Inspecting her troops at Kilcooley, Medb observed that the Gaileoin, Leinstermen, excelled all the other groups in every skill. They had their shelters pitched, their food eaten, their musicians tuned up, while the rest were still preparing to cook. Medb warned her husband and her lover that these Gaileoin would reap all the glory of the war if they were allowed to continue. But she would not have them left behind, for fear they would capture her territory in revenge. Ailill and Fergus were openly impatient. What would she have them do with the Gaileoin?
‘Kill them!’ she commanded.
‘That’s a woman’s thinking and no mistake,’ Ailill scorned.
Fergus swore that the Gaileoin would be killed over his dead body. Medb did not flinch. ‘That can be arranged.’
Queen Medb of Connacht
Who was this virago? Did she ever exist, or is she a grotesque spasm of the ancestral imagination?
In the Táin, Medb is queen of the Connachtmen, her territory centred on Cruachain. However, she actually originated as the goddess of sovereignty at Tara in the eastern province of Leinster. She is known to have been the focus through which a pagan king was married to his land. Medb – meaning roughly ‘one who intoxicates’ – was invoked by alcohol during the inauguration ritual of a king. The alcohol was fermented honey, known as mead.
The Connachta were originally an elite based at Tara in Leinster. From that power-base, they harried the northern province of Ulster in the early centuries of the first millennium AD. They split into tribes east and west of the Shannon while the Táin tales were developing. Connachta, the original name of the tribe, became the province of Connacht, where some of the group remained, while others continued to dominate Tara as the Uí Néill.
As the Táin stories developed to keep pace with political change, Medb was shifted to Cruachain, royal centre of the Connachta or Connachtmen, and she was transmuted to a common queen. At some stage in this transformation, the memory of her matings with many kings gave her a sexual dimension that would guarantee her popularity in the Christian imagination. Along with every deal struck throughout the Táin, she offers a bonus: ‘… and the friendship of my thighs on top of that.’
Fergus mac Róich, chief incumbent of those thighs, bitterly turned the position around, when he pronounced after the final battle, ‘We followed the rump of a misguiding woman. It is the usual thing for a herd led by a mare to be strayed and destroyed.’
It is quite clear that the Táin has a sustained misogynistic slant, which must reflect both the warrior culture from which it emerged and the monastic culture that wrote it down. It reflects also the inhuman divinity from which Queen Medb was drawn.
RIVER SHANNON
Soon after the army left Cruachain, the River Shannon barred the way. No fuss was made of the crossing, but it would have been a major challenge. The river was wider then. Animals and loads had to be brought across. There were high spots and dry spots at a ford; there were shoals and shallows and makeshift causeways. Fords depended on slack water, which meant that travel and raiding were seasonal. It must have been a disaster to be caught by floods in enemy terrain on the wrong side of a river.
There were several options and Medb’s army used the ford closest to Rathcroghan.2 The Táin force of fifty-four thousand warriors crossed at the point where the linear village of Tarmonbarry now stands on the western bank and the Longford-bound N5 bridges the Shannon. The exemplary Gaileoin warriors had been scattered among the other troops.
If the Táin had originated as a story of Connacht attacking Ulster, the army would probably have crossed at the Doon of Drumsna further upriver, and headed directly north. The choice of the Carlingford Peninsula in the far northeast as a destination suits a campaign beginning in Tara, as this one probably did in some earlier, oral version
On the trail of the Táin, I found it an anticlimax to cross the Shannon at Tarmonbarry. The road-bridge seemed to miss the point. There is a very powerful weir just a few hundred feet downstream. A railed gangway suspended over the flood crosses the river at this point, closed off at either end. It is guarded during the day, but I dodged across at dawn before the sentry mounted the rampart with his bugle and spear. Mist and spray were rising off the roiling river. Pent-up waters roared in the channels under the quivering gangway. Staring down into the thunder where the water was squeezed into jets of liquid marble, I understood for the first time the strength of this river which had always seemed asleep in its wandering flow. Clenching the rail with whitened knuckles, I felt the gangway thrust back upstream against the surge, as if I stood at the rail of an ocean-going ship.
We don’t feel this elemental sense of power while crossing any bridge today. We have forgotten that the Shannon was once the main travel route in Ireland. Our lives are rarely engaged with the river now, except as recreation; we don’t depend on the surrounding land for food or security. A bridge today is part of that detachment, a means of soaring across a current without even glancing aside.
And yet, when bridges were first constructed, they must have seemed a miracle: timber and stone suspended in air, challenging the force of the flood. They collapsed and were swept away, were thrown down by defenders and invaders time and again, reinforcing the dominance of the river, which for all the security it offered was also fraught with the threat of attack.
The Vikings sailed up the Shannon on frequent raids. Brian Boru put three hundred boats on the river as part of his bid for the kingship of Ireland. Barricades of stone were constructed across the river to deter him. Warring expeditions on the Shannon are known to have portaged their boats overland to join other river systems. In 1139, the King of Connacht held a muster during which a canal was dug between the Suck and the Shannon. So great was the threat of Napoleonic invasion via the Shannon that powerful defences were constructed as far upriver as Meelick.
Despite all that, and numerous wicker-bridges at Athlone, Connacht can be seen as an almost-island on any map that gives due prominence to the Shannon. From the gaping fissure of the estuary, the river is a severe crack-line that runs most of the way around the province towards Sligo Bay. A province is only a territorial state of mind floating on the land, but in the case of Connacht, the Shannon is a definitive boundary. Given the kind of labour that built Cruachain and fortified the Doon of Drumsna, it should not have been all that hard to apply primitive leverage and snap Connacht off decisively, making it an island for practical purposes. Archimedes, in the same period, spoke of a lever long enough to shift a planet.
When I was growing up in Roscommon, the bridges on the Shannon were fixed in the psyche of the Connachtman like crossings into another state of mind. Chugging east through Athlone, over the narrow bridge in a boxy Ford, there was a sense of reaching a foreign shore. That feeling has not completely vanished, even with the opening of the new bridge that bypassed Athlone. But, as we swoop across the broad current of the river now, we no longer feel we are entering treacherous Leinster and the shadow of Britain. Given the circle of stars and the funding acknowledgements, there is little doubt that we have reached Europe.
CO. LONGFORD
East of the Shannon, Medb’s army entered Trego, the Plain of the Spears, flat ground stretching a few short miles to Longford town.
There was no sense of political unity in Ireland in the pagan Iron Age, although shifting alliances existed. The political and social unit was the tuath, the local king’s domain. These were petty kings of little substance, ruling scattered tribes. Only within his own tuath, under the protection of his own leader, did a person have an identity and security. The intellectual classes and the craftsmen, the aes dána, were the exceptions. They seem to have travelled widely and to have been responsible eventually for the unified culture of a fractured country.
WARRIORS
The appearance of the Iron Age raiding-band would have been very different from that depicted in the Táin, which is bursting with well-armed heroes in chariots, all coiffed, cloaked and bejewelled.3 Colour was added
as the story developed over many centuries from the pagan Iron Age into the Christian era when versions of it were finally written down. The actual warriors would have been a straggling mass of tribesmen, dressed in motley wool and rawhide, ill-disciplined and crudely armed. Disfigurement and physical handicap would have been rife. An expert eye would have recognised different groups by hair colour and bone structure, relating them to their area of origin, as one might even today at a football final, or at the fair at Ballinasloe. Many were of the longstanding genetic stock of the island with no Celtic identity, apart from the new Gaelic language that was erasing the earlier tongues.
While the Táin paints them all as heroes, some groups must have reeked of misery, while others were aggressive, or raucous and jovial. There were long-boned men in family groups; short men with stubby legs and potbellies; there were thick necks and scrawny Adam’s apples; curly-headed easygoing men, famous perhaps for the beauty of their women, and jealous types who lost their tempers in a flash and were easily killed in battle. Some would be friendly by nature, others permanently suspicious, sensing a slight in everything. Each group had its own leader. The promise of plunder and loot would have kept them all together.
Bigger groups had in train their women, cooks, porters and healers. Professional warriors had their own attendants. The chariot was a feature of the European Celts that filtered into Ireland along with a number of military practices. Although chariots were popular in the legends, it is doubtful that they were common on a rugged journey with many fords to be crossed. Provisions were carried on horseback – also by porters and slaves. There would not have been enough food for a long journey, so stops had to be scheduled for hunting and raiding along the way. People living beside the route in settlements of thatched huts would have fled with their stock at the first hint of a war party approaching. Or else, deals might be done, either by force or negotiation, to supply food for the march. Local groups joining Medb’s army in Longford and further east must have pitched in a beast or two, or a sack of corn, in exchange for a promise of plunder. The brown bull of Cooley is an elite symbol. In real life, the Men of Ireland were raiding Ulster for cattle, for women and for slaves.
GRANARD
At this point, the Táin army was conscious of being observed – an uneasy feeling in the back of the neck. A prophecy of doom was bayed aloud in the camp at Longford, and the war spirit left the troops terrified and sleepless. Groups started up in panic, prepared to flee for home, no doubt, until Medb came and calmed them. Next day, the army headed for high ground – not easy to find, it might be thought, in the central plain of Ireland, dented as it is by the weight of an ice age. But, in fact, the plain is studded with ridges. The town of Granard lifts to a central hill with huge views across the countryside in all directions. There are hills sketched in the distance on every horizon. Enemies moving out there would have been visible to Medb’s army from their camp at Granard.
Fergus, the Ulster exile, chief tactician of Medb’s army, sent a message north to his former comrades, warning of Medb’s attack – a delicate exercise in loyalty and betrayal. He knew that the Ulster army, to a man, was flat on its back. The northern warriors suffered the pangs of childbirth in times of emergency. This was the vengeance of Macha, another aspect of the war goddess, who had cursed the Ulstermen for forcing her to race the king’s chariot while she was pregnant.4
Granard is dominated by a tall church, Gothic Revival, with a darkly elegant spire. A grassy dome peers oddly over the shoulder of the church. It is a prominent Norman ‘motte’, heaped up on the highest point of the landscape. Long before any church was built, this flat-topped mound had a timber stockade around the perimeter of the summit, enclosing a wooden tower. No doubt it incorporated earlier fortifications on this strategic position, and probably prehistoric structures as well. Medb’s army would have posted lookouts there, perhaps a thousand years before the Normans came in the twelfth century.
Today, a statue of St Patrick dominates the mound. It commemorates fifteen hundred years of Irish Christianity. The broken hand and the rusty claw, typical of ageing statues, suggest the iron will required to convert a pagan country and to throw that steep spire skywards within a shout of the ancient mound.
The army of the Táin was about to come under the surveillance of Cuchulainn, the Hound of Ulster. Well might their neck hairs bristle. Born on the Plain of Muirtheimhne, east of Dundalk, he was exempt from the phantom pregnancy that crippled the northern warriors. The defence of the province fell to him.
Cuchulainn’s qualities in the Táin have a definite sense of plurality about them. His hair is of three distinct kinds – ‘brown at the base, blood red in the middle, with a crown of golden yellow’. He has seven irises in each eye, seven fingers on each hand. The sheer force of his role would justify its division among a sizeable crowd.
Cuchulainn observed the Táin journey first from the hill of Iraird Cuillenn, which is Crossakeel in Co. Meath – high ground, though not quite in the moral sense, because he abandoned his post to spend the night with a slave-girl provided for his use.
Cuchulainn
There is evidence that Cuchulainn was freshly inserted into the Táin on a cut-and-paste basis, as the version we are familiar with took shape. His character and role are complete, but they developed in some other narrative context and were trimmed to fit the Táin. An earlier text exists, with a synopsis of the Táin in which Cuchulainn is not mentioned at all. His role is played by Fiacc, a son of Fergus mac Róich.
However, the end result is an idealised warrior with the ultimate skills. He carries echoes of the continental Celts described by Roman writers, and it seems likely that his lore grew from an early Celtic war-cult settled somewhere near Dundalk in the late Iron Age.
The role of this group may have been the frontline defence of Ulster. Such a warrior tribe, perhaps with experience against the Romans in Europe, would have been logical allies of the Ulaidh (the Ulstermen) reacting against Uí Néill (Connachta) expansionism from Tara. That such an expansion did occur historically is beyond doubt, and Ulster shrank dramatically as a result. Gradually the war band came to be embodied in a single figure. The fact that the early Irish practised single combat must have added to the cult of the warrior as hero, and furthermore the prospect of a fight to the death between two rival characters, Ferdia and Cuchulainn (echoed later in the battle of the two bulls) had the dramatic potential to turn the Táin from a complex war campaign into a personal struggle of epic proportions.
As he whittles away at Medb’s army, paring it down, it becomes logical to think of Cuchulainn historically as a band of guerrillas harrying an army in wild terrain. That tactic would distinguish Gaelic warfare against superior forces many centuries later.
MIDLAND CHARM
Medb’s army quit the heights of Granard and headed for Crossakeel, where Cuchulainn had stood to observe them. Today, the pursuit of the Táin through this landscape south of Lough Sheelin provides one of the most unexpectedly rewarding road journeys in Ireland. This is thoroughly midland country, where the topography could be expected to be as flat as the accent. In fact, it is a thicket of tangled landscape with twisting back-roads in a tumble of hills; nothing high, but none of it flat; everything smothered in hedges and native trees. There is a casual richness and, above all, a relaxation to the countryside that seems to have retained tradition and resisted intensive change. The absence of Sitka spruce is striking.
Somewhere outside Granard, there is a dancehall from the mid-twentieth century that catches the eye as forcefully as a prehistoric ruin. The degree of decay in a few short decades is shocking. Some of those who danced to the show-bands are living out along the roads to Finea. The stark new houses common to the midlands are rare in this area, but there is a scatter of older farmhouses and cottages with slate roofs, limestone walls, stone gateposts, iron gates. Now and then, a hood of ivy on some ancient gable appears, or a country rose growing up a whitewashed wall. A little black-haired girl stand
s at a gate, with a calendar-kitten in her arms, a dog peering over the wall. Another child, a few miles further on, in a sleeveless T-shirt, has a tattoo on her shoulder, where the rim of a different culture has broken through. Fat cattle lie low in the afternoon, stupefied with grass. Four brown ponies graze among buttercups in a field surrounded by drumlins. There are no – almost no – dormer bungalows with tight black caps of imitation slate and those plastic doors with the crimped expression – the type that give off toxic fumes in a house fire.
CO. MEATH
Crossakeel stands at a height of one hundred and sixty metres. The unpretentious village has a big sky and a wide view. Gently accessible, it is the ideal vantage point from which to survey terrain that would be quite hidden at a lower elevation. This is Ireland from a defensive perspective, an Iron Age point of view. A forecast of doom for the Men of Ireland at the bloody hands of Cuchulainn was issued here. The seer warned of ‘torn corpses, women wailing’, and chanted in a complex Gaelic metre:
Whole hosts he will destroy,
Making dense massacre.
In thousands you will yield your heads…
Crossakeel draws no attention to its role in prehistory. But there is an echo of the ancient poet’s warning in a verse from ‘The Red Flag’ on a brand-new monument. The labour anthem was written by a local man:
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