The Fews (fíodh: a wood), from which they emerged rheumy-eyed into a new order, was one of the great ‘black holes’ of the Irish landscape. West of Slieve Gullion and stretching from today’s Crossmaglen to Newry, it was a ruggedly wooded area in south Armagh where time (and law) barely prevailed. Today the name itself has almost disappeared with the forest, but a little of the character remains. Full of hidden places until the helicopter came, the Fews was famously resistant to hostile outsiders. It was an ideal lair for a remnant of the Fianna, just as it would be a bolthole for outlaws through every century that followed, down to the present day.
Plodding from Armagh into Co. Louth at the start of a journey into another culture, the old diehards were soon on the major route south that links Newry, Dundalk and Drogheda today. The landmarks were painfully familiar – mounds and ridges everywhere, strewn with abandoned stories. The stripped silence made memory all the more intense. Woods were felled where they had hunted; the forts and dwellings of their kind were swept away. They did not understand this new country where they had their bearings and yet were completely lost. Here and there were wooden structures with strange emblems; men with shaven heads hurled incantations at them.
Slieve Gullion, the Cooleys, the Mournes – haunts of the old hunters – diminished behind them in the distance. They felt huge, clumsy and very old in a world of smaller men. Before their journey’s end, all but two of their retainers would ‘put their mouths to the ground’ and perish from loneliness and old age.
The Myth of Fionn mac Cumhail
From modern analysis of tradition and the development of myth, it appears that the warrior Fionn mac Cumhail acquired the visionary qualities of Find, a much earlier figure, to become in the process an enduring hero of enormous power. Find embodied the wisdom of a Celtic deity of the Boyne Valley, preceding the cult of the fiana. Fionn mac Cumhail, absorbing him, was to become the hero of a later culture.
In early Christian Ireland, Fionn became the avatar (god as man) of a Leinster tribe, Uí Fáilghe, whose boundaries had been compressed by the Uí Néill in their expansion out of the Boyne Valley. Fionn mac Cumhail, originally borrowed from the Boyne, became a symbol of their struggle.1
They were the last of their kind. The great men they served, their leader Fionn mac Cumhail, their friends and fellow warriors, sons and grandsons were all dead. They plodded down the flat coastal plain towards the River Boyne. Where the Christian tradition would later distinguish itself with Monasterboice and Mellifont, both in ruins today, the geriatric warriors swung right along the river, heading west.
RIVER BOYNE, CO. MEATH
This was Slí Mhidluachra, the ancient route from Tara to Ulster. Tara, Temhair in Co. Meath, was the political centre of early Ireland – insofar as there was one – where the concept of overkingship was focused. The warriors were travelling the route in reverse, going south towards the Boyne and west towards the Hill of Slane.
Oisín disappeared on Otherworld business, leaving the sorrowing Caoilte to continue the journey. Their parting was as of the soul from the body. The heroic emotion was rather exaggerated, since Caoilte was still accompanied by nine retainers, and anyway Oisín was to reappear for a later episode of Acallamh.
Bereft, Caoilte visited first the Pool of Fiacc at Rosnaree on the Bend of the Boyne (close to the megalithic tomb at Newgrange and a traditional fording point on the river.) This was the place where Fionn, his beloved leader, had burned his finger as a boy and – sucking it – had tasted the Salmon of Knowledge, which gave him the power of second sight.
HILL OF ALLEN, CO. KILDARE
Moving upriver, Caoilte stopped neither at the Hill of Slane nor the Hill of Tara. Those great sites were steeped in traditions of their own and would distract his journey. He was heading for the Hill of Allen, near Newbridge in Co. Kildare today, where it stands between the River Liffey and the Royal Canal. Originally a sacred site, it was known as Almhu, centre of the powerful Leinster cult of Fionn mac Cumhail. The Hill of Allen was both his home and his burial mound.
Today this great landmark has been hollowed out by quarrying, and a large part of the hill has been removed, although the noisy summit can be reached from a point close to the little village of Allen. On the level of respect alone, it is perhaps little wonder that motorways and roads built from the rubble of an ancient landmark should be so destructive of human life.
The Fenian Lays
Oisín was the son of Fionn mac Cumhail, and tradition accords him a radical response to Christianity. His reaction is found in the subversive medium of the Fenian Lays, Laoithe na Féinne. These verse tales were carried in the oral tradition right through to the twentieth century, smuggled like contraband under the tongue. ‘I don’t like your Mass,’ Oisín warns Patrick. ‘I want nothing to do with you.’
The notion of Oisín telling Patrick where to get off has appealed to an anti-clerical streak hoarded in the popular imagination for centuries. Many verses, rarely printed or translated, exist.
Cuirim druim leatsa, a Phádraig
I turn my back on you, Patrick,
Is go lá an bhráth leis an gcléir,
And reject forever your priests,
Agus fós le Neamh na n-órd
Likewise your ordered Heaven
Is le slóighte uile naomh.
And all its ranks of saints.
When Fionn and the Fianna lived
They loved the hills, not
monkish cells.
Blackbird song is what they loved;
Not the harsh sound of your bells.
If my son Oscar and your God,
Were in combat on Cnoc na bhFiann,
If I saw my son knocked down,
I’d admit God is a strong man.
It would be an almighty shame if God
Would not release Fionn from flame,
For if God himself were in Hell,
Fionn would fight in His name.
Caoilte, once Fionn’s loyal lieutenant, was on a pilgrimage to the past. He tramped up to Almhu, and stumbled into a brand new future. No quarrying then, as far as we know, but Patricius, son of Calpurn, had arrived; he was scattering demons in every direction, blessing the mound, claiming it for a new god. Pledged to defend his culture to the death, Caoilte might have sprung into action and routed this new druid, but instead he was strangely passive. Humbly he accepted the baptism rained upon him. He was in the hands of a Christian author, of course.
Caoilte avoided confrontation. To pay for his baptism, he reached into the rim of his shield and handed over a bar of gold. Religion would be an expensive business – he could see that. However, the Christian saint was not enforcing prayer or reviling feasts. The Adze-head, Tálcheann, as Patrick came to be known, was a lively character with whom it might be a challenge to travel.
Camped companionably on the Hill of Allen, the missionaries fed their pagan guests; they elicited heroic tales, admired the finer points of Fenian life, and condemned nothing. For the moment. The old man came out of himself in Patrick’s skilful hands. Having cleared the problem of profanity with his attendant angels, the saint ordered that Caoilte’s words be written down as treasures for posterity. What old warrior could resist that compliment? The questions too were designed to swell his heart with honest pride.
‘What has kept you warriors alive for all these years?’
‘The truth of our hearts, the strength of our arms, and the constancy of our tongues.’
‘Was your leader a good man?’
Caoilte left Patrick in no doubt on that score:
‘Were the dark leaves gold that the trees let fall,
With the silver wave, he would give it all.’
His blood quickened, nerves thrilled; he was himself again. ‘Sixty were the queens following in my wake; in truth I was a rogue, and yet I pleased them all.’
A nervous moment for the Christians. Monogamy was their platform. ‘Is our dinner ready yet?’ Patrick harrumphed.
COOKING
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Food for the missionaries was provided by their wealthy converts – kings and cattlemen in the surrounding landscape. Patrick extended the hospitality to Caoilte and his men, and they chipped in the fruit of their own labours. For nomadic hunters, the most effective means of cooking raw meat in a hurry, even today, is to cut it in strips and roast it over a bed of hardwood embers in a shallow pit.
The modern landscape and its maps are dotted with fulachta fiadh, timber-lined pits designed for boiling water with hot stones. These are traditionally associated with the feasting of the Fianna, but there is now considerable doubt that they were ever used for cooking; they belong to much earlier Bronze Age settlements.
STORYTELLER
Caoilte’s first tale boasted of the bravery of the Fianna. Nine of the leading warriors, including Oisín and himself, had raided Britain once to recover some stolen hounds. With a white shield on each man’s shoulder, two stabbing spears in each right hand, and a helmet on every head, these nine were the equal of any four hundred warriors in the world. They brought home their hounds and a herd of the finest horses as well.2
The raid on Britain brings Niall of the Nine Hostages to mind, a semi-historic Irish warrior said to have captured the young St Patrick while on a slaving raid. He is reputed to have ravaged as far afield as the European Alps in the fifth century. He may well have been the leader of an actual fian in his time.
While Caoilte’s tales proved over and over the courage of the Fianna, they reflected at a deeper level an obsession with personal honour and renown, to be maintained by violence. They pointed also to the brutal insecurity of a society in crisis, as pre-Christian Ireland appears to have been, leaving it open to convulsive change. And it is obvious too from the constant celebration of drunkenness and all its fetishes – particularly the ritual drinking-vessels of the Fianna – that a sacramental drink culture is lodged right at the earliest roots of Irish identity.
In between Caoilte’s stories, Patrick made some crucial conversions.
‘You shall have the kingship tomorrow at the middle of the day,’ he promised a dispossessed prince. ‘And your race after you.’
But Patrick had second thoughts: ‘Unless you turn against the Church.’
The religious future of the east midlands thus secured, it was time to move on and tackle Munster. Patrick and his new bodyguard headed southwest.
Place-Lore
In Irish legend, a place is defined not so much by its geographical co-ordinates as by its stories and its names. The constant emphasis on place names and their associations was a function of all Irish narrative, including stories of the Fianna. A large body of medieval place-lore, or topography, Dinnshenchas Érenn, deals entirely with place names and their stories. It reflects the extraordinary rootedness of the Irish imagination and was required learning for the bards. Like the Annals of the Four Masters, for example, it is often uncritically admired merely for its existence. Place-lore was to saturate the later literary traditions too. Little wonder that Ulysses, although a modern urban novel, is obsessed with nuances, resonances and exactitudes of place.
KILDARE AND OFFALY
Just as Caoilte’s approach had followed the logic of an ancient route, Slí Mhidluachra to Tara, the next leg is loosely associated with Slí Dhála, the route from Tara to North Munster. Stepping off the Hill of Allen, they made their first stop in Kildare. Cill Dara (church of the oak) suggests the pagan cult of Brigit, goddess of animals and fertility, which would have been familiar to the Fianna and was widely known throughout Celtic Europe. The oak in the place name may be an echo of a sacred tree or grove on the old site. Within a century of Patrick’s presence, the goddess Brigit would be transformed into the Christian saint, Brighid or Bríd. She was given a back-story in later Christian lore, making her a member of the Uí Fotharta, a group coming to power just then among the Leinstermen. Ownership of the goddess-saint must have given them a fine head start.
Afterwards, Patrick and Caoilte continued, in the words of Acallamh: ‘by the Wood of a River-Branch and the Ridge of Clay, now called the Church of the Oak, across the river-pool at Durrow, across the ever-green River Barrow, and over the Causeway of Líag, daughter of Cúarnatán ….’
In other words, the route from Kildare took them south over the River Barrow, past the Slieve Bloom Mountains, through the plains of Laois and over the headwaters of the River Nore. This was wet and rugged country, not easy ground to travel in the early Christian era when it was the tribal territory of Uí Fáilghe. The rivers were forded, sometimes waded, and narrow necks of bog were crossed by wooden causeways (tóchair), some of which are still preserved in the peat of Offaly today. The tribes and their lands tended to be separated from each other by natural features of the landscape – forests, bogs, rivers, uplands. This added to their sense of independence.
Travel in the low-lying midland bogs had not become much easier by the time Acallamh was compiled in the late twelfth century. Ó Conchobhair Fáilghe held the area at that period as an island in a sea of Anglo-Norman expansion, indicating that access was still difficult.
Between Aghaboe (site of a later monastery) and Roscrea, the warrior and the priests were briefly on Slí Dhála and the main road to Cashel. Hard travellers, they did not stay on it long, veering west from Tipperary into Limerick instead. The popular story of the visit to Cashel when St Patrick nailed the king’s foot to the floor with his crozier, did not arise on this journey.
The Politics of Legend
When Acallamh was being compiled from the oral tradition in the twelfth century, there was intense competition for the Munster kingship between the O’Brien descendants of Brian Boru and a rival dynasty. The author had to strike a careful balance as to which dynasty he placed in power seven hundred years earlier. The king who visited Ardpatrick was not an O’Brien. As far as it went, this was historically correct, since the royal pedigree of Brian Boru was a very stunted tail indeed.
The Rock of Cashel, a great Munster landmark, may have been excluded from the journey because it might have identified Acallamh too closely with one faction of the later struggle for power.
ARDPATRICK, CO. LIMERICK
The travellers took their next break at the foot of a hill – not just any old lump in the landscape, but the one still reputed to be the highest green hill in Ireland. Tulach na Féinne, as it was called, or the Hill of the Fianna, (185 metres), is a green jewel clasped in the dark bezel of the Ballyhoura Mountains. Neatly conical, grassed to the summit, it seems to control by natural right the tracts of grazing that stretch north towards Limerick, the finest dairy land in Ireland. Patrick is said to have founded a church on top, and the hill is now called Ardpatrick. Like many a prelate, he had an eye for a prime site. That church was followed by later churches, all in ruins now, and by a round tower of which only the butt remains. One of Ireland’s airiest graveyards sits on the summit, still in use though slightly neglected, as if the height of the hill puts it just above regular attention. A walk on Ardpatrick gives a pleasant uphill stroll into the past, with views over the present, and the future almost in sight.
Caoilte recalled how the Fianna, on that very hill, had feasted on berries and hazelnuts, bramble-shoots, sprigs of gentian, roasted birds, salmon and eel. O’Sullivan Beare and his followers tramping north from west Cork in the winter of 1603 were to slide deep into starvation as they camped at the foot of Ardpatrick, finding only a little watercress in the surrounding countryside. Throughout history, travellers and storytellers are drawn to the same significant landmarks which feature repeatedly in the accounts.
The saint and the warrior did not go hungry. They were met there by the King of Munster and his nobles, who laid their heads in Patrick’s lap – a gesture of submission – and rewarded him. ‘Patrick stayed there for a week, raising the dead, and curing sickness and disease of every kind.’ More Messiah than missionary, he certainly out-miracled the pagan druids who could not quite raise the dead. Witch-doctors and shamans often roused people
from induced trances, but not from the grave.
As soon as Patrick had converted the nobles and nailed down the little mountain for the future Church, Caoilte secured it for the pagan past. A poor bargain, but the odds were against him. He told a lame story of the naming of the hill by the Fianna as they left it on their way to the Battle of Ventry. ‘This is a lovely hill,’ remarked Fionn. ‘What better name so,’ said his men, ‘than the Fair Hill!’ Caoilte recovered from that low-point to relate the great tale of the battle itself, one of the most poignant episodes in the Fenian tradition.
The early Christians were deeply touched by the tragedy of Caol and Crédhe. ‘May you have victory and blessing,’ said Patrick. ‘The story you have told is a good one. Where is Broccán, our scribe?’
The Battle of Ventry
An invasion force had arrived at Ventry Strand on the Dingle Peninsula in west Kerry, even as the Fianna were feasting on their hilltop in Limerick. It was led by Dáire Donn, King of the World. Setting off from Fair Hill to repel the invaders, the Fianna diverted in order to help a young comrade to win the woman he loved. He was Caol and she was Crédhe, a lady of high standards from the Paps of Anu, twin hills in Co. Kerry dedicated to a goddess of the land and renowned for their suggestive symmetry.
The entire cohort of the Fianna struck south from Ardpatrick towards Killarney to support Caol, instead of racing west to Dingle to confront the invasion. Caol had to present his case in a poem composed for Crédhe. Countless suitors had fallen at this hurdle, and the Fianna were doubtful of his chances. But his foster mother was an insider; she had composed his poem for him.
Endurance Page 16