Travelling with him, Brian had his own personal poet, Mac Liag, the man thought by many to have written Cogadh Gaedhel, although it was actually composed long after his death. As they rode along the Sligo coast, the Atlantic surf broke against the beach at Streedagh and the headland at Mullaghmore, while the great cliffs of Slieve League would have been visible across the bay to the north. Some of the Clare men might have made anxious comparisons with the Cliffs of Moher. A thousand years before Yeats made Benbulben famous, Brian Boru and his poet – horsemen – passed by. The English language was still to come. The lyrical language of Ireland was passing one of its high points and turning purple on the lips of sycophantic bards. The language of Cogadh Gaedhel is clogged with grease, but an epitaph for Brian rings with the resonance of the earlier tongue.
… nir ba cloch ininad ugi fein, ocus nir ba sop ininad largi, acht ba tren ininad trein, ocus ba tend iar tend.
He was not a stone in the place of an egg, and he was not a wisp in the place of a club, but he was a champion in a champion’s place, and he was valour after valour.
SLIGO-LEITRIM
The route north followed the coast. It struck west of King’s Mountain, passed under the prow of Benbulben, and soon left the sharp ridge of Benwiskin behind, propping the limestone plateau against the sky. That was the recognised way, the alternative being the bogs and lakes of Leitrim. Brian was following a corridor of fords and passes that led from one territory to the next. At one stage of the itinerary outlined in the annals, he seems almost to take flight like a boy careering along, arms outstretched:
… into the country of Cairpre, and beyond Sligech, and keeping his left hand to the sea and his right hand to the land and to Beinn Gulban over Dubh and over Drobhaois and into Magh-n-Eine, and over Ath Seanaigh at Easruaidh; and into Tír Aedha and over Bearnas Mór, and over Fearsad and into Tír Eoghain ….
The rivers Duff and Drowes (Dubh agus Drobhaois) were crossed, the first flowing out of the steep-sided cleft of Glenade, the second draining from Lough Melvin. Neither would have presented any problem to the engineers if the bridges were down or the fords up. They are not big rivers. The Four Masters, annalists of Brian Boru, would themselves be closely associated with the Drowes, six hundred years later. They compiled their major work, at a secret location on its banks. Today the two rivers mark the limits of the Co. Leitrim coastline – all three miles of it.
Further inland, towards the foot of the limestone rampart, a straggle of Early Medieval homesteads stretches all the way from Sligo along this section of Brian Boru’s journey. These ringfort dwellings, widespread throughout Ireland, were in general use between the fifth and twelfth centuries. They were not fortifications, as we tend to assume. Neither were they fairy-forts, a belief that helped preserve thousands of them in later years. They were farmsteads – the standard homes of the better off. A raised circular bank contained the house and outhouses. The embankment offered rudimentary protection for the cattle-farmers who occupied them. Stone walls and thorn fences kept the animals secure. The dairy business seems to have been thriving during this period, though perhaps not as gloriously as legend proclaims.
Sadly, that decade was little different from any other, to judge by the annals. Death and destruction flourished. Cenél Conaill, Cenél Eoghain, and the Ulaid, all the major powers of the north, were at each others’ throats – or rather Cenél Eoghain was at the throats of the other two, ranged on both sides of it. The Annals of Ulster, 1004, record wholesale slaughter. Kings to the left and right – Ailech and Dál nAraidhe – were killed by Cenél Eoghain, whose own king had hoped to succeed Máel Sechnaill as rí Érenn. In the same year, Máel Sechnaill ‘fell from his horse, so that he lay mortally ill’. Few men were of sufficient note to merit a provisional obituary in the Annals. In the light of such turmoil, it is not difficult to understand why Brian felt the need to impose his presence repeatedly on the province.
DONEGAL
Crossing the River Erne at the ford of Ballyshanny (Béal Átha Seanaidh) on his majorcircuit, Brian rode on to previously forbidden ground. He’d been blocked there two years before by the northern tribes, temporarily united by his visit. However, in 1006, the way was clear, a tacit submission in itself. Had it been blocked a second time, Brian would have cleared it, at great cost to the northern groups. There was no need to chase Cenél Conaill, the clans of Donegal, into their own highlands; they handed over their hostages and Brian veered northeastwards to face down the other faction, Cenél Eoghain.
The Barnesmore Gap is a gigantic vee, slashed deep and direct through the flanks of the Blue Stack Mountains. It cleaves into otherwise inaccessible terrain. Boulders and bog along the bottom would have forced the old route higher than the bed of the pass. The original line must have traversed the slope, though not necessarily as high as the line of the abandoned railway today. The river below, beside the modern road, traces so many oxbow bends that the eye is tempted to read it as a watery script.
At first sight, the long funnel of the gap looks ideal for an ambush from the granite outcrops overhead. But the slopes are too steep, too long, too rough underfoot. Soldiers would not so much hurtle from above as tumble head over heels, looking foolish on arrival. Ferns and heather on the damp hillside make it an ideal breeding ground for midges. There is no way of knowing whether our ancestors suffered from midges as badly as we do today. Perhaps modern hygiene leaves us more exposed, without a protective layer on the skin. But washing is not an entirely recent habit; hot water on arrival was a condition of Early Medieval hospitality. Maybe there was a midge repellent based on some herb or ingredient we no longer eat. Today, there is only one effective cure for the Donegal midge: a mixture of cow dung and paraffin smeared on the skin – and set on fire.
In any event, there was no ambush. Cenél Eoghain was not fighting back. Obviously the weight of power was on Brian’s side, the northern tribes riven and fractured. Taking pledges from them, he marched on to cross the River Foyle at the ford of Strabane. How did a royal hostage from Donegal get on with one from Tyrone (Cenél Eoghain) in the cavalcade of the Munster king? There is no record, but the same match would occur almost six hundred years later when Red Hugh O’Donnell from Donegal and Art O’Neill of Tyrone were locked up in Dublin Castle as hostages of the Crown. Despite the enmity of their factions, they escaped to embark on a journey together that has linked their names in brotherhood forever.
ULSTER
Marching close to modern Coleraine, Brian crossed the River Bann in the vicinity of Camus where a monastery marked the ford. Far from being hidden and remote, most monasteries occupied important crossing points in the landscape. They were focal points and often trading posts. Brian swung into North Antrim, and then veered sharply south towards Belfast Lough. This corner of Ireland was the territory of the Ulaid, once enormously powerful (in the era of the Táin), but now pushed aside by the expansionist Uí Néill. The Ulaid gave their name to Ulster. Their most northerly faction, Dál Riada, had previously colonised western Scotland in the early centuries of the first millennium, seeding the Gaelic language there.
Brian took in Dál nAraidhe too, the Ulaid kingdom centred on Belfast Lough. There was no hint of the city of Belfast then, not even a monastery around which a town might cluster. (Belfast began, from scratch, in 1603.) Passing Co. Down and the Mourne Mountains, he took pledges of good faith from Dál Fiatach, the grouping which tended to monopolise the over-kingship of the Ulaid. It was very much to his advantage that all these factions were at war with the Uí Néill, particularly with Cenél Eoghain. In a recent battle between them, when the Ulaid were badly defeated, there had been ‘… a slaughter of the army, both noble and base… as well as the elite of Ulster’, according to the local annals In fact, it could be said that Brian picked the ideal time to lord it over the north – a period of years when there was hardly a warrior left standing on his feet.
At the end of the summer, Brian and his army emerged from the northern kingdoms through the ‘Ga
p of the North’. This pass, midway between Newry and Dundalk, was the eastern portal of the province. Today it marks the border between the Republic and Northern Ireland. When Queen Medb of Connacht attacked Ulster in the Iron Age saga, Táin Bó Cuailnge, she marched all the way across the midlands in order to approach via the Gap of the North. All the heroes of Ulster were flat on their backs suffering under a mysterious curse. Ironically, the same might be said of them in 1006, except that there was no mystery; the curse was division. But Ulster was usually defended by the complexity of its landscape. Its natural boundaries – hills, bogs and lakes – set it apart from the rest of Ireland, so that the alienation we struggle with today is in many ways as old as the hills.
Brian Boru’s Tour of the North, 1006, was not unlike an invasion of another country. As if in acknowledgement, Cogadh Gaedhel rushes on to attack Scotland and England immediately, stampeding Brian into an action he did not actually take. Many thought he might. His determination to be King of Ireland and the attribution in the Book of Armagh to Brian, Emperor of the Irish have combined to form a strong belief that his ambitions extended beyond the island of Ireland to some kind of western empire. It is inevitable that such a concept would have been imagined, based on the pattern of Charlemagne in Europe, but Brian Boru was still a long way from achieving the stability in Ireland required to support a wider vision.
The successful campaign of 1006 was traditionally presented as a Circuit of Ireland, although it included neither Munster nor Leinster, and largely skirted Connacht. But Brian’s army included troops from all those parts and provinces. In marching first to Athlone, and then homewards from the Gap of the North, some of the army at least could be said to have completed a plausible Circuit.
CLONTARF
Over the next few years, Leinster and Dublin would continue to wrangle and conspire, eventually forcing the Battle of Clontarf in 1014. Brian himself, at the age of seventy-three, would be killed on the fringe of the battle, after the moment of victory. So too would Murchadha, his son and likely successor. Murchadha’s son, Brian’s grandson, would also die. While many still see the Battle of Clontarf as the final defeat of the Vikings in Ireland, the fact is that they had long been absorbed into the country and were not at all the threat they had been up to a century before. But the Battle of Clontarf would put an end to any illusions of an Irish empire ruled by a royal dynasty descended from Brian Boru.
Máel Sechnaill, who had fallen from his horse with such a thump that the shock was felt in the annals, had recovered. A long-suffering ally, he withdrew his support on the eve of the Battle of Clontarf, leaving Brian’s largely Munster army severely tested. Máel Sechnaill became rí Érenn again on Brian’s death and ruled until 1022.
From then on, for a century and a half, the descendants of Brian and those of the Uí Néill would struggle for supremacy. While the Uí Briain, as they came to be known, were usually in the dominant position, they would never again reach the eminence achieved by Brian Boru. A century and a half after his death, the arrival of the Normans would begin to alter forever the kingships and the balance of power in Ireland.
IV
THE HALO & THE SWORD
6 WARRIOR AND SAINT
Caoilte and St Patrick (5TH CENTURY AD)
Acallamh na Seanórach, Discourse of the Elders, is the story of a journey around Ireland made by St Patrick and a pagan warrior of the Fianna, Caoilte mac Rónáin. Set in the fifth century AD, the account was written in the twelfth century. Acallamh, a compilation of Fenian lore, is the overarching narrative of medieval Irish literature. Episodes from the journey have become the staples of Irish folklore; its characters and their adventures have gone on to influence world literature.
The old pagans and the new Christians had not merged easily in the fifth century. Although Ireland as a whole converted to Christianity, war bands had continued to exist, and their adherents were branded ‘sons of death’ by the early Church. Both bodies – the war bands of the Fianna and the missionaries who succeeded them – had a tradition of hard travelling, on foot, through the same terrain. St Patrick, as he appears in this medieval itinerary, composed long after he lived, is not the politically correct figure we know today. This is not the patron saint of the plaster statue – mitred and croziered, grave and measured, dressed up in a green gown, throttling a snake. The Patrick of Acallamh is at once a clever magician and a cunning diplomat, practised in local politics, founding a Church on the joint platform of principle and wealth.
St Patrick and the Fianna
St Patrick is a verifiable, historical figure, born in Roman Britain, a missionary to Ireland in the fifth century AD. Son of Calpurnius, a deacon, and grandson of a priest, Patrick was captured as a youth near the west coast of Britain and was enslaved in Ireland for six years. Later, he returned as a missionary to the land of his captivity and spent the remainder of his life in Ireland. He is believed to have worked mainly in the east midlands, but tradition has attributed to him virtually all the efforts and achievements of the early missionaries.
Fionn mac Cumhail, Oisín, Caoilte and the rest of the Fianna are not fantasy figures either. They are the heroes of a real warrior culture from the final chapter of pagan Ireland, when the aggressive kingships employed roving bands of mercenaries for military purposes. Such units were known as fiana. They contained men of noble birth, still to come into their inheritance; younger sons squeezed out of power; and other elite victims of dispossession. Some were outlaws, swords for hire; others were adventurers; some were loyal to a master – on call to their king. The subversive force of their warrior culture was such that the fiana were later romanticised to become, in the popular imagination, the legendary Fianna, or Fenians, led by Fionn mac Cumhail.
Fleet-footed, broad-chested and deep of lung, they travelled on foot, free of chariots and the elite trappings that characterised Celtic culture in the European style. It was nothing to the Fianna to run down stags and boars in the forest, to stride into battle or step it out to a feast a hundred miles away.
They lived in the wilderness and revelled in it. Their dress was a linen tunic, the léine, and a woollen cloak, the brat. A sense of simple freedom ensured their popularity forever. Any barefoot boy running in a field at any time in Ireland could imagine himself a Fenian warrior.
Just as various war bands and their local movements were fused by folklore into one continuous surge of Fenian travel, so the ripples of many evangelists became the singular marathon of St Patrick.
In the modern idiom, Acallamh na Seanórach would be a road movie, with Patrick whipping the journey along on the righteous energy of his mission. In the long-established literary tradition of the road genre, the saint’s sidekick is his tragicomic opposite – a pagan, a broken-down warrior, whose loyalty humanises the saint’s mission. Caoilte has the shambling presence and the clear wit of the Wise Fool.
Their journey and its landscape are vividly detailed, at once fantastical and recognisable. There are time-shifts and diversions, up mountains and down into the Otherworld. Covering the entire country in a set of dashing forays, Acallamh is the first great travel guide to Ireland.
The landscape releases a flood of stories. Every landmark, every place name on the journey sparks questions and the travellers light up with tales – of battles, love affairs, hunts, feasts, treachery, loyalty and humour.
ROADS AND FORDS
The elaborate circuit of Ireland walked by Caoilte and St Patrick is ornamented with provincial loops and cross-country stitching. At times, the travellers follow the Five Great Roads of ancient Ireland, which were simply the main directions to and from the provinces, with a notional focus on Tara.
Routes throughout early Christian Ireland were not mysterious, as they have often been portrayed. They were networks of tracks such as might be found in any remote landscape today, worn into existence for pastoral and sometimes for military reasons. As might be expected in a cattle culture, many of them were herding trails. They connected major f
ords and causeways, sometimes following the crest of an esker (a ridge of moraine), a route hewn through woodland, or a wooden gangway (tóchar) over a bog.
SOUTH ARMAGH
The journey began in south Armagh when two ancient warriors, Caoilte and Oisín, stumbled from the forest of the Fews. There was a small problem at the outset. Caoilte and Oisín had been wiped out with Fionn and the rest of the Fianna long before St Patrick arrived in Ireland in the fifth century. The story took that disjunction in its stride without the convenience of a bridge. They were dug up and pitched forward in time to fit the plot. Loose teeth and old bones rattling, sinews snapping, the characters simply heaved into view one Christian morning in the Fews Mountains. Accompanied by a few retainers, they appeared, not as heroes locked in their monotonous prime, but as vulnerable ancients deserving respect and pity. Charged with grief for a lost culture, they embodied the heroic life of the pagan senses, and its cruel decline.
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