sovereignty on him. As a result, he becomes a king and is accepted as such. As an old man he is again in a wood where he meets a young woman and mates with her; she turns into an old woman and kills him. Thus, life and death resided with the goddess.
The old woman or hag is also known as the ban sídh or ‘woman of the mound’, and it is in the mounds that the spirits of the dead are said to survive. The term is now more commonly written as the ‘banshee’. She is a harbinger of death and appears or is heard before the death of an individual in certain families.
My mother never forgot a verse about the banshee which she heard as a young girl in Wexford; the verse is as follows:
Hushed be the banshee’s cry,
unearthly sound
wailing one soon to lie,
cold in the ground.
The folklore commission of Ireland recorded many stories concerning the banshee in the 1930s. In the 1970s, a student told me that on his way home to the country from the city he heard a wailing sound as he approached his parents’ farmhouse, which made the ‘hairs on his head stand up’. When he arrived home, he found that his mother had just passed away.
Thus, the supernatural being known as the ban sídh or cailleach has the power of life and death over mortals. However, in time the word cailleach was used pejoratively to mean ‘hag’, ‘witch’, or ‘crone’. With the spread of Christianity, pagan Ireland was predictably vilified, as happens in most cases when one mythology takes precedence over another (one possible exception being the relationship between Shintoism and Buddhism in Japan, where both systems have been allowed to flourish).
FIGURE 1. Sheela na Gig (illustration by Jack Roberts).
One powerful symbol of the cailleach is the Síle na Gig more commonly known as the Sheela na Gig, and this figure may be connected to the sovereignty rite mentioned above. Sheela na Gigs are a group of female stone sculptures found not only in Ireland but also in Britain and France. The sculpture is a nude figure, represented face on, with legs splayed and with hands placed behind the thighs with fingers opening the vulva. She is generally regarded as a stone fetish that was supposed to give fertility. Some Sheelas have holes in them and these are regarded as part of the rite. There are more than 100 of these sculptures in Britain and Ireland, although there is a disagreement about the exact number. At a later date they were incorporated into the walls of churches and castles as a ‘ward against evil’. For a long time, many were confined to the crypt of the National Museum in Dublin, but for the past twenty years they have been put on public display.
SACRED TREES
The main political centres of ancient Ireland were Emain Macha, which could be regarded as the capital of Ulster; Dind Ríg, that of Leinster; Cashel of Munster; and Cruachain of Connacht. The spiritual capital of Ireland was Tara in the ancient province of Mide (Meath), which also served as the ceremonial home of the High King. On a more local level, the most important ritual centre was the bile or ‘sacred and venerated tree’. Under these trees, which could be ash, oak, yew or hawthorn, chiefs were inaugurated, and they were the gathering place for tribal meetings and fairs. Some were cut down as a consequence of the zeal of Christian missionaries, others as a result of intertribal warfare. The influence of the sacred tree was demonstrated by the fact that the greatest insult that could be inflicted on an enemy was the desecration of the tree. For instance, the inauguration tree of the Dál gCais at Magh Adhair, now Moyre, near Tulla, Co. Clare, was, according to the Annals of the Four Masters, ‘cut after being dug from the earth with its roots’ by Maelseachlainn of Meath, King of Tara in 980 AD This date lends credence to the persistence of the inauguration ceremony long after Christianity had taken hold in Ireland. When in 1099 the craeb tulca, or ‘tree of the mound’, was cut down in Antrim by the O’Neills, the offending family some years later uprooted the sacred bile of the O’Neills at Tullaghoge.
As there were as many as 100 local chiefs in Ireland at the beginning of the twelfth century, we may assume that there were many sacred inaugural trees throughout the land. According to the archaeologist Barry Raftery, ‘the bile leaves no trace in the archaeological record, but we can assume that this custom [inauguration of kings] is of pagan Celtic origin, for there are clear indications that it existed in Gaul in the pre-Roman Iron Age’.
How to Use this Book
This book attempts to outline all the significant places in every county on the island of Ireland and includes places in Scotland where the early stories of the two countries conjoin. Altogether there are over a 1,000 locations referenced.
Each location is identified by a number in square brackets that refers to the Ordnance Survey Discovery Series for the Republic of Ireland and the Ordnance Survey of Northern Ireland Discoverer Map Series.
Names that appear frequently in the text are explained in a glossary and are marked with an asterisk * throughout.
Various time periods are mentioned throughout the book and these are as follows:
Mesolithic: c.7000–4000 BC
Neolithic: c.4000–2400 BC
Bronze Age: c.2400–500 BC
Iron Age: c.400–500 AD
Early Christian: c.400–800 AD
Viking period: c.400–1100 AD
Early Medieval: c.400–1100 AD
CONNACHT
GALWAY
Gaillimh, ‘stony (river)’, also Gaillem, ‘the river and town of Galway’ Cnoc Medbha (‘Medb’s* Hill’), also known as Cnoc Magh (‘the hill on the plain’) and now known as Knockma, is five miles south-west of Tuam and south-east of Castlehacket [46]. Although only a little more than 500 feet high, the summit of Knockma commands some of the finest views in Ireland; the hill in the early part of the twentieth century was part of the folklore of Galway and Mayo. The fairies of Connacht were said to dwell in the depth of the hill under their leader Finvarra. The great cairn on the summit of the hill is marked Finvarra’s Castle on the Ordnance Sheet. Knockma is the south-eastern limit of the great plain anciently called Nemidh or Magh-Ith.
Fairy-fighting in the sky over Knockma and on towards Galway was held responsible for the famine of 1846–7. Or one might hint that if something disastrous occurred then the remnants of the fairy faith were somehow responsible.
There are four cairns in this area within which are said to be excavated passages and a palace where the aes síde live. Inside the cairn of Knockma there is believed to be an entrance to the Otherworld. It was common belief in this area that after consumptives died, they became well again with the aes síde.
The cult of the head which I have encountered in a few counties is found in a novel called Hero Breed by Pat Mullen, from Inishmore on the Aran Islands, published 1936:
What it was she saw or how far into the future it went nobody has ever known, but she said it as a geasa on his eldest son that he must dig up his father’s skull at the coming of the first new moon after one year had elapsed, and never part with it until his death, when it was to be placed in the care of his eldest son in turn. In this way it would be passed down through the centuries until time ceased to be. ‘For’, said
