DANCES WITH WEREWOLVES
On foot with the myths and legends of Ireland
For Tourism Ireland, The Times, 2021
Forget the hibernophiles, the neo-Celts, the fifth-generation Americans with a Dooley in the family – anyone who can spell Ireland will tell you it’s an enchanted place. It’s an established fact. For while its landscapes – all those drumlins, eskers and shades of green – draw more than the odd gasp, it’s the tales they tell that cast the spell.
The country is sodden with myth. Here be dragons, yes, but also gods, giants, sluaghs, pookas and werewolves (distribution limited to what is now Kilkenny and Laois). The hills – well, tumuli – are alive with the sound of banshees. Wherever you go, stories clamber over each other to be heard – it’s as if every blade of grass has got its own.
Storytelling has always been central to Irish culture. In pre-Christian Ireland, each clan chieftain kept a fili (Old Gaelic, “seer”), a poet of noble caste whose job was to versify and recite the past and present glories of the ruling class, to preserve their genealogies and reputations for heroism and valour, as well as topographical lore. It was thanks to this oral tradition that a significant body of Irish history, myth and literature was passed down.
More than significant, in fact. After Ireland was Christianised in the fifth century, the filid assumed the poetic function of the outlawed Druids, and were based in monasteries that were centres of learning and manuscript production. Once transcribed, their oral narratives comprised the largest corpus of non-Latin literature seen in Europe since Ancient Greece.
So, all the talk about the Irish having “the gift of the gab” – close encounter with the Blarney Stone or no – is a belittling of the truth. A classic English belittling, I think – fired by a Protestant resistance to rhetoric and fluency that has traditionally saddled the eloquence of Catholics with dubious motives (think smooth-talking Latins looking to pluck English roses).
Dr Bernadette McCarthy, a specialist in Irish myth and literature who teaches in West Cork, has no time for such projections: “The storytelling tradition is part of our identity. It is our response to our history. Always has been. We’re not interested in who we’re not – we define ourselves. In the 19th century, when Ireland was in great difficulty economically and politically, when the Famine hit, those stories were a tremendous source of strength and pride. And later, our writers, like WB Yeats, returned to them and their themes, igniting interest in Irish culture internationally.
“Ireland today is a testament to a people who have held on to their culture – and to the power of the stories we’ve always told each other.”
I’m no stranger to the power of those stories. They ripple through me. And on marathon walks, in the distracted manner of Mad Sweeney, the wandering hero of the medieval Irish tale Buile Suibhne, I have drunk deep of them: I have fished for the Salmon of Knowledge in the River Boyne; met St Patrick and his pirate captors off the boat in Wicklow; and bumped fists with Cú Chulainn just before he mulched the fields of Louth with his foes.
And you can do the same. Though you may want to meander less. In which case, Brú na Bóinne, in Meath, the former seat of the High King of Ireland, is here for you. The World Heritage Site, one of the most sophisticated neolithic complexes – and largest collections of megalithic art – in western Europe, is a one-stop shop for Irish legends. Dominated by three large passage tombs, Knowth, Newgrange and Dowth, which were built before Stonehenge and the Pyramids (some 5,000 years ago), “the Palace of the Boyne” has long been considered the portal to the Otherworld.
Supernaturally enough, the Otherworld is a realm where youth, beauty, abundance and joy are everlasting. As befits a dwelling place of gods and assorted faerie folk – the Tuatha Dé Danann, among them the Dagda, who has power over time, weather, life and death; Dian Cécht, the healer; and the war goddess Morrígan – there’s a strict door policy, though security is said to be more lax during the festivals of Samhain and Beltane.
A half-hour drive away is Teamhair (the Hill of Tara), the country’s ritual capital. Amid this storied sprawl of monuments and earthworks, dating from the neolithic to the Iron Age and part of a much larger ancient landscape, stands the Lia Fáil (Stone of Destiny). According to legend, it’s where the High Kings of Ireland were crowned and if the chosen chieftain were a worthy one the stone would sound its approval.
All of which serves as a suitably circuitous introduction to this week’s walk, the Táin Way, a 40km trail that more or less circumnavigates the Cooley Peninsula, in Louth, on the east coast of Ireland, close to the border. If you have eyes, the peninsula, a happy protrusion of low mountainous country bounded by Carlingford Lough and Dundalk Bay, has all you could possibly want out of two days on foot. You’ll be on natural beauty duty the entire time.
And this is more than fabled territory. Sliabh Foy, the highest of the Cooley mountains, may well be in the tombola drum as the final resting place of the mythical hero Fionn mac Cumhaill (rendered in English as Finn MacCool, the begetter of a thousand bar names and lampooned mercilessly in Flann O’Brien’s 1939 novel At Swim-Two-Birds), but the peninsula’s primary claim to legendariness is… it’s the setting for Táin Bó Cúailnge, the epic of early Irish literature.
The country’s own Iliad describes a war fought over a phenomenally fertile stud bull. For reasons of jealousy, spite and boredom, Queen Medb of the western province of Connacht wants it, and Dáire Mac Fiachna, a wealthy Ulster cattle baron, has it. So she rounds up an army from all over Ireland to help her steal it. Trouble is, the demigod Cú Chulainn, though just 17 and defending Ulster alone, is waiting for them (a curse of labour pains has incapacitated the men who might have fought alongside him).
What follows is extraordinary. The Táin is a fabulously grisly read. Cú Chulainn is a matchless warrior, but wanton slaughter is his forte. In Ciaran Carson’s 2008 translation of the text, we learn that in the grip of his ríastrad, or battle rage – which engenders a horrific Hulk-like physical transformation – Cú Chulainn commits three massacres whose casualties are “beyond computation”. With blood and fire spurting from his forehead, an eyeball dangling against one cheek, neck muscles forming fists, and shanks and sinews all turned around, he dismantles his enemies and builds walls with their corpses.
It’s a wonder that anyone who’s read the Táin would want their cause to be associated with this personification of carnage, but in the late 19th century, recast as an avenging angel transmogrified by righteous anger, Cú Chulainn was considered to be the perfect embodiment of the nationalist ideal by such Celtic revivalist figures as Yeats, the theosophist “AE” Russell and the Gaelic scholar Pádraic Pearse. And after Pearse was executed for his part in the 1916 Easter Rising, Cú Chulainn came to symbolise the republican struggle, too.*
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The Táin Way starts and finishes a little over an hour’s drive north of Dublin, in Carlingford, a small, once walled town with a medieval layout and Viking roots. Though the Norsemen left only its name, Kerlingfjoror, meaning “narrow sea-inlet of the hag”, their descendants, the Normans, were more generous with their time, and the castle they built in 1190, to guard the lough the town overlooks, still stands, a ruin, but stabilised and imposing.
The trail loops around Sliabh Foy, and this section of it boasts a peculiar distinction. In 2009, the area was designated a sanctuary for Ireland’s 236 remaining leprechauns under the EU Habitats Directive. Yes, you read that right. When I was last there, signs advised walkers to “tread lightly” and warned that “hunters and fortune seekers will be prosecuted”. The little people have become their own industry, with tours, a folklore park and a “faerie cavern” carrying their name, and Kevin Woods, “the leprechaun whisperer”, the man who campaigned for their protection, is at the centre of it all. The cynical may argue that you don’t need to believe in leprechauns to find a pot of gold.
The Way is travelled by quiet roads, forestry tracks and open mountain paths, and from high points such as Clermont Carn – which is topped, as the name suggests, by a neolithic tomb – the views are spectacularly good, northwards across Carlingford Lough and the Mournes, and southwards down the east coast. As some wag might have it, here the scenery chews itself. The total aggregate ascent is about a thousand metres, but the terrain for the most part is untroubling, so the moderately fit should be fine. I refuelled at Lumpers Bar, a hikers’ haunt, in Ravensdale, and with the permission of a fellow drinker – and local landowner – bivuouacked by a stream under dense tree cover a couple of miles away.
I was following a carefully laid-out trail across the Cooleys, of course, not whacking a ball with a stick. Which is what many of the top hurling and camogie players do here each year in the All-Ireland Poc Fada Champonship. The stick is a hurley and the ball a sliotar, and the spoils go to whoever can lash the latter with the former harder and more accurately than the competition. It’s a brutal form of golf, with a 5km scree-laden course, bogs for rough, ravines for bunkers and no holes you can’t turn an ankle in. Unsurprisingly, the tournament, which was founded in 1960, has its roots in the myth of Cú Chulainn, who, as a boy, was said to have poced a sliotar from Carn an Mhadaidh, on Annaverna in the Cooleys, all the way to Eamhann Mhaca in Armagh.
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On my last night in Louth, after an early dinner of Carlingford oysters (which are meaty and nutty and have been harvested since medieval times), I took off to Lily Finnegan’s, a 180-year-old hostelry in the neighbouring village of Whitestown (hen parties pack out Carlingford most weekends). You might have heard of Lily’s: Joe Biden’s great-great-grandfather, Owen Finnegan, who left the peninsula for the US in 1849, was a relative of the pub’s namesake, and the now president has dropped in a couple of times, once when he was veep.
There was live music – the traditional kind, with a fiddle, concertina, bodhrán and penny whistle all pitching in – and the place was whirling. Choreographed by Redbreast whiskey**, I danced a few reels, then staggered into conversation with three sixtysomething regulars who had been waiting for “the visiting writer” to quit his exertions. They were eager to impart the tale of how Bruce Springsteen, a day after playing his first concert in Ireland – at Slane Castle in Meath in 1985 – paid Lily’s a visit, and the encore they got out of him.
They admitted to “bullying” The Boss for a rendition of one of his anthems, “you know, a blue collar ode to dock workers or firefighters or checkout girls”. After about 20 minutes, Springsteen capitulated. “He groaned, but gave us a quick a burst of Born in the USA.” Frank, the most loquacious of the trio, pulled a face, remembering one detail.
“It was grand, but it lacked passion. Buy hey, we were squealing like girls. Then I made a mistake. I said I liked Hungry Heart better – you know, from The River – and that I was willing to bet he’d not forgotten the words to that. The great man shook his head. I had tried his patience for the last time.” Springsteen made his excuses and rejoined his friends, but not before buying the boys a Guinness apiece. Smiling again, Frank reassured me: “The craic was deadly!”
It was a good story, which, if the indulgent expressions of the eavesdropping locals were anything to go by, they had been polishing for years. They took joy in telling it – not only in the memory, but in how they told it. It was their greatest hit, an assured crowdpleaser, and they served it well. Bruce would have been proud.
* Éamon de Valera, Pearse’s comrade who came to power in the Irish Free State in 1932, marked the Rising’s 20th anniversary by installing Oliver Sheppard’s sculpture of the demigod’s death in Dublin’s General Post Office, the republican insurgents’ old HQ.
There have been attempts to convert Cú Chulainn to the loyalist cause. A Belfast doctor – and later lord mayor – Ian Adamson argued that Ulster was once the domain of the Cruthin, who were Picts, and Cú Chulainn, a doughty Cruthin, was simply defending his own people against Queen Medb’s mob of mostly Celt invaders from mainland Europe. This highly flawed interpretation, which pushes Ulster’s historical, cultural and even racial separateness from Ireland, never really caught on, though in the early Nineties a wall in East Belfast did bear a faithful reproduction of the Sheppard sculpture in a mural that was sponsored by the Ulster Defence Association, the largest loyalist paramilitary group.
** It was the 15-year-old, one age statement up from the gateway bottling. Triple-distilled pot still whiskey matured in a combination of first fill and refill ex-bourbon and ex-sherry casks. Lemon peel, apple and candy canes on the nose; and dusty tropicals sit with polished oak, fudge, ginger and cinnamon spice on the palate. Finish lingers, dry and peppery, but tempered by a vanilla creaminess. Doesn’t play well with water, which shuts it down rather than opens it up.
