The Morrigan’s hole
I drove across Ireland today beneath quilted clouds of grey. The only other colour in the world was green, and that was drenched in gloom.
Spits of wind lifted leaves onto the car. There was no swirling. From plough-black fields lone crows rose and fell. Above Strokestown hundreds of jackdaws swarmed. On village main streets solitary children walked, hunched, slouching on wet-grey pavements.
At speed in a car a man has no burdens. The landscape is a reflection of his thoughts, the radio a soundtrack. But on the cusp of winter, on a day like this, thoughts are born gasping. I see the plywood eyes of dead old houses and exhaust fumes on the verge.
On the sides of roads hoardings hang from lifeless cranes and digging machines. Improvised advertisements for mustard-coloured shells of housing that lie huddled on empty streets, at wet crossroads, beside animal feed centres and tyre repair shops.
I stop in Tulsk.
Two days from Halloween, four kilometres from the entrance to the Celtic Other World a girl is standing on the street wearing enormous, pink-framed sunglasses. She is alone and still. Outside the heritage centre a woman shakes bread crumbs over screaming ducks. Inside a genial younger woman says:
“The guide is off today.”
“I wanted to see the cave of the Morrigan,” I say.
“Oweynagat, the Cave of the Cats. It’s actually on private land.”
“Is this it marked on your map?” I ask.
“Yes. There’s not much to see. It would be too muddy to climb into. Your clothes would be ruined.”
“And it’s on private land,” I say.
“Yes,” she says smiling.
Down a boreen past a wrecked bungalow to a dead end. There is a padlock on the turnstyle, so I climb through the barbed wire and sink into the mud were the cattle have churned up the field. Two holes in the embankment are the entrance to the cave. But this is not an entrance. It is a hole. Growing above it is a hawthorn tree upon which two pieces of ribbon are tied. In the mud at my feet is a candle.
Pigs of magic come from this cave, and red birds whose breath withers the world. The vulturous triple-headed Ellen comes, and the three daughters of Airitech in the guise of wolves, the last of the grievous company. And the Morrigan. Once a goddess, of war, fertility and sovereignty, “Great Queen”, the crow on the shoulder of a dying Cuchulainn; or ‘mor’ from ‘maere’ in Old High German, surviving in ‘nightmare’, and in French ‘cauchemar’. Night-hag, screech-owl, a cattle sweating monster.
And this was cattle country. A cattle-fattening landscape of esker-ridge grasslands. From Rathcroghan queen Maeve launched the raid for the bull of Cooley. From the next field that same beast tossed the loins of another to Athlone and his liver to Trim.
In every direction there are great mounds, tombs and forts. This is Cruachán, the Tara of the West, cemetery of the high kings, the most mentioned royal site in the old texts and a forgotten place.
In the next field is the main mound of Rathcroaghan. Recent explorations have confirmed it is an unexcavated passage grave in the vein of Newgrange. For many centuries a wooden henge spiralled on top. Posts driven into the ground leave their trace. So do vandals and the information sign in the nearby visitors’ car park has been torn down. Only bumps in the field to explain the place now.
Building a royal site so close to the gates of hell might have seemed like asking for trouble, but the kings of Rathcroghan were semi-divine. Maeve was not a historical person, but the goddess queen of Ireland, wife of the priest-kings who drank her in long drafts to marry the land.
In 1310 A.D., according to the Annals of Lough Ce, Feidhlim O Conchobhair was proclaimed king of Connaught near Rathcroghan… in a style as royal, as lordly and as public as any of his race from the time of Brian son of Eochu Muigmeadoin till that day. And when Fedlimid mac Aeda meic Eogain had married the Province of Connacht his foster-father waited upon him during the night in the manner remembered by the old men and recorded in the old books; and this was the most splendid kingship marriage ever celebrated in Connacht down to that day.
Irish royal sites are often found near gateways to the other world. The ‘Sid’, the mounds, homes of the fairy folk, Tuatha de Danann. They live out of time and space, neither living or dead, just different, and at Samhain, the least Christianised of the Celtic festivals, the barrier drops between worlds; they can die in ours, and a man can hide from death in theirs.
Cruachán is heavily associated with Samhain. Great feasts where held, men fought battles with demons, spoke with ghosts, and made love to supernatural women. The gods whispered secrets from the cave of the cats. The harvest was in.
As children we harvested too, and had secrets. “Go early in small groups.” Households that gave sweets were rare, and word passed fast. The streets were ganged with black-bag clad competition. There were many children then and we roamed. I was a cardboard knight Templar, tatty Robin Hood and a Dinny from Glenroe. Tiring of the black bag, foundation of all costumes, I donned a flat cap, grabbed a walking stick, and feigned an arthritic limp. But the neighbours were narrow people, and they didn’t understand.
In 1779 Gabriel Beranger climbed into the Morrigan’s cave on all fours. He had heard the story of a woman whose calf had dragged her into the cave and all the way to Sligo.
We examined closely, but solid rock was everywhere - no door, window nor crevice, where the woman and her calf could pass;… we joked the country people on their belief: but the answer was that the devil had stopped it up, and this statement we could not contradict conveniently’.
A man who gave up much convenience in his passion for the site was Samuel Ferguson, an antiqarian, who in 1864 found an Ogham inscription in the cave that read ‘RAICCI MAQI MEDVII’. ‘Fráech son of Medb’.
A Connaught champion called Fráech does appear in mythology. His story involves a woman, a water monster and stolen cattle pursued to the foot of the Alps. He ends in a supporting role, in a ford at the hands of Cuchulainn.
But the Ogham was not written in the Morrigan’s cave. It was written on a stone taken into the cave by men of later years. Originally it would have stood on a hillock, like the dull wet pillar of Dathi’s grave, which still stands on a mound near here. The last pagan king of Ireland, it’s held he died by lightening at the foot of the Alps.
All this action at the foot of the Alps. Perhaps it was as far away as could be imagined. I do not know but I wonder. Samuel Ferguson wondered too. All the way to Switzerland in search of footprints in the snow.
Ogham is not the only thing written in the cave. The young Douglas Hyde scrawled his name there. Not just a moustache and a banknote, but also a boy with a knife in cave.
The first President of Ireland grew up near here. His teenage diary records his shooting expeditions across this landscape, there wasn’t much he wouldn’t shoot. Along with lists of curlew, snipe, woodcock and more, are his first stumbling attempts in Irish.
Teaching himself day by day, phrase by phrase the future co-founder of the Gaelic League learned his Irish from the family servants and the diary is a remarkable record of this. In English his father is ‘Pa’ or ‘the Governor’, and his mother is ‘Ma’. In Irish they are always ‘An Moisther’ and ‘An Moistrass’. ‘The Master’ and ‘The Mistress’.
Back on the road, I wonder who tied the ribbons to the hawthorn above the Morrigan’s hole, and about the new Halloween costumes I saw in shops, sexy nuns, hot nurses, and very wicked witches, Made in China for an American Halloween; there are some who think even the festival is a U.S. import. And few children come knocking now. Some years none.
Eleven kilometres from Castlebar, with dreary bogscapes in my bones, I pass more mustard housing among it’s builder’s rubble. A small girl is hauling a tricycle out of a puddle. She pauses. And then she’s gone. The inheritor.
admin @ November 27, 2009