The mythological accounts of the peopling of Ireland were accorded the status of gospel truth, even until quite recently, for the same reasons that partially invented British histories, like those of Nennius and Geoffrey of Monmouth, were also accorded legitimacy: they were neat and tidy, and they were religiously orthodox. They reconciled Biblical stories and early mythologies with contemporary situations, and they provided rattling good entertainment into the bargain. In Ireland, the histories served another, very specific purpose: they legitimized the ancestries, and therefore the right to rule, of the High Kings. The key name in the pedigrees was Aithechda (the name is actually a derivative of aitheach, which literally means ‘rent payer’ or ‘churl’) son of Magog son of Japheth son of Noah. More recently, the pseudo-histories of the vernacular texts have also served to support the claims of the romantic nationalist movement.
For the Celts of continental Europe and mainland Britain, we have accounts from classical authors, at least some of which were based on genuine first-hand contact. For the Celts of Ireland, we have only hearsay and brief mentions. Ireland was most commonly referred to by classical authors as Hibernia, although the name Scotia was also sometimes used. The sixth century BC poet Orpheus uses the name lerna, as does Aristotle. Plutarch uses the term Ogygia, after Ogyges, an ancient ruler of Beotia in Greece: the name merely signifies great antiquity. Pomponius Mela used the term luvernia in the first century AD, saying this of the country:
Beyond Britain lies luvernia, an island of nearly equal size, but oblong, and a coast on each side of equal extent, having a climate unfavourable for ripening grain, but so luxuriant in grasses, not merely palatable but even sweet, that the cattle in very short time take sufficient food for the whole day - and if fed too long, would burst. Its inhabitants are wanting in every virtue, totally destitute of piety.
Strabo went even furthei; claiming that the Irish were cannibals, a claim later repeated by St. Jerome. Solinus, who wrote at the beginning of the third century AD, called the Irish ‘inhuman beings who drink the blood of their enemies, and besmear their faces with it’. There is no other historical evidence of any kind to support any of these claims. In the third century AD, a very obscure historian called Marcianus Heracleota reported that he had met sixteen different Irish clans and visited eleven of their palaces or ‘cities of note’, but gave no further details.
Remains of wattled huts found near Lough Neagh have been dated to the period 7000 to 4000 BC. It is probable, from the location of these settlements near the Lough and along the banks of the River Bann, that the pre-Celtic people who lived in them survived mainly by fishing, presumably for eels and salmon, which remain plentiful to this day. They appear to have followed the coastal routes and inland waterways, westwards through Fermanagh and along the Shannon, and down the east coast to Dublin and Wexford. By 1800 BC, there is extensive evidence of their pottery, known as Sandhills ware. The mesolithic salmon fishers of the Boyne appear to have been the first to devise the small skin-covered boat called the curragh, which has the distinction of being one of the very few Stone Age artefacts to have survived in regular use until the present day.
As in Britain, there are many megalithic sites about whose origins and purposes we remain uncertain. The most impressive of these is the circular passage grave complex at New Grange, which lies close to the River Boyne, east of Knowth and south of Monknewtown. Although the cairns and court-graves are fewer in number than their contemporary counterparts in mainland Europe (particularly Brittany), they have generally been exceptionally well preserved. It was long assumed that these megalithic chambers and mounds were built by new settlers, either from Brittany or from the Iberian peninsula, but of the 1 250 surviving megalithic sites the vast majority are to be found north of the River Boyne, which suggests that they were the work of indigenous peoples.
As was suggested earlier, finding a precise date for the arrival of the Celts in Britain and Ireland is no easy task. The Lebor Gabala mythical accounts date the arrival of the Cessair to 1000 BC. Certainly there was in the Late Bronze Age, from about 900 BC, a sudden appearance of new tools and weapons in Ireland; new metal-working techniques included the hammering and riveting of bronze sheets to make huge cauldrons, of the kind which figure so prominently in Celtic lore and literature. However, real evidence of distinctively Celtic metalwork (by now mostly in iron) is not found until about 200 BC. As in Britain, the Celts’ culture was not imposed in one fell swoop on the pre-Celtic natives; rather, a gradual process of cultural and linguistic assimilation took place. For example, it has been suggested that typical Irish syntax such as that found in the sentence, ‘I’ll be after having my dinnei;’ is pre-Celtic in origin, and that while the vocabulary of Gaelic is Celtic, much of the structure of the language represents the skeletal remains of the language spoken by the natives whom the Celts eventually subjugated.
It was probably the Celts who brought oats to Ireland. While the older cereals, wheat and barley, continued to play an important part in the lives of the British Celts, oats were found to be particularly well suited to the even damper Irish climate; oats flourished in poorer soils, and with less careful cultivation. To this day, oatcakes and oatmeal porridge are identified more particularly with the Celts of Ireland and Scotland than with the Brythonic Celts.
The Irish Celts also built hillforts and other defences, known by the Irish words crannog, rath and cashel or caher. The crannog was a lake-dwelling, usually a small artificial island connected to the shore by a walkway. The word means ‘piece of wood’ or ‘pole’ (crann is the Gaelic for ‘tree’), but it is used to refer to any wooden frame or structure, like a hut, a pulpit or rostrum, or the crow’s nest on board a ship. The narrow timber walkways made the crannog easy to defend from the land. The rath was a circular ringwork or succession of earthworks in concentric ramparts; the word rath indicates piling up or gathering - it is used to describe a layer of thatch, and the phrase rath sneachta means ‘snow drift’. The word dun, occasionally found in Ireland to describe more heavily fortified sites, is imported from the Latin dunum, which in turn came from Brythonic din or dinas, as mentioned in the previous chapter.
While we are describing Irish vocabulary for fortifications and defensive earthworks, it is worth mentioning one other important word: sid or sidh (pronounced ‘sheedh’, plural sidhe). The sidh was a mound or hill in which lived the faery folk or spirits. These were not little winged creatures of the Tinkerbell type. The gods, demi-gods and mythical heroes of the Irish tales have the sidhe as their strongholds, and they are places of great power. It is supposedly to the underground fortresses of the sidhe that the Tuatha de Danann fled, and where they reside to this day. Even in modern, Christian Ireland, there remain strong traces of the druidic belief in the special potency and magic of lakes, caves, wells and springs, those places of transition between this world and the Otherworld, and of the sidhe, the underground fortresses where Ireland’s former gods and goddesses still dwell.
If the rath was built in stony ground, especially in the hills, so that the ramparts were rather dry stone walls than earthen embankments, the fortification was then usually called a cashel or caher. Some of these are indeed castle-like. The cashel known as the Grianan of Ailech in Donegal was a royal palace, and was extensively restored at the end of the nineteenth century; Staigue Fort in Kerry has stone stairways leading to wallwalks, and cells and galleries inside the wall, almost like an early Norman castle; and on the Aran Islands, where there are many cashels, stands Dun Aengus, a particularly impressive promontory fort protected on one side by a 90 metre (300 ft) cliff which rises sheer from the sea.
There are some souterrains in Ireland (and several more in Cornwall, where they are called fogos or fogous). These underground passageways, sometimes single-ended like a cave but usually double-ended, and roofed with granite slabs, have caused much acrimonious debate, because nobody really understands how they were used. The most common explanation is that they were places of cold storage for grain and meat, but their permanent dampness presents difficulties for that explanation. They may have been places of refuge from marauding tribesmen, they may have been places of emotional or religious sanctuary, or they may have served some combination of these purposes. We shall never know for certain. The Irish souterrains are found only in Ulster, which suggests that the practice of building them may have been imported from northern Britain or Scotland. Tree-ring dating has led to suggestions that the crannog may also have been imported from Scotland, perhaps as late as the sixth century AD.
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