as yet exist) was repeatedly fought over, destroyed and rebuilt. Turlough, styled “the Augustus of Western Europe” by the Annalists, had a long and intermittently triumphal reign as King of Connacht and High King of Ireland. His fleet was crucial to his successes, bringing his forces up the Shannon to burn down Limerick and devastate the surrounding parts of Munster, defeating the combined fleets of his Ulster enemies, the Scottish Isles and the Isle of Man in the greatest of ancient Irish sea-battles, off Inishowen. The O’Flahertys contributed their ships to this fleet, for as lords of the inner bay of Galway and of the huge expanse of Lough Corrib they were a naval power—a fact commemorated by the “antique galley” of their coat of arms. A poem of this period refers to “the warlike O’Flahertys”:
To flee from their onslaught is meet;
To them belongs the watching of the fair harbours.
The O’Flahertys were not solely devoted to war, though. At Annaghdown on the eastern shore of Lough Corrib was an ancient ecclesiastical site attributed to St. Brendan of Clonfert. Under the O’Flahertys a priory arose there soon after 1195, and Annaghdown became a bishopric roughly co-extensive with their territories, to which they supplied several bishops. The monastery was burned down in 1411, but some of its fine Romanesque stonework can be seen in the ruins of the later cathedral, together with the remains of cloisters with a distinctly military air; in the dangerous world of the O’Flahertys even their religious capital had to be fortified.
Turlough O’Connor died in 1156, and it was during his son Rory’s High Kingship that one of his rivals, Dermot Mac Murrough, brought the first Anglo-Norman mercenaries into the island, in 1167. Chain-mail, the crossbow, the battle-steed, a new discipline and ideology of conquest, rapidly brought ancient Ireland to its end. By a treaty of 1175, Rory became a vassal of the King of England, holding Connacht directly from him and paying tribute. The treaty did not long delay the Anglo-Normans’ advance. They first invaded Connacht in 1177, coming as far as Tuam and sending an expedition to burn Galway before being put to flight. In 1196 the O’Flahertys rose in revolt against the aged Rory O’Connor and were crushed by his rebellious younger brother Crobderg (red-hand), who captured the O’Flaherty chieftain and handed him over to the English to be put to death. Two years later, Rory, the last High King of Ireland, died as a pilgrim at Cong, the monastery his father had founded at the head of Lough Corrib.
Differences over the succession left Connacht open to the fateful advent of the Normans. William de Burgo had paid good money for a grant of Connacht to King John of England, and was looking for an opportunity of seizing the land to go with the parchment. In 1202, and after devious and treacherous combinations between Anglo-Norman and Irish forces, he was celebrating Easter with the recently crowned Crobderg in Cong, while conspiring with the O’Flahertys against his host. These plans failed, and within a few years he was dead, and for the first time the O’Flahertys were driven out of Maigh Seola by the O’Connors. Soon they had to hand over all their ships on Lough Corrib, were ousted from their fort at Galway, and retreated into the wild terrain of mountains and bogs to the west.
The de Burgos were a powerful family at court, however, and the paper grant of Connacht always threatened. When, in 1235, the Norman lords undertook the systematic reduction of Connacht, the de Burgos’ share was to include Maigh Seola. The O’Flahertys, although confined behind Lough Corrib, were still seen as a danger, and the English attacked them and forced them to co-operate in pursuit of some of the O’Connors’ troops. On this occasion the O’Flahertys dragged their ships from the head of Lough Corrib to Killary Harbour, a distance of seven miles, sailed from there to Clew Bay and joined with the English in committing slaughter and devastation in the islands of the bay. Perhaps because of this, when the O’Flahertys petitioned King Henry III of England to be restored to their ancient lands, the King was willing to concede that, although “mere Irish,” they and their ancestors had always showed fealty and service to him and his predecessors by assisting the English to reduce the Irish. But the lords in possession were not so amenable, and repeatedly invaded the O’Flaherty refuges beyond Lough Corrib. Meanwhile Norman tower-houses had risen all over Maigh Seola, just as in the Welsh borderlands a century earlier.
The name Iar-Chonnacht after this period refers only to the region almost severed from the rest of Ireland by Lough Corrib and the long fiord of Killary Harbour, the almost inviolable homeland of the O’Flahertys. The previous chieftains of these lands were subordinated, the English dared not penetrate so far west, the O’Malleys to the north were in alliance most of the time, and for three hundred years the O’Flahertys’ main enemy was their own feuding selves. In Connemara, the remoter half of this territory, was a crannóg of some strategic importance, controlling the lowest ford on the main river flowing southwards out of the boglands. The history of Ballynahinch (Baile na hInse, the settlement of the island), as it was called, is almost synonymous with that of Connemara. Ne
ar it, during this relatively settled period, the O’Flahertys founded two modest religious houses, a Carmelite monastery on the lakeshore in about 1327, and a Dominican priory at the sea-mouth of the river about a century later.
For the Celts of old, wealth was measured in cattle, but after their retreat into this land of bogs and rainswept stony hillsides the O’Flahertys would have been more dependent on their flocks of sheep, and wool was the basis of their sea trade with the Atlantic fringe of southern Europe. But as the outside world changed, with the little walled town of Galway growing into an outpost of commercialism and civility, the unregulated, untaxable comings and goings of the O’Flaherty sails came to be regarded as mere smuggling. Although O’Flahertys now intermarried with the Burkes (i.e. the de Burgos, hibernicized), to the citizens of Galway, and especially to the merchant families of Norman origin who formed its oligarchy, Iar-Chonnacht was still the abode of the alien, against whom their walls had to be manned, and it is said that over Galway’s north gate was inscribed the prayer, “From the Ferocious O’Flahertys good Lord deliver us.”
Towards the end of the fifteenth century the O’Flahertys began to build Norman-style keeps or tower-houses, near their borders with Norman Ireland and all around the western coastline. The finest of these still stands: Aughnanure (Achadh na nIúr, the field of yews), about fourteen miles up the west shore of the Corrib from Galway—a substantial castle consisting of a six-storey tower-house with an inner and an outer walled enclosure or bawn, and the remains of a sixteenth-century banqueting hall; its most famous appurtenance was a flagstone in the floor of this hall which revolved upon itself at the touch of a secret lever, dumping the unsuspecting victim into the river below. Most of the other castles were much simpler towers consisting of about three large vaulted rooms one above another, within a single enclosure. At the natural crossroads of Ballynahinch such a tower-house was built on the ancient crannóg itself, using stones from the nearby Dominican priory which it seems had fallen into disuse at that period. The folk memories that still haunt the ruined castles of the sixteenth-century O’Flahertys are not of worthy and heroic clan leaders but of petty local tyrants or fairy-tale ogres. From Renvyle on the north-westernmost peninsula of Connemara, one hears of two serving girls who saw the O’Flahertys hanging someone in the castle; they fled in terror, and rather than be taken alive, flung themselves over cliffs into two creeks that still bear their names, Fó Cháit and Fó Mhairéaid. People living opposite the ruins of Doon, the castle that dominated the long narrow bay of Streamstown, remember how a local man was peaceably smoking his pipe one evening, when a spark from it floated off downwind, and a shot rang out from the castle; this incident forewarned the man, so that when he was invited to dinner by the O’Flahertys, he left his hat outside the castle door as an excuse to step outside again, then flung himself into the sea, swam across the bay and ran off along the other shore. The O’Flahertys pursued him, and although they had to go round the head of the bay they eventually caught up with him, and a patch of red rock on the seashore still marks where his blood was spilt.
Of all the O’Flahertys, Tadhg na Buile (“of the rage or frenzy”) of Aird is the best and worst remembered. Tales of his oppression of the poor were recorded from old story-tellers in Carna in the 1930s. His castle at Aird was at the head of a little creek, and the only entrance was an arch through which a boat could be floated into a lock in the bawn; the well was outside the bawn, and a servant girl would come out in a little boat to fetch water:
This is how he was killed. There was a widow’s son from Inis Leacan [an island a few miles to the north west] who had been away at sea for a long time. Tadhg hadn’t been at Aird when he left. He came home and his mother put some food before him. “I don’t have any sauce,” she said. “I have a crock of butter for Tadhg na Buile and if I don’t give him that he’ll take the cow from me.” “What sort of a person is Tadhg na Buile?” he asked. She told him. “Give me the butter,” he said, “and leave it between myself and Tadhg.”
The widow’s son went east in the evening and got into talk with Tadhg’s servant girl. She let him in. He went up to the place where Tadhg was asleep and he stabbed him in his bed. His wife Síle was in the bed. “Throw him out” she said, “before he soils my bed.”
And so Tadhg was thrown out of the window, and is buried where he fell.
A similar tale is told of a Marcus O’Flaherty of Aughnanure (whom I do not find in the genealogies). Two sheep belonging to a poor widow trespassed onto his land, and as recompense for the grass they ate, he sheared the wool off them. The widow’s son then murdered him, and his ghost used to be seen in a wood near the castle. Once he appeared to a basket-maker there, who saw that the O’Flaherty’s feet were thin and withered. The ghost explained his state:
Gach dlí géar dár cheap mé,
For the hard laws I made,
Gach creach mhór dá ndearna mé,
For the great lootings I took,
Chun tí Dé ní dheachaidh mé;
I did not go to God’s house;
Allus lucht an tsaothair
Sweat of the labourer
Agus a bheith go géar ar na boicht,
And being hard on the poor,
Ach sé féarach an dá chaorach
But it was the grass of the two sheep
A chaolaigh mó dhá chois.
That thinned my feet.
Bím oíche sa ngil,
I am a night in the dew
Oíche sa tsruth,
A night in the stream,
Oiche ag fuaidreamh na gcnoc.
A night wandering the hills.
Fliuch fuar í mo leaba,
Wet and cold my bed,
Tá fearthainn inti is géar-ghaoith.
There is rain in it and sharp wind.
Tá íoc na huaire ar m’aire-sa—
My business is penance by the hour—
Is t’aire ar do chléibhín.
And yours is your basket.
The man looked down at his basket, and when he looked up again the ghost was gone.
History hardly remarks the existence of the O’Flahertys for some generations after their withdrawal into Iar-Chonnacht, and it was not until the Tudor era that the little cogs of clan rivalry began to engage with the grander machinations of European politico-religious struggles. In 1538 Henry VIII’s Deputy of Ireland visited Galway, and the nearest O’Flaherty chief, Hugh Óg, came in from his castle in Moycullen and formally submitted to the King’s authority. Soon after that a period of intense feuding broke out among the O’Flahertys, which the English statesmen and the Anglo-Irish Burkes were able to exploit in order to bring them to heel. The Moycullen O’Flahertys were the first to be anglicized. When Hugh Óg was old and infirm he resigned his chieftainship to his son Murtagh, but Dónal Crón of Aughnanure, head of the senior branch of the O’Flahertys, seized the castle of Moycullen, murdered Murtagh, locked up Hugh in his own dungeon and starved him to death. Murtagh’s infant son Rory was smuggled out of the castle by his people and later was taken to England to be educated. The Elizabethan policy of affecting young Irish chieftains to the court and to English values in this way had some failures notable in the history of the times, but with Rory it seems to have been successful, and on his return he was granted the castle of Moycullen again “in respect of his good and civil upbringing in England.”
The western O’Flahertys remained intractable, however. The designated successor to Dónal Crón as chief of all the O’Flahertys at this period was his nephew Dónal an Chogaidh (“of the war”), whose castles were Ballynahinch and Bunowen in the farthest south-western corner of Connemara. (In the old Celtic way, the succession went to the most able and warlike among a small range of relatives, not necessarily to an eldest son.) Dónal’s wife was as ferocious as himself; she was Gráinne Ní Mháille, of the seagoing O’Malley clan. Local tradition holds that Dónal was in dispute with the Joyces over a castle on an island in the north-western arm of Lough Corri
b, from the fierce defence of which he was nicknamed An Coilleach, the cock; eventually the Joyces captured and killed him while he was hunting in the nearby mountains, and Gráinne continued to defend the stronghold with such spirit that it is still known as Caisleán na Circe, the Hen’s Castle.
The doings of the remoter O’Flahertys were of less concern to the English than those closer to hand, and of these the most dangerous was the young Murchadh na dTua, Murrough of the Battleaxes, of Fuaidh (at the present Oughterard). His incursions into the territory of the Clanrickards (as the branch of the Burkes powerful in Galway now called themselves) were so vexatious that in 1564 the Earl of Clanrickard sent his troops into Iar-Chonnacht. Murchadh used his practiced tactic of withdrawing into the western fastnesses, and then as the Earl’s forces with their plunder of cattle were retiring towards the ford at Galway, he fell upon them; some got over the river, although “such was their apprehension of death, that they knew not how,” but most of them were drowned. After this disaster the English decided it would be easier to buy Murchadh’s friendship than compel it, and he was issued with a pardon and appointed by the Queen to the chieftainship of Iar-Chonnacht. Since he was not the legitimate chief under Brehon law this instigated complex feuds among the O’Flahertys. In the 1560s the ascendent Murchadh spread his wings over the Aran Islands, driving out the O’Briens. Then, when the sons of the Earl of Clanrickard staged a rebellion against the Queen and planned to seize the castles of Iar-Chonnacht as their bases, Murchadh repaid his debts by betraying their plans; the Lord President of Connacht then besieged and took the castle of Aughnanure, held by descendants of Dónal Crón. As his reward Murchadh na dTua was given the castle, which was his family’s seat thereafter. Next, Murchadh ousted Rory O’Flaherty from the castle of Moycullen, and in 1584 he tried to seize Ballynahinch from the western O’Flahertys—the aftermath of this was the killings at Log na Marbh I have already written about. He got his knighthood in about 1585 in connection with the “Composition of Connaught,” the comprehensive settlement under which the chiefs were to surrender the clan territories to the Queen and be regranted them as heritable property under feudal law. Murchadh signed, of course, and the anglicized Rory O’Flaherty whom he had expelled from Moycullen was probably reinstated at this time. In general the eastern O’Flahertys were docile thereafter, until the rebellion of 1641.