It is a pity not to have more information on those who arrived with O’Sullivan: the faithful thirty-five – particularly the mysterious woman. There may be any number of reasons for her anonymity, the most likely being lower-class station, so that she would not have merited identification by an aristocratic author. But some have scented intrigue: a lover accompanying Donal Cam while his wife remained hidden in the Eagle’s Nest high among the Caha Mountains, awaiting escape to Spain. It is a spurious theory, but it lends itself to romantic fiction. Others assumed the lady to be Philip’s mother, the wife of Dermot of Dursey. An inscription on a plaque at the ruins of O’Rourke’s castle in Leitrim village actually makes this assumption. However, this is no longer credited, and Philip’s account makes it clear that his mother had remained in Beara.
Donal Cam O’Sullivan was not a man to delay. Within days, he was on his way again, at the head of a renewed force, marching to join O’Neill who was a hundred miles and several flooded rivers away. But O’Neill was in extremity. Unaware that Queen Elizabeth had just died, he surrendered miserably, on his knees, before her emissary in March 1603. The Nine Years’ War was over.
O’Neill, Earl of Tyrone, received a pardon. O’Conor Kerry was reinstated on his own lands. O’Rourke of Breifne, in rebellion to the last, died within the year. There was, and would be, no pardon for Donal Cam O’Sullivan. His cousin Owen, the Queen’s O’Sullivan, became chieftain of Beara. Donal Cam escaped to Spain, where he was welcomed with honour and a pension and was proclaimed ‘Count of Birhaven’, to the chagrin of the English court. Years later, he was stabbed to death as a bystander at a duel fought, in a final irony, for his honour and reputation.
Duel
Philip, defending the honour of his uncle, Donal Cam, got into a duel with one John Bathe, to whom money had been lent. Donal Cam, the innocent observer, was stabbed to death in the quarrel. Don Philippo, as the historian was known, remained unharmed. A born survivor, he outlived sixteen brothers and sisters.
LEADERSHIP
O’Sullivan’s March obviously resembles other military expeditions notorious for their hardship, but it also suggests certain journeys of exploration during which adversity whittled down the numbers, paring the flesh away from a central figure, as if to expose the very idea of leadership in all its desolate rags. In Beara, the herd on which O’Sullivan depended had been lost in a single battle. His most vulnerable followers were abandoned in the woods of Glengarriff. His favourite horse was cut out from under him on the second day. Soldiers were chopped down around him in batches. His people deserted, or were starved into disappearance.
Was he a brave and distinguished leader, the charismatic figure that folklore reveres, or simply a running man protected by hired soldiers? When his own castle at Dunboy, near Castletownbere, had been besieged by the Lord President of Munster in June of the previous year, he had failed to come to the rescue of its defenders. They were wiped out to a man after a dramatic stand, although O’Sullivan himself was no more than a few miles away, with additional troops. His refusal to respond is often interpreted as a callous, if not cowardly, failure.
It can also be argued that a mistake was made in leaving Munster, instead of continuing guerrilla warfare in the mountains. But from the moment the decision was taken, it was carried through with unswerving commitment. O’Sullivan still believed in Hugh O’Neill, Earl of Tyrone, strategist and driving force of the Nine Years’ War, and he was marching north to join forces with him. Nothing deflected him from that purpose, not even the dreadful toll on his people.
Notes
1. In O’Sullivan’s time, Keimaneigh was a rugged defile, clenched between steep slopes and cliffs, with mountains rising on both sides. To put it behind him on the first day would be a decisive move; he would enter a different region – Muskerry – home of the MacAuliffes, O Keeffes and MacCarthys.
An older route crossed the east shoulder of the pass, without the threat of ambush. O’Sullivan’s convoy entered Muskerry late in the day, filing steeply downhill well to the east of Gougane Barra, the great mountain corrie sacred to St Finbarr, where the River Lee rises. They were in a kind of internal exile then. In a country of warlords, garrisons, shifting allegiances, there was no continuous state under their feet when they crossed from one territory to another.
2. George Carew, Lord President of Munster, had posted a price of £300 on O’Sullivan’s head, which must have stirred the bounty hunter in his neighbours.
III
POWER JOURNEYS: KINGs & QUEENS
4 MEDB AND THE CATTLE-RAID OF COOLEY
(A Journey in the Iron Age)
At the core of Táin Bó Cuailnge is a journey – a cattle-raiding quest that sundered Ireland nearly two thousand years ago.
An epic of the pagan Iron Age, the Táin tells of an army that marched from Roscommon in the west midlands to Carlingford in northeast Ulster, in order to capture the great brown bull of the Cooley Mountains.
There were challenges, battles and betrayals along the way. Pagan gods haunted the journey, flogging the action like angry ghosts; but the outcome hinged on human character – on jealousy, greed, loyalty and courage.
Queen Medb (Maeve) of Connacht assembled an army to march on Ulster, the northern province, in the ultimate cattle-raid – the theft of the primal bull. Her forces, the Men of Ireland, contained a detachment of Ulstermen in exile, whose loyalty was divided. Their leader was her secret lover. Queen Medb’s army crossed the Shannon and marched across the midlands.
The heroic Cuchulainn, deeply flawed, defended the Ulster border against invasion. In the absence of the northern army, he faced the enemy hordes alone, tormenting them from the fringes of the march. Eventually he was forced to fight his childhood friend, Ferdia, in single combat.
When this private tragedy had played itself out, the army of Ulster arrived in pursuit of Queen Medb and the Men of Ireland. Near the shore of Lough Ennell, in Co. Westmeath, the last great battle erupted. It ended in a shameful rout. But the brown bull of Ulster had been captured and sent to Connacht. An image of death and darkness, the beast escaped ….
The cattle-raiding epic of ancient Ireland has seeped into schoolbooks, roadmaps, brochures. Its ringforts, earth mounds, place names, standing stones and river crossings have been identified. There are Táin centres, Táin trails, Táin towns.
In spite of all the fuss, we don’t own this Táin. Ireland may well be grounded in it, but most of us have never read it. The Romans in Europe are far more real to us than their contemporaries, the Celts in Ireland. We don’t recognise these ancestors. The tribes of the Táin are just on the wrong side of history, a little too close to archaeology for personal acquaintance. They seem like caricatures of myth with crowns and headbands: the envious Queen Medb, weak King Ailill, virile Fergus, tragic Ferdia, loyal Cuchulainn.
Hard for children to imagine Cuchulainn striding the land in sandals and tunic with a huge hub-cap of a shield; hard too to visualise flamboyant war camps in place of the grocery shops of Granard and Ardee; harder still to see Queen Medb as commander-in-chief, ploughing along in her chariot, up to the axle in muck. And yet, the story at the core of the Táin is as dramatic in many ways as any of the classic odysseys of the distant past.
THE ROUTE
Táin Bó Cuailnge comes storming off the written page, swaggering along the country roads, out of Roscommon, over the Shannon, through Longford, Meath and Louth. The trail of Queen Medb’s cattle-raid is stitched in place by signposts among the wild grasses of the long mile – the roadside verge. The entire route of the Iron Age journey can be plotted in the modern landscape, with virtually every campsite of Medb’s army identifiable. The Táin is a local journey on a national scale, its hoof-prints and wheel-ruts gouged into familiar landmarks. It fords the River Shannon, ploughs the mud of Dundalk Bay, climbs the Cooley Mountains, and staggers back onto the Central Plain. The Táin campaign covered in all about three hundred and fifty miles (five hundred and sixty kilometres) from Rath
croghan in Co. Roscommon to the Carlingford peninsula in the far northeast, and back.
Much of the action takes place on the border of ancient Ulster, still wholly recognisable today. The modern road to Belfast runs past the selfsame Gap of the North defended by Cuchulainn against Queen Medb. The border today replicates the ancient one. Those who think that Ireland’s divisions began with British interference might read Táin Bó Cuailnge carefully and reach the conclusion that the split may be as old as history itself. It is a fracture in the mould.
Co. Roscommon
The great journey of Táin Bó Cuailnge begins in Co. Roscommon and erupts eastward across the River Shannon. I have an inborn tendency to see this as the trajectory of human existence, since I too originated there and was projected eastwards. The brazen clamour of the Cattle-Raid of Cooley had dwindled to an anecdote in the country of my childhood. People were tired of being thatched and patched and backward; we wanted to be modern but did not know how. The bungalow, the picture-window, the TV set had not yet arrived.
My parents were primary-school teachers and we kept a few cows near Athleague, a quiet village where nothing much had happened since Red Hugh O’Donnell crossed the River Suck in 1601 on his march to Kinsale.
It was my job to feed the calves and milk the cows by hand in the evenings after school. Sadly there was no cattle-raiding to be had, though I remember Fair Days in Roscommon town, rain teeming down, the windows barricaded, and steaming beasts packed together up and down the streets in a stew of dung. Cattle-dealers stamped about in boots, with heavy sticks, grunting take-it-or-leave-it prices that were only a hair’s-breadth from theft-with-menace.
I treated cows as the enormous lumbering pets they are, and walked them home for milking with my arms slung across a pair of rolling necks behind the stumpy horns, feet lifted pleasantly off the ground between them. A red shorthorn made her way home from miles away, days after she had been sold.
The black cat watched the milking from the cowshed door. The trick was to build up a head of pressure in the udder, working fast with two hands, then squirt the cat full in the chest across the floor. She was caught between outrage and gratitude; forever feeling towards a scheme to attract the milk without the drenching – a great lesson in evolution for both of us. Ringworm was the result of all this handling, with visits to the seventh son of a seventh son, near Athleague, for a cure.
ROYAL SQUABBLE
There is a soap-opera scene at the start of Táin Bó Cuailnge. It’s a curtain-raiser in which egos are inflamed and the journey towards battle, bloodshed and betrayal is set in motion. Queen Medb and her royal consort, Ailill, lying in bed in Cruachain, engage in a clash of connubial pride. The charged pillow-talk of a king and queen, nearly two thousand years ago, triggers the journey from Connacht to Ulster to capture the brown bull of Cooley. The tone of post-coital rancour is familiar to us from television-drama, where no one has the sense to shut up in bed.
‘It’s well for the wife of a wealthy man,’ King Ailill blusters. ‘You’re much better off today than the day I married you.’
‘I was well enough off without you,’ Queen Medb retorts. And that should have been warning enough.
Medb reminds Ailill that her father, the High King of Ireland, bestowed the province of Connacht on her. She has a tidy way of putting it in Thomas Kinsella’s translation: ‘You’re a kept man!’
And so the epic comparison of wealth begins – the pairing of beast and herd and species, bringing to mind Noah’s preparations and the probability that a common narrative flourish underpins all such tales of ancient accountancy. In the heel of the reel, Ailill owns a magnificent white bull, Finnbennach, for which Medb has no match. The crooked corner of some narrator’s mouth hisses that Finnbennach was the calf of one of Queen Medb’s cows; he went over to the king’s herd, refusing to be led by a woman. And so begins Medb’s savage journey northeastward to Ulster, to rob a matching bull from Carlingford and to cut her husband down to size.
But the underlying thrust of the story, and of the journey, runs far deeper than a domestic squabble. It is an account of the conflict between the early provinces and tribes of Ireland – the ebb and flow of power that would shape the country for centuries to come.
RATHCROGHAN
Covering an area of about four square miles on a plateau northwest of Tulsk in Co. Roscommon, the royal site of Cruachain, or Rathcroghan, is one of the great ritual landscapes of Ireland, in a league that includes the Boyne Valley, Emain Macha (Navan Fort) and Tara. In spite of such breathless significance, there is not a whole lot to see. Some fifty scattered mounds and earthworks – Rathmore, Rathbeg, Rathnadarve – are printed on a careless landscape, which is little more than rumpled by their presence. They look, on a huge scale, like a set of casual objects covered by a rug moulded to their shapes by rain.
Round about, the usual fenced and stonewalled fields enclose the unkempt architecture of rural Ireland. Within their shelter-belts of sycamore, conifer and whitethorn, the houses are up to their knees in the past. Only a grassy sward separates them from the subsoil of history. The twisting N5, between Tulsk and Frenchpark, is a smear of tarmac across an ancient plain.
There is a car park, a landscaped bank with planted shrubs and wand-like rowans wavering in the wind. Midday, in mid-June, there is no one here. ‘Rathcroghan’, the display on stout galvanised poles proclaims: ‘Royal Residence’.
In its earliest visible phase, this was a prehistoric cemetery, belonging to a people of whose language we know nothing. Recent inhabitants (our Celtic ancestors) named it from cruacha, the Irish for ‘mounds’. They imagined palaces and royal halls here, just as they did at Tara farther to the east. So they centred their own kingdom of Connacht on this location, locking their transient structures into a powerful landscape for enhanced authority. Cruachain is thought to have become a place of ritual assembly for the inauguration of provincial kings. It was never a hub of palaces and banqueting halls as it is often visualised, out in the wilds like Las Vegas.
Still, whatever way you look at it, there is not a lot to see – apart from dawn and sunset and weather and cattle. But, with second sight, which is not so difficult to acquire, a place like this has so much resonance that it practically hums under human scrutiny. The hum is in the observer’s head, of course. It is the consensus of time. The place has been felt with such intensity for thousands of years; so much curiosity has accumulated that there is a current of concentration charging the air – or rather the space within the observer’s head. The speculation of countless generations, ever aware of significance, aligns our thoughts like iron filings in a magnetic current.
Gates of Hell
The trapdoor of the Underworld is actually located in Cruachain. Savage beasts, pagan devils, forces bent on wreaking havoc broke through to terrorise the upper world. When I was growing up, people kept quiet about such things. Bad enough to be known as Roscommon Sheep-stealers; unforgivable to have the Gates of Hell in the county.
Uaimh na gCat, Cave of the Cats, is marked on a map of the monuments about half a mile southwest of Rathcroghan Mound. A wood-sculptor living nearby led me to the end of a narrow road, under a sycamore tree. He pointed out a pit like a badger sett among the roots of a heavy whitethorn. The branches were snagged with fetishes of ribbon and rag, such as you find at a holy well.
A section of the cave is accessible by crawling under the bush, through the constricted opening, and down a muddy shaft. Ireland is riddled with limestone caves that would swallow this one without trace, but the chamber, for all its slimy constriction, is striking. Its eeriness is a result of the intensity of tradition and the stories associated with it. Crawling in, I felt as though I was entering a crack in the floor of time. There is another crack in the floor of the imagination that coincides with it during a visit and allows the past to break through into the mind
Just over one hundred feet long, twenty feet high at the most, the narrow channel dips to a muddy floor between dripping w
alls, the ground rising steeply at the far end, and the sides closing in to form a bottleneck blocked by excavation damage from above. Wedged in a greasy slot, almost out of reach, was a hard black object, twice the size of my hand. When I wiped away the muck, the torchlight revealed a three-faced head of astonishing sharpness and clarity. I thought of the evil figure known as the Morrígan, one of three manifestations of the goddess of war. Her name derives from MórRíoghain, the Great Queen. This triple-personage of the ancient world (our gods still come in threes) is known to have dwelt for a time in the cave at Cruachain. She harried the Táin on its journey east, appearing in various guises, from a beautiful girl to a powerful eel, a grey she-wolf, a hornless red heifer …. There she was, in the torchlight, at the end of the cave, black as an ember of hell. I found out later that Davy, the wood-sculptor, had placed her there in a personal handshake with the past.
THE MEN OF IRELAND
Led by Medb and Ailill, the army left Rathcroghan and marched towards the River Shannon. The great cattle-raid to capture the brown bull of Cooley was under way. They camped the first night at Cuil Silinne, Kilcooley, just east of Tulsk today. There is a country graveyard there, overlooking the main road. A few tall yew trees transcend the ordinariness at twilight and lend it an air of belonging to a different time. The army in that encampment numbered fifty-four thousand. It was made up of eighteen troops, each of three thousand men. They were allies from every corner of the country, including a detachment of exiled Ulstermen under Fergus mac Róich, who was Queen Medb’s lover.1
Endurance Page 10