Sligo Folk Tales E-Book

Joe McGowan

• Herausgeber: THP Ireland
• Kategorie: Fantasy und Science-Fiction
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 296

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2015

Beschreibung

For the devotee of Irish heritage, mythology or folklore, County Sligo has everything. From the Curlew mountains in the south, where Aodh Ruadh Ó Domhnaill defeated an English army under Sir Conyers Clifford, to Benbulben's slopes in the north, where St Colmcille battled the High King of Ireland, every hill and valley is linked by the gossamer threads of myth, folklore and legend. These stories, some age-old legends and fantastical myths, some amusing anecdotes and cautionary tales, are a heady mix of the bloodthirsty, funny and passionate and a selection of the best are retold here by writer and local historian Joe McGowan. In these pages you will find little-known anecdotes of the traditional ways of Sligo's residents, their customs and superstitions; you will find stories of epic battles and heroic deeds; and you will also hear the fantastical accounts of mythical creatures, faeries, witches and the ghosts of Connacht itself.

Leseprobe

Come, faeries, take me out of this dull house!

Let me have all the freedom I have lost;

Work when I will and idle when I will!

Faeries, come take me out of this dull world,

For I would ride with you upon the wind,

Run on the top of the dishevelled tide,

And dance upon the mountains like a flame.

W.B. Yeats, The Land of Heart’s Desire

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like to acknowledge with thanks permissions granted by Críostóir Mac Cárthaigh, archivist of the National Folkore Collection, to include some of the stories reproduced here.

Every effort has been made to trace and contact copyright holders. If there are any inadvertent omissions I apologise to those concerned, and will correct any oversight in subsequent editions.

CONTENTS

Title

Quote

Acknowledgements

Introduction

  1    Balor and the Battles of Moyturra

  2    A Wilful Saint

  3    Cormac Mac Airt

  4    Diarmuid and Gráinne

  5    Queen Maeve: Ireland’s First Feminist?

  6    The Enchanted Cave of Kesh Corann

  7    Strange Occurrences

  8    Ghosts

  9    Mermaids

10    St Patrick in Sligo

11    A Noble Horse

12    Communicating with Rats

13    Power of the Priest

14    The Ship-sinking Witch

15    Sligo: The Shelly Place

16    The Lost Bell of Lough Gill

17    Lug na Gall

18    The Split Rock

19    Willie Reilly and the

Cailín Bán

20    The Rose of Carns Hill

21    The Black Pig of Enniscrone

22    Water Monsters

23    Buried Treasure

24    

Na Daoine Sidhe

(The Fairy People)

25    Winter’s Tales

Bibliography

Copyright

INTRODUCTION

For the devotee of Irish heritage, mythology or folklore, County Sligo, in the west coast province of Connacht, has everything. For those who take time to read the landscape, every stone and hill has its own unique, often bloody, story to tell. Here one can literally trace the dramatic tendrils of our nation, from mythological origins through a turbulent history to a modern nation. In its lofty mountains, its winding rivers, its jagged coastline, God has created here a land blessed by time and unspoiled by man.

From the Curlew mountains in the south, where Aodh Ruadh Ó Domhnaill defeated an English army under Sir Conyers Clifford, to Benbulben’s slopes in the north, where St Colmcille battled the High King of Ireland, every hill and valley is linked by gossamer threads of myth, folklore and history. Keshcorran, birthplace of Cormac Mac Art and home to Diarmuid and Gráinne, is linked to Benbulben, where Diarmuid met his death at the hands of the wild boar.

The mighty prow of ‘bare Benbulben’s head’, made famous by the poet W.B. Yeats, defines the County Sligo landscape. This is ‘Yeats’ country’, a countryside rich in history, folklore and mythology. In Drumcliffe churchyard, the poet himself lies at peace in the Sligo soil that inspired much of his work.

The ancient bards and filidh were respected and highly valued. Their verses and tales were told in Tara’s halls; their memories the repositories of great deeds of the Irish race and treasured epics like ‘The Song of Amhergan’ and the ‘Táin Bó Cúailnge’. They cherished the ancient sagas passed on from generation to generation through the mists of pre-history until they were written down by the early Christian monks. Sometimes it was almost too late. The chief filidhe, Senchan Torpeist, endeavoured to gather together the elements of the Táin in the reign of Guaire Aidne, the seventh-century King of Connacht. Along with his son, Muirgen, he called up the spirit of the dead hero Fergus to help them with their task.

Men like Henry Conway of Carns, County Sligo, or Jimmy McGettrick of Ballymote, County Sligo, would dismiss any accolades or tributes to their talent. Yet their contribution to our knowledge of things past is as great as the men who memorised the Táin, their minds a repository of tales and verse, comic and sad, of the glories of the Gael. Henry’s was no bardic school, but a modest fireside where he pitted his intelligence against Roger Moore of Drumfad in verse and storytelling feats. The storytellers’ knowledge, tempered by their own experience, was handed down to them by men and women of another generation.

Out of the treasure chest of his mind Henry drew for me the ‘Ballad of Pat Donlevy,’1 a song and story of treachery and deceit remembered from Land League days over 100 years before. Without his scholarship and interest, the story of this hero of another age would have been consigned to that vast black hole with so much that has already been already lost. Without any prompting he would launch into classics like ‘The Burial of Sir John Moore at Corunna’:

Not a drum was heard, not a funeral note,

As his corpse to the rampart we hurried;

Not a soldier discharged his farewell shot

O’er the grave where our hero we buried.

We buried him darkly at dead of night,

The sods with our bayonets turning;

By the struggling moonbeam’s misty light

And the lantern dimly burning …

Poaching, rebellion, smuggling; these were not crimes here in the chimney corner, but rights. Ernie O’Malley wrote of long nights spent with such people during his time on the run during the War of Independence:

Here was their paper, a living warp and weft spun of their own thoughts, fancies and doings. Now and again a biting turn of phrase, for in their nature was the old Gaelic satire … there was a love of discussion and argument that would take up a subject casually without belief and in a searching way develop it … Deferential to a stranger, they evoked in themselves a sympathetic mood, changing gears in conversation to suit his beliefs and half believing then through sympathy whilst he was present. Afterwards when they checked up on themselves it might be different; they would laugh at the strangers’ outlandish opinions when their mood hardened.

Michael Collins, another hero of the War of Independence, wrote that:

Great age held something for me that was awesome. I was much fonder of the old people in the darkness than I was of the young people in the daytime. It’s at night that you’re able to get the value of old people. And it was listening to the old people that I got my idea of Irish nationality.

A gesture of the hand, a facial expression drew pictures from words. The listeners looked into the flames and, aided by these spell weavers, saw there the clamour and conflict, the fire of ancient battles: Fionn’s pursuit of Diarmuid and Gráinne, the Táin Bó Cúailnge, Granuaile’s exploits.

Many of the fireside seanchaidhe, survivors of a crucible of conquest and colonisation,were men who had little or no formal education. Yet, in the manner of the bards of long ago, they could commit to memory endless anecdotes, stories, riddles and legends. Their minds were a treasure house of lore and tradition, inspiring a unique and natural-born talent that could never be acquired. They possessed a simplicity and authenticity, a cadence, rhythm and sense of timing that formal education would have destroyed.

‘There might be seven or eight people in a rambling house,’ Mickey McGroarty recalled.

’Twas all clay pipes was goin’ that time. They’d fill the pipe and when one man had a good smoke on it, he’d pull his fingers on the shank and pass it on to the man beside him. When he’d have a smoke he’d pull his fingers on it an’ pass it on to the next man an’ so on till every man had a good smoke. All ye had to do was fill one pipe in the night because every man took a turn filling his pipe an’ passing it on. When the seven or eight pipes was filled ye had a big night’s smoking done – the one pipe gave every man a smoke. The baccy that’s goin’ today, it’s not baccy at all, ye haven’t it lit till it’s gone!

The night was no time in passin’ with all the different stories ye’d hear. I learned them all from the oul’ people. I learnt it an’ I drunk it by heart. When I was goin’ home on a dark winter’s night I was going over the story in me mind the same way the oul’ people told it. Even when I went to bed, before the sleep took me, I’d be trying to remember what I heard from the oul’ men. The next day I had it off be heart.

Outside the camaraderie of that comforting fireside circle, in the murky, dimly lit corners of the kitchen, phantasmal ancestors long passed away listened unseen in the shadows. Spirits, that once had a place by the fire-lit circle of mortals, loitered where the dancing flames of the burning turf fire and pallid glow of the oil lamp faded into gloom. Overhead where the light strove to penetrate the dim-lit recesses around the smoke-blackened purlins were concealed creatures that crept away only with the dawn light. Flickering flame-thrown shadows of the fireside company danced with phantom visitors on the whitewashed wall, bringing our two worlds into a shadowy unison. Stories of banshees that wailed to foretell a death, desperate struggles with ghosts on lonely paths; anything became possible as we flirted with the spirit-peopled otherworld that from time to time crossed over darkly to ours.

For centuries, the old ways and the old world endured. It was imbedded in the storytellers’ souls. More than spectators, they were what they believed, they lived what they told. But their practices and customs collided with a rapidly evolving world. In a clash of traditions, they have lost. Or so it seems. Time will prove the greater loss is ours. In a conflict as profound in its effect as when the Milesians drove the Tuatha De Danaan to their underground places, so too the new technology defeated the gentler ways. Mass communication and instant entertainment have obliterated customs and beliefs long held. They have vanished like snow, today glistening white, tomorrow silently and swiftly gone.

The English poet and Celtic scholar Robin Flower once wrote:

It is only by a glint of colour here, a salient thread there, in the dulled material, that we who strive to reconstitute something of the intricate harmony wrought into the original fabric can imagine to ourselves the bright hues and gay lines of the forgotten past. The world has turned to another way of life, and no passion of regret can revive a dying memory.

Visitors to country kitchens, following the arrival of television, saw that the same people who used to sit around the walls of the kitchen to sing, dance and hear stories now sat on the same chairs and furms (long stools) watching whatever flickered on the hypnotic screen.

Mickey McGroarty, Maggie McGowan, Bernie Kelly, Jimmy McGettrick: they and their stories will soon be history. The ‘intricate harmony’ is no more and the world a poorer place for its going.

Unfolded here then are the beliefs of ordinary people, their superstitions, customs and way of life. Our journey reveals that the character of Ireland, and County Sligo in particular, is a microcosm not just of Sligo, but of a romantic Ireland on the verge of extinction. These stories bring to life the stories, customs and superstitions once told around the fireside at night. The warp and weft of everyday people, their existence mostly unrecognised and unsung, is celebrated in these pages.

NOTE

1  McGowan, J., In the Shadow of Benbulben, p.79.

1

BALORANDTHE BATTLESOF MOYTURRA

‘The Land of Heart’s Desire’ is how the poet W.B. Yeats described Sligo. And who can argue? It must have always seemed so, starting with the first land-hungry colonists who viewed Benbulben’s lofty towers from the wild Atlantic to the O’Neill and the O’Donnell of a later time. ‘Yes this is the Promised Land,’ we can hear them say. ‘Here is a land worth fighting for.’

Who then were the first settlers? What do we know of them? Who were these early ancestors whose blood enriches our veins? What language did they speak?

Our earliest history was memorised, not written. The repositories of this early lore were members of a powerful and privileged caste of poets, diviners and seers in early Ireland. Trained for at least twelve years in rigorous mental exercise, they committed all history and mythology to memory.

Written Celtic tradition is inspired and informed by this learned class of filidhe and found in the great collections of manuscripts compiled in monasteries and castles from AD 800 to the time of the transcription of the Annals of the Four Masters in 1632. Their authenticity is disputed, but it will serve us well to remember that although the shaft of sunlight striking the inner chamber at Newgrange was common knowledge locally, it wasn’t ‘discovered’ by the academic world until the early 1960s.

The ‘Book of Invasions’ (Leabhair Gabhala) is one of our earliest sources of information. A twelfth-century text transcribed by Christian monks from identifiable poets of the ninth and tenth centuries, as well as from oral lore, it is an invaluable record. The book is one of the oldest mythologies of the western world and made huge tracts of history available in written form for the first time.

Let us find the first immigrants from another early source, the Chronicum Scotorum compiled by Duald McFirbis at Lecan in the Barony of Tireragh. In the year ‘Anno Mundi2 1599’, he says, ‘The daughter of one of the Greeks came to Hibernia, whose name was Cesair, and fifty maidens and three men with her.’

Lucky men!

Those eminent chroniclers, the Four Masters, agree with McFirbis: ‘Forty days before the Deluge, Ceasair came to Ireland with fifty girls and three men – Bith, Ladhra and Fintain, their names.’ The group evidently hadn’t bothered to take a place in Noah’s Ark! Coming to Ireland was an inspired choice though, as they seem to have escaped the fate that overcame the rest of the world. Of these early colonists we know little else.

We have somewhat more information on the Parthalonians or Scythians, who arrived in Ireland in AM 2520 or, as it is calculated, 278 years after the Deluge or, if you like, the twenty-first year of the age of the Patriarch Abraham as recorded in the Annals. To put the timescale in context, the ancients placed the Deluge at 1,656 years after the Creation. Let’s just simplify things and say it was around 1500 BC.

Parthalon’s followers are also said to have come from Greece. Perhaps they were looking for Cesair and her handmaidens, who had sailed out on uncharted seas many years before. We don’t know. The Fomorians arrived some few years after this but were roundly defeated by Parthalon and his men. However, the Parthalonians scarcely had time to savour the fruits of their victory before they were wiped out by a plague. The sound of a human voice was not heard in Ireland again until the arrival, in AM 2859, of the Nemedians.

According to Geoffrey Keating’s History of Ireland, the leader of this group, Nemedius, was eleventh in descent from Noah. Settling in Maugherow, north of Sligo town, they enjoyed undisputed tenancy for over two centuries. Maugherow at that time comprised all of the area between the Benbulben range and the sea.

The Fomorians, however, after a long absence, stormed onto the scene once again. They had somewhat more success this time as by the year AM 3060 they had succeeded in founding settlements in Sligo and other points along the west coast. Establishing their principal stronghold on Tory Island off the Donegal coast, they were the bad boys of this prehistoric era. According to historian Revd E.A. D’Alton, they lived, ‘by piracy and plunder of other nations, and were very troublesome to the whole world.’ We can imagine how ordinary decent Nemedians must have felt about this: ‘There goes the neighbourhood,’ we can hear them say.

But worse was yet to come. An even worse band of villains in the form of the Firbolgs (literally ‘bagmen’) arrived in AM 3266. Sligo must have been high on a list of places to conquer in the Greek War Office then, as these latest arrivals were Scythians as well. ‘Black, loquacious, lying, tale bearing and of low grovelling mind’ is how they are described in the Book of Lecan. Seventeenth-century Sligo historian Duald Mac Firbis described the Firbolgs as black haired, thieving and churlish and for good measure threw in ‘mean and contemptible’ as well! Establishing their chief seats of power at Tara and Sligo, they quickly conquered Connacht and extended their rule as far as Meath and Leinster.

The Firbolgs had it their own way for only about forty years, when the Tuatha De Danaan arrived. They came off a bit better in Mac Firbis’s description, which characterised them as fair haired and skilful, but nevertheless they were also plunderers, large and vengeful. They were as fair of skin and feature as the previous invaders were dark. Immediately on arriving on Sligo shores, we are told, they burnt their boats. The Firbolgs didn’t spot them until they got as far as Leitrim and, seeing no boats, attributed their arrival to some form of magic. Magic was big in Ireland then, so this perception gave the newcomers an advantage right away.

The Firbolgs sent their best warrior, Sreng, to a meeting with Breas, his counterpart on the De Danaan side. The two ambassadors examined each other’s weapons with great interest. The spears of the De Danaans were apparently light and sharp-pointed, those of the Firbolgs heavy and blunt. Breas sued for peace, making the very reasonable point that Ireland was big enough and couldn’t they divide it between them? Sreng brought the offer back to his leader King Eochy who, encouraged by Sreng’s evaluation of the invaders’ strength, immediately declared war on King Nuada of the De Danaan.

They, hoping to avoid a confrontation, retreated to Moyturra near Cong in County Mayo. The Firbolgs followed and, despite peace feelers by King Nuada who was reluctant to fight, the battle commenced. King Eochy was immediately thrown into confusion when he couldn’t even find his opponents. The De Danaan had caused a magical mist to descend on their camp, concealing them completely from view. When the battle eventually began, it lasted for four days, at the end of which the Firbolgs were destroyed and their numbers reduced to 300 men. The De Danaan pursued the fleeing enemy to Beltra strand near Ballisodare in County Sligo. Here they administered the coup de grace when they killed King Eochy. This great battle, known as the First Battle of Moyturra, is said to have happened around 2,000 BC, 700 years before the Siege of Troy.

Following the battle, a truce was called and an agreement made: the Firbolgs would take the province of Connacht for their territory, while the De Danaans would take the rest of Ireland. The possibility that the Firbolgs did in fact at one time exist is mooted by the scholar Mac Firbis who, in his seventeenth-century investigations, proposed that the ancestry of many of the inhabitants of Connacht could be traced to these same Firbolgs.

Some time after this conflict, a rift developed between the warrior hero Breas and his De Danaan comrades. Breas fled to the Hebrides to seek assistance from his Fomorian relatives, who ruled there. Assembling an invasion force and, placing it under the leadership of Balor of the Evil Eye, they sailed for Sligo.

Described as a man of ‘gigantic size and Herculean strength’ Balor was ‘perfectly skilled in the Magic Art, he always kept a cover on his eye which he took off whenever he intended to do an injury by his look’. The power was said to have come from a druid cauldron; left to guard the mixture, Balor had lifted the lid and was sprayed by the vapour escaping from the boiling pot. Afterwards, imbued by a magical power, whole armies could be struck down with one glance of his eye. A perfect match, it seems, for the De Danaan who, up until now, had it all their own way in the magic department.

Balor may have been the first in Ireland with the curse of the Evil Eye. In a less fearful fashion, ‘blinking’ or the ‘overlook’ has existed from the dawn of history into modern times. Jealous or resentful people are said to have the power to do harm just by casting their eyes on stock or property. It is respected and feared not just in Ireland, but in world folklore as well. The poet W.B. Yeats, remarking on the phenomenon, said that: ‘the admired and desired are only safe if one says, “God bless them when one’s eyes are upon them”.’

Landing at Ballisodare, Balor, the disgruntled Breas, and an army of men marched to Moyturra in the parish of Kilmactranny, Barony of Tirerrill. This plain is 700ft high and 1 square mile with valleys on three sides and Lough Arrow to the west. It is remarkable to this day for the number of sepulchral monuments, pillars, monoliths and obelisks, that exist there. These groups were soon joined by remnants of the previously defeated Firbolgs, anxious for revenge. It was payback time! Space does not allow the battle to be described here in full but the Tuathas were fearsome opponents.

Lugh was chosen to lead the Tuatha De Danaan into battle against the Fomorians and their champion, Balor. The battle began on the Feast of Samhain with some preliminary skirmishes, in which the Fomorians got a rude awakening when they experienced the superior weaponry of the De Danaan and their ability to restore the wounded to health:

Fearful indeed was the thunder which rolled over the battlefield; the shouts of the warriors, the breaking of the shields, the flashing and clashing of the swords, of the straight, ivory-hilted swords, the music and harmony of the ‘belly-darts’ and the sighing and winging of the spears and lances.

The Tuatha De Danaan

By force of potent spells and wicked magic,

And conjurations horrible to bear –

Could set the ministers of hell at work

And raise a slaughtered army from the earth –

And make them live and breathe and fight again …

(T.W. Rolleston, Myths and Legends of the Celtic Race)

As the battle proceeded, there was great slaughter on both sides. The annals relate that 100,000 men fought and died on the battlefield at Moyturra for possession of the ‘Land of Heart’s Desire’. The slain of the Fomorians remained so, but those of the De Danaan were cast into a well over which the healer Dian Cécht and his three children sang spells and, by its magic, they were restored to life. Lugh also used his powers, moving around his army on one foot and with one eye he chanted an incantation to lend them strength and courage. He thus assumed the traditional posture of the sorcerer and one that was attributed to the Fomhoire.

The hard-pressed Fomorians brought on their champion, Balor, with his venomous fiery eye, on which there was always kept seven coverings. One by one, Balor removed the coverings:

With the first covering the bracken began to wither, with the second the grass was scorched, with the third the woods and timber began to heat, with the fourth smoke came from the trees until with the seventh they were set afire and the whole countryside in a blaze.

In Gods and Fighting Men,Lady Gregory describes the battle thus:

And it was a hard battle was fought, and for a while it was going against the Tuatha De Danaan; and Nuada of the Silver Hand, their King, and Macha, daughter of Emmass, fell by Balor, King of the Fomor. And Cassmail fell by Octriallach, and the Dagda got a dreadful wound from a casting spear that was thrown by Ceithlenn, wife of Balor.

But when the battle was going on, Lugh broke away from those that were keeping him, and rushed out to the front of the Men of Dea. And then there was a fierce battle fought, and Lugh was heartening the men of Ireland to fight well, the way they would not be in bonds any longer. For it was better for them, he said, to die protecting their own country than to live under bonds and under tribute any longer. And he sang a song of courage to them, and the hosts gave a great shout as they went into battle, and then they met together, and each of them began to attack the other.

And there was great slaughter, and laying low in graves, and many comely men fell there in the stall of death. Pride and shame were there side by side, and hardness and red anger, and there was red blood on the white skin of young fighting men. And the dashing of spear against shield, and sword against sword, and the shouting of the fighters, and the whistling of casting spears and the rattling of scabbards was like harsh thunder through the battle. And many slipped in the blood that was under their feet, and they fell, striking their heads one against another; and the river carried away bodies of friends and enemies together.

And as to the number of men that fell in the battle, it will not be known till we number the stars of the sky, or flakes of snow, or the dew on the grass, or grass under the feet of cattle, or the horses of the Son of Lir in a stormy sea.

Then Lugh and Balor met in the battle, and Lugh called out reproaches to him; and there was anger on Balor, and he said to the men that were with him: ‘Lift up my eyelid higher till l see this chatterer that is taunting me.’

Then they raised Balor’s eyelid, but Lugh quickly made a cast of his red spear at him, that brought the eye out through the back of his head, so that it was towards his own army it fell, and three times nine of the Fomorians died when they looked at it. And if Lugh had not put out that eye when he did, the whole of Ireland would have been burned in one flash. And after this, Lugh struck his head off.

One legend tells that, when Balor was slain by Lugh, his eye was still open as he fell face first on to the ground. His deadly stare burned a hole into the earth from which the blood gushed forth to form a lake which is now known as Loch na Súl, or ‘Lake of the Eye’, which is still to be found in the parish of Kilmactranny.

NOTE

2  Many of these early texts use AM, ‘in the year of the world’; dating from creation, fixed by Archbishop Ussher at 4004 BC.

2

A WILFUL SAINT

It is well known that St Colmcille, in addition to the establishment of a monastery at Drumcliffe, County Sligo, founded a monastery on Iona in AD 563. What is not so well known is that it was St Molaise of Inishmurray, a small island off the coast of County Sligo, that was responsible for Colmcille’s exile and odyssey to Iona. It is no small matter, for the foundation of Iona is credited with being the inspiration for a wave of missionary zeal that eventually brought learning, culture and religion to a barbarised Europe.

Molaise was confessor to St Colmcille and it was to him that this holy man went in great remorse after the Battle of Cúl Dreimhne (anglicised to Cooldrumman) in North Sligo. This ‘Battle of the Books’ came about when Colmcille copied one of St Finian’s manuscripts that he had admired and subsequently borrowed. Although there is no historical proof, we believe the book in question may have been the Cathac. Others say it was the text of the chronicle of Rufinus of Aquileia, which is known to have been brought to Ireland in the fifth century and used subsequently on Iona in the monastery established by Colmcille.

Lending books, even in modern times, has its pitfalls. The sixth century, it turns out, was no different – even when it was saints that were involved. When St Colmcille returned the original he refused, much to Finian’s chagrin, to give up the copy as well. Arguing that he had returned what he had borrowed and that the copy belonged to him, the dispute escalated between the two holy men until it was eventually brought to the High King of Ireland, Diarmuit Mac Cerrbhéll, for adjudication. The king, having considered the matter, issued his now famous edict, reputed to be the first ever recorded copyright judgement: ‘Le gach boin a boinín is le gach leabhar a leabhrán.’ (To every cow its calf and to every book its copy.)

Remaining resolute and unmoved, Colmcille stubbornly refused to obey the ruling. In consequence of the saint’s refusal the armies of the High King and Colmcille, in AD 561, fought a pitched battle on the slopes of Benbulben Mountain in County Sligo. Thousands were slain, Colmcille was victorious and the king forced to concede the copy of the Psalter to the victor.

Despite his triumph, Colmcille’s conscience bothered him and he was soon stricken by remorse for his defiance and the slaughter he had caused. Molaise of Inishmurray was his confessor and it was to him that this holy man then went in order to confess his sin. The Martyrology of Donegal records that they met at the cross of Ath Iomlaise (Ahamlish) situated near the well of St Molaise at the entrance to Ahamlish graveyard near Grange village. They were blood relations as Colmcille’s sister, Cumenia, was St Molaise’s mother.

St Molaise’s Well, still in existence but now fallen into disuse, was much visited until recent years because of its curative properties. In the last nineteenth century the volume of pilgrims was a source of great annoyance to a Protestant clergyman who lived nearby. The landlord, Lord Palmerston, closed the well at the minister’s request. To his dismay, when the minister came downstairs the next morning, the well had sprung up in his living room. He went immediately to Palmerston, who ordered his workmen to restore the well upon which the parson’s home returned to normal.

Island tradition holds that it was not at Ahamlish, but at Inishmurray that the meeting between Molaise and Colmcille took place. It is said that when Colmcille went to Stáid Abbey at Streedagh in order to cross over to Inishmurray to confess his sins, there was no boat available. Not to be deterred by such a trifle, he threw his cloak on the water and a green path immediately opened before him. Just as with the parting of the Red Sea at Moses’ command, Colmcille then walked across to Inishmurray. Ever since that time, no harm has ever come to any boat travelling to or from Inishmurray that way. It is a fact that while the islanders lived on Inishmurray it was firmly held that, regardless of sea swell or storm, no boat travelling on this path ever came to harm.

As a result of the meeting with Molaise, Colmcille’s penance was to leave Ireland, never to see or put foot on the island again and to win as many souls for God as were lost in the battle at Cúl Dreimhne. Colmcille was distraught at having to leave the land of his birth that he loved so much:

Broken is my heart in its breast;

Should sudden death overtake me

It is for my great love of the Gael …

 … Were all Alba mine

From its centre to the border

I would rather have the site of a house

In the middle of fair Derry …

Sailing with a heavy heart to Iona in AD 563, he was one of a wave of Irish missionaries that colonised a barbarised Europe, bringing learning, culture and religion with them. Scots, Picts, Irish, Britons and Anglo-Saxons poured into Iona to learn at Colmcille’s feet. ‘While Rome and its ancient empire faded from memory and a new, illiterate Europe rose on its ruins, a vibrant, literary culture was blooming in secret along its Celtic fringe’, Thomas Cahill wrote.3

Before his death at the end of the sixth century, Colmcille’s disciples had founded sixty monastic communities in Scotland. From there, learning and Christianity spread to the pagan Angles of Lindisfarne and Northumbria. Uncontainable, faith and learning spilled on from there to continental Europe.

The stones, clochauns and churches of Inishmurray speak to us today of the richness and diversity of our great cultural heritage, of a land once called the ‘Island of Saints and Scholars’. If it weren’t for the penance imposed on Colmcille by St Molaise of Inishmurray, Iona would have remained an obscure and desolate outpost on the edge of the civilised world - and the history of the Christianisation of Europe been written differently, if at all.

NOTE

3  Cahill, Thomas, How the Irish Saved Civilization.

3

CORMAC MAC AIRT

Cormac Mac Airt (son of Art) was the most celebrated of all the High Kings of Ireland. His reign, according to medieval historians, is said to have been from AD 204 to 244. He is said to have ruled from Tara, the seat of the High Kings of Ireland, for all those years, and under his rule, it flourished. He was famous for his wise, true, and generous judgments. In the Annals of Clonmacnoise, translated in 1627, he is described as: ‘absolutely the best king that ever reigned in Ireland … wise learned, valiant and mild, not given causelessly to be bloody as many of his ancestors were, he reigned majestically and magnificently’.

Although a famous High King, his beginnings were humble and troubled. Cormac’s father was the High King, Art Mac Cuinn. His mother was Achtan, daughter of Olc Acha, a smith (or druid) from Connacht. According to the saga The Battle of Mag Mucrama, Olc gave Art hospitality the night before the Battle of Maigh Mucruimhe. It had been prophesied that a great progeny would come from Olc’s line, so he offered the High King his daughter to sleep with. That night Cormac was conceived.