Ireland's Forgotten Past

A History of the Overlooked and Disremembered

Turtle Bunbury

• Publisher: Thames and Hudson Ltd
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN: 9780500775363
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Irish History
• Index: History

Why did the Romans never try to conquer Ireland? Why did the King of Spain give his name to an Irish county? And how did brandy change the course of Irish history? Turtle Bunbury explores unexpected corners of the past to offer an informative and entertaining glimpse into 36 lesser-known tales from Irish history, from the eruption of a massive volcano in County Armagh sixty million years ago to more recent events that have made Ireland the vibrant place it is today. In his inimitable sparkly style, Bunbury explores the people and events from high to low that played major roles in Irelands fascinating past but have since been overlooked. These alternative annals include tales of spymasters and scientists, battlefields and brothels, tailors and traitors. Irelands Forgotten Past paints a surprising, witty and engaging new portrait of an Ireland you thought you knew.

1 Of Tetrapods & Volcanic Rings

Should you ever find yourself on Valentia Island off the coast of County Kerry, you might venture to its northern shore in pursuit of a fossilized trackway, unwittingly imprinted for eternity by a Devonian tetrapod that pitter-pattered upon this planet 385 million years ago. The footprints of that 1-m (3¼-ft)-long creature are among the oldest fossils in Ireland but just in case you think this four-legged beauty sounds like a dinosaur, please observe that it lived 150 million years before the dinosaurs.

Fast forward to about 66 million years ago when a giant asteroid, perhaps 15 km (9 miles) in diameter, slammed into the Earth and wiped out approximately three-quarters of the known animal and plant kingdom, including all non-avian dinosaurs. That astral cataclysm spelled the end of what’s called the Cretaceous period and the start of the Palaeogene period, at which point Ireland was hovering on a latitude roughly equivalent to where Portugal sits today. As such, the island was in pole position for the considerable turbulence that befell the world when, five million years into the Palaeogene, the North Atlantic Ocean was born.

The ocean’s birth was a long-drawn-out affair. In Ireland, it was marked by the eruption of the Antrim basalts (which created the Giant’s Causeway) and a swell of scorching hot magma gushing across the Mountains of Mourne. Its legacy can clearly be seen at the Ring of Gullion in County Armagh, through which enormous numbers of people drive on the Dublin to Belfast road every day. The ring measures 11 km (7 miles) in diameter and covers more than 15,000 hectares (37,000 acres). Its huge rocks are the remnants of a massive volcanic caldera that collapsed, as calderas are wont to do. Simultaneously, layer upon layer of magma intruded into the heart of the volcano itself to form Slieve Gullion (576 m/1,890 ft), now the highest peak in County Armagh.

Attempts to grapple with all this shape-shifting geology are complicated by the miscellaneous glaciers that left their mark during the ensuing Ice Age; numerous glaciations eroded the region’s weaker sediments, leaving the hard volcanic rocks of the Ring of Gullion and Slieve Gullion standing sturdy and proud. A geological fault running through the low ground between the ring and the north of Slieve Gullion became a glacial ribbon lake, now known as Cam Lough.

In the Celtic legends, the warrior Fionn mac Cumhaill is tricked into diving into another of Slieve Gullion’s lakes by the Cailleach Bhéara (the Hag of Beara); the moment his muscular torso hits the water, he is transformed into a weak and withered old man. At length, he guzzles an antidote and is restored to full strength but his hair remains white ever after. Such fabulous tales gather added kudos when one visits the five-thousand-year-old passage tomb near the Hag’s Lake; aligned with the setting sun on the winter solstice, this is the highest such tomb in Ireland.

And just in case you’re starting to think five thousand years is a very long time ago, it is, in fact, only 0.001 per cent of the 385 million years that have passed since that Valentia tetrapod took a stroll.

2 It Starts with a Bear

Somewhere in the region of 12,800 years ago, a hunter in County Clare confronted a big brown bear with a sharp stone flint. Having won the battle, the hunter dragged the bear into a cave near present-day Ennis where he or she began butchering the beast, stripping the meat and smashing the bones to access its high-protein marrow. At least, that’s one conceivable explanation for a surviving bear patella – or kneecap – found in the aforesaid cave. A series of lopsided, man-made cuts on that patella are presently regarded as the earliest conclusive evidence of mankind in Ireland.

The Palaeolithic bear hunter must have been among the first humans to take advantage of the melting waters that freed up the lands of northern Europe after an Ice Age that had lasted nearly 100,000 years. The rising sea levels created the island of Ireland as a separate entity to Britain and the rest of western Europe.

Nearly three thousand winters after the death of the bear, a band of humans made a clearing in a primitive forest between Creadan Head and Dunmore East in County Waterford. They constructed what is believed to be the oldest settlement in Ireland; thousands of stone knives, scrapers and tiny blades made from chert pebbles have been found at the site. At about this time, similar settlements sprang up at Ballyferriter, near Dingle, County Kerry, and at Mount Sandel, near Coleraine, County Derry.

Our knowledge of what Ireland was like during the Mesolithic period remains profoundly vague. These people were shorter than us, and shorter-lived, too, with lifespans perhaps half the length of our own. They may have been dark-skinned and blue-eyed, like England’s ten-thousand-year-old Cheddar Man is thought to have been. They would have spoken their own fully-fledged language, incomprehensible to modern ears. Excavations at Mount Sandel suggest they lived in egg-shaped, dome-roofed structures, constructed of timber posts, saplings, hide, bark, thatch and reeds. Perhaps a dozen people could comfortably fit into each hut; the inhabitants snoozed around a central hearth that afforded them a holy trinity of heat, light and a place to cook. The flint-smith was of pivotal importance, crafting arrowheads, hide scrapers and spears with razor-sharp blades, as well as polished stone picks and axes.

Women played a key role in the quest for food. During the summer, these plucky souls foraged for crab apples, lily seeds, berries and protein-rich hazelnuts that could be kept in storage for the leaner months. Taking to the water in dug-out log canoes, they trapped and speared the migrating salmon, sea bass, plaice, flounder and autumnal eel that swam in and around the estuaries and coastline; the fish were smoked or dried on wooden racks just beside their huts.

In the cold, wet winters, Mesolithic people fed on wild pigs, hares and other edible animals, as well as birds such as wood pigeon, teal and mallard. Eagle bones found at Mount Sandel are thought to indicate a fashionable fancy for eagle feathers in clothing and headdresses rather than a passion for eagle meat; traces of red ochre on flint blades suggest that they also liked to paint their bodies in times of ceremony.

There were other Mesolithic communities in Ireland, primarily along the coast of northern Ulster, as well as the Blackwater Valley in the south. Still more people settled on the shores of Galway Bay, where they evidently had a soft spot for limpets. Ireland’s oldest-known graveyard is a Mesolithic burial pit near the River Shannon at Hermitage, County Limerick, where the efficient cremation of two bodies perhaps 9,500 years ago indicates that the funeral party were no strangers to such procedures.

It is no surprise that the population stuck to the coast and rivers, given that the interior of Ireland at this time was effectively an impenetrable forest; a squirrel could apparently swing from tree to tree from Malin Head, on the northernmost coast of County Donegal, all the way down to Mizen Head on the southernmost tip of County Cork, without ever touching the ground. That said, some hunters made it inland as far as Boora Bog in County Offaly where there is yet more archaeological evidence of humans chopping up animals and fish with axes and flint nine millennia ago.

Life in Mesolithic Ireland appears to have continued undisturbed, generation after generation, for several thousand years. Our knowledge of this epoch of early humanity in Ireland is wreathed in emptiness and speculation. Estimates of the island’s peak population vary from 3,000 to as high as 40,000. In any event, the age was to come to an end with the arrival of the first Neolithic settlers almost six thousand years ago. The fate of the Mesolithic inhabitants is unclear but they were almost certainly either displaced or assimilated by the highly driven and intriguing newcomers.

3 Neolithic Stargazers

Just outside the town of Carlow stands a work of immense human ingenuity and antiquity. Known as the Brownshill Dolmen, this burial tomb comprises two hefty, sculpted boulders standing upright, atop of which tilts a massive, weather-beaten granite slab that is estimated to weigh a whopping 103 tonnes: that’s about the same as seventeen fully grown Indian elephants or a Boeing 757 jet. If the All Blacks and the Lions rugby teams were to unite with the hundred strongest National Football League players from the USA, they would struggle to nudge the Brownshill capstone by an inch. How they managed to elevate that formidable slab remains a mystery but archaeologists believe that Brownshill and the other 180 or so portal tombs in Ireland were probably created by a combination of beefy humans and brawny oxen, working with timber sledges greased with lard or tallow, as well as rolling trunks, earth ramps, knotted ropes, levers, counterweights and pivots.

Although the site has not yet been excavated, the Brownshill Dolmen is thought to have been created in about 3900 BC. Dolmens are a type of megalith (from the Greek for ‘large stones’), of which at least fifteen hundred were constructed across Ireland during what is known as the Neolithic period. Limited excavations carried out to date have yielded human bones, both burnt and unsullied, as well as decorated pottery, beads, bone pins and flints. These were clearly burial tombs built by a people who cremated and then venerated their dead.

In 2019, scientists published their findings after a genetic analysis of teeth belonging to eleven individuals found in two tombs at Carrowmore, Ireland’s oldest Neolithic complex, on the Cúil Irra peninsula in County Sligo. The results revealed that those buried within were from the same family and predominantly male, and that the tombs may have been used for at least twelve generations.

While some megaliths clearly served as family mausoleums, many were also brilliantly designed with one eye on solar or lunar events taking place in the skies above. In other words, they doubled up as the world’s first clocks – elaborate sundials that enabled these budding farmers to keep track of time. Some were aligned with the spring equinox, the start of the sowing season, or the autumnal equinox, when the harvest is traditionally complete. Yet more were designed to show the halfway point between solstices and equinoxes, providing the four cross-quarter days of Imbolg (February), Beltane (May), Lughnasa (August) and Samhain (November), while others appear to be attuned to the eight-year cycle of Venus or to the three stars of Orion’s Belt, one of the principal indicators of the solstices. Some were modestly harmonized to reflect relationships with other sacred monuments or natural topographical features in the vicinity.

The Neolithic pièce de résistance is at Newgrange in County Meath where an astounding underground burial chamber is tucked inside a man-made mound of 200,000 tonnes of earth and loose stones. Every 21 December, or winter solstice, the rising sun shoots its rays down an 18.8-m (61¾-ft)-long, damp-proofed passageway into a chamber where it triumphantly strikes a triple-spiral motif on the back wall, illuminating the entire space for the next fourteen minutes. Cloudy mornings aside, it has achieved this feat without fail for approximately 5,200 solstices in a row.

As well as megaliths, there are at least 187 surviving stone circles in Ireland, although untold numbers have been destroyed over the past millennia. For instance, the thirty monuments that stand at Carrowmore today represent less than half the number counted in a survey of the area in 1837. Not all of these stone circles were constructed in the Neolithic period, some hail from the Bronze Age. Although their purpose appears to have been primarily ceremonial or funerary, the monuments often indicate a keen astronomical awareness. Others are reputedly aligned with ley lines, the mysterious energy channels that are said to criss-cross the globe.

The architects of these cosmological masterpieces arrived from afar early in the 4th millennium BC and dominated much of the Irish landscape until their disappearance shortly before 2000 BC. Sadly, we know precious little about them save that they were skilled farmers with a profound knowledge of astronomy and engineering, as well as a deep commitment to the afterlife. They are thought to have come from Galicia in Spain or from Brittany in France; both landscapes are also liberally spotted with megaliths. They were predominantly olive-skinned and dark-haired, not unlike present-day Sardinians, and lived in huts constructed with timber beams, finely woven wood (wattle) and dried mud (daub).

You would not want to pick a fight with someone from the Neolithic Age. A scientific analysis of arm bones belonging to Neolithic women from central Europe indicated that they were between 11 and 16 per cent more muscular than Cambridge University’s female rowing crews. These women came of age in the wake of an agricultural revolution that began in places such as the Fertile Crescent of the Middle East ten thousand years ago and gradually inched its way across Europe.

The Neolithic people who populated Ireland had acquire...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• About the Author
• Other Titles Of Interest
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1. Of Tetrapods & Volcanic Rings
• 2. It Starts with a Bear
• 3. Neolithic Stargazers
• 4. The Bell Beakers
• 5. The Bog Toghers
• 6. Roman Hibernia
• 7. Pagan Christians & Holy Wells
• 8. High Crosses of the Kingdom of Ossory
• 9. The Uí Dúnlainge Kings of Leinster
• 10. Sitric Silkbeard & Queen Gormflaith
• 11. The Knights Templar of Ireland
• 12. Rohesia’s Castle
• 13. Great Scot: Edward the Bruce’s Invasion of Ireland
• 14. Prince Lionel Comes to Carlow
• 15. Great Pretenders & Warring Roses
• 16. The Midland Shires
• 17. Sir William Stanley, Public Enemy No. 1
• 18. Rise & Fall: The Maguires of Fermanagh
• 19. Cromwell’s Tailor
• 20. The Byerley Turk: A Warhorse on the Boyne
• 21. The Lixnaw Project
• 22. Joshua Dawson, Spymaster
• 23. Lord Rosse & the Hell-Fire Club
• 24. The Butcher’s Column
• 25. Peg Plunkett, Queen of Vice
• 26. The Cherokee Club
• 27. Gold Fever in Avoca
• 28. Medicinal Springs
• 29. The Night of the Big Wind
• 30. The Crimean Banquet
• 31. The Prince of Wales & the Curragh Wren
• 32. John Henry Foley, Sculptor of an Empire
• 33. Bloody Balfour’s Kindly Deeds
• 34. Queen Victoria’s Dublin Visit, 1900
• 35. Killer Gas in the Great War
• 36. Operation Shamrock
• Epilogue: The Power of Remembrance
• Bibliography
• Acknowledgments
• Index
• Copyright