Cú Chulainn then took Emer with him and bolted across the three ramparts. Talking to local farmers in the 1970s, I was informed that I could better spend my time with other aspects of folklore rather than with this ‘immoral man’; two millennia later, ‘the wild man from Ulster’ is still seen as one to be avoided.
Drumanagh entered the news in 1996 when an article in The Sunday Times led to a war of words with some academics. The article stated that: ‘A nondescript patch of land fifteen miles north of Dublin has shattered one of Ireland’s strongest myths [that the Romans never invaded Ireland]. It indicated that the country was, after all, invaded by the Romans.’
Drumanagh was here being described as a Roman promontory fort and a bridgehead for the invading Roman legions. This extrapolation was based on a find of Roman coins and small pieces of jewellery on or near Drumanagh, and further supported by Roman burial finds at nearby Lambay Island. Another point of view stated that the artefacts discovered were ‘most likely due’ to Irish trading with Roman Britain.
Farmers ploughing in the 1950s and 1970s found Roman and Gallo-Roman ware. However, as no scientific excavation took place, the way was open for pillagers with metal detectors. A preservation order was put on the site, but this was contested by the local landlord as far as the Supreme Court, where he lost the case. Although artefacts reappeared at Sotheby’s in London, many have been recovered and are now in the National Museum in Dublin; for legal reasons, however, they are not open to public viewing. Loughshinny just north of Drumanagh was an established port from earliest times, and it appears that trading with Roman Britain did occur, as the artefacts testify. But whether this constitutes an outpost of the Roman Empire remains a moot point. One thing that is not open to debate is that Drumanagh should be the subject of a scientific survey, and the results should be on public display.
Rathmooney, mentioned above, was also known as Bruiden Fergaill Manach, the ancient bruiden (‘hostels’) being centres of feasting as well as lookout posts. There is a well here known as St Bride’s well, which is most likely a Christian gloss on the ancient name. There were five bruidne (the plural form of the word) in Ireland, and these were places of perpetual feasting, the four others being Bruiden Da Derga, Bruiden Da Choca, Bruiden Meic Da Réo and Bruiden Meic Da Thó. According to legend, the god of the Otherworld presided at these banquets.
Six miles north-west of Rathmooney is the village of Naul [43], also known as ‘The Naul’ (an Ail, ‘the cliff’ or ‘the rock’), apparently relating to the rock on which the original castle stood on the banks of the River Delvin (Ailbine or Ollbine). A cave close to the village fits into the story that Máire Mac Neill tells in her work The Musician in the Cave. Here she writes of tales of musicians in caves from Rathlin Island to Inish Maan to Ceis Corann; but here in the Naul lies a tale in the world of empirical reality in so far as the piper Seamus Ennis played his pipes in a cave down the side of a cliff just north of the village. I was taken to this cliff and wondered what those unaware of Seamus’s sense of creativity thought of the music and its source.
Malahide Bay [50] is where a people known as the Domnann entered Ireland, as preserved in the Irish version of the name, Inber Domnann (‘the rivermouth of the Domnann’). As they were a pre-Gaelic people, they are sometimes seen as either aboriginal or primitive. According to T.F. O’Rahilly, they were ‘a branch of the Dumnonii of Devon and Cornwall’. They also had connections with Scotland, especially around Dumbarton and extending to Ayr. O’Rahilly states that their tribal name is derived from the name of a deity, namely Dubnonos or Dubnona. They were also known as the Fir Domnann. The academic Sharon Paice Macleod has suggested in Mater Deorum Hibernensium that they may also be related to the Tuatha Dé Danann,* insofar as the form Tuatha Dé Domnann is often used to name the same people. The Broadmeadow and Ward rivers flowing into Inber Domnann would have been the conduits along which they entered the island. At the estuary of Malahide Bay is a dangerous sandbank called Mol Downey Bank which perpetuates the name of the Domnann in Mael Domhnann (‘the whirlpool of the Domnann’).
Perhaps the most famous person to enter Inber Domnann was Tuathal Techtmar or Tuathal the Legitimate, who was a king of Ireland in the second century AD. Tuathal arrived at Inber Domnainn or Malahide Bay with a fleet of foreigners and defeated three tribes: the Fir Bolg,* the Domnann and the Gálioin. He is seen by some as an historical character who led the Gaels across the sea, gradually conquering Ireland. He became King of Ireland about 130 AD after subduing the aithechthuatha or vassal tribes of Ireland. Some say that Tuathal was a Roman legionary who was supported by the Gaels.
About fifteen miles north of Malahide Bay is Balbriggan; once there, take the R132, and two miles north you cross the River Delvin, which today forms the northern boundary of Co. Dublin and flows into the sea through the townland of Knocknagin. It marks a boundary of Fine Gall (a name for the Vikings), now Fingal. The river takes its name from Ollbine, ‘great crime’, the story of which concerns a king named Rúad mac Ríg Dúnd from Munster, who set out with a number of boats for a meeting with men from the south-west of Scotland. After their ships were becalmed, Rúad jumped into the sea to investigate the cause and he found nine women there, who confessed that they had stopped the boat. They brought nine ships of gold to him, and he in turn spent nine nights with them. One of the women conceived a child and said she would bear a son, and that she would return to them before his birth. The king took the other women to his men, and they all remained carousing for seven years. When they eventually landed in the estuary of the Delvin (Inber Ollbine), the women left the boy behind at the landing place, which was stony and rocky, where the men threw stones at him and killed him. The women then began to scream ‘bine oll, bine oll’, or ‘great crime, great crime’. That is how the Delvin got its name. The area is still stony and rocky. If you go one mile south from the estuary at Knocknagin Bridge and take the second turn left until the end of the road, you will find yourself in the vicinity of five mounds. And this, apart from its ancient associations, is the perfect viewing place from which to see the estuary and conjure up the story of Rúad and the fate of the newborn boy.
To the north and west of Donabate is the townland of Turvey, referred to as Traigh Tuirbhi, ‘the strand of Turvey’, in the annals [43]. The Books of Lecan and Ballymote say that Tuirbhi was the father of the Gobán Saor. His full name was Tuirbhi Tragmár or ‘large-footed Turvey’. He apparently owned all the land attached to the strand. Like Canute, King of England and Denmark, Turvey had a penchant for controlling the tides. Whereas Canute tried it by shouting orders, Turvey tried it by throwing a hatchet from Tuladh an Bhiail (‘the hill of the hatchet’), into the face of the flowing tide. Needless to say, legend has Turvey stopping the tide. Tuladh an Bhiail may well have been situated at Portrane on the hill overlooking the Irish Sea. The present hospital at Portrane was built on this hill in 1898, and workmen digging the foundations ‘found a subterranean sepulchral chamber lined with small stones; a long approach also lined with stones led to it, and in it was the skeleton of a man of large size; the whole was cleared away and the skeleton was thrown over the bank of rubbish’ (Hogan, Onomasticon). Another example of the past being consigned to the rubbish tip!
The Dindshenchas* encapsulates this story in verse as follows:
Tráig Thuirbe, turcbaid a hainm,
do réir anctair ria imshaidm:
Tuirbe trágmar ós cach thráig
athair grammar gú Gobáin.
A thúaig notelged iar scur
in gilla mergech mór-dub
ó Thulaig Béla buide
fri cach ména mór-thuile.
Cían nodcuired a thúaig the
in muir ní thuiled tairse:
cid Tuirbe thess na túag tré,
ní
