The Old Irish World

by Alice Stopford Green

The fruitful plain of Lecale, defended and enriched by the sea, drew to it inhabitants from the first peopling of Ireland. All Irish history is reflected there. The in-comers of prehistoric times raised the great stone circles of Ballyno, that stupendous monument to a great hero and a solemn worship—none more astonishing in Ireland. On a wide slope, completely shut off and secluded by the higher ground, the rings of massive stones lie confronting alone the eminence on which is lifted up against the heavens the imposing mound of Erenagh, loftiest of the line of earthworks that surround Dundrum Bay. From the time of an immemorial Nature worship pilgrims have assembled, even as they gathered down to our own times, where the streams of Struel pour abundantly from the rock, to seek cleansing in the bounteous waters on Midsummer Day, and at the festival of Lughnasadh or Lugh’s fair on the first of August. The Red Branch of Emain sent its heroes to hold the two main passages into the “island,” and the inlets of the sea where trade was borne. On the northern port, known to Ptolemy as Dunum, where the river Quoile widens to Strangford Lough, Celtchair of the Battles made his entrenchment of Rath Celtchair or Dun Lethglasse, on a hill rising from the flat ground and swamps of the river. At the head of Dundrum Bay, where the sea narrows over a stretch of shoals and shallows to the inner bay, another Red Branch knight raised on a steep rock his commanding fort, Dún Rudraidhe, and left his name also to the ocean tide, Tonn Rudraidhe, whose waters were lifted up into one of the Three Waves of Ireland that sounded their warning to the land when danger threatened, or echoed the moan in battle of a dying hero’s shield. Here, in this place of Celtic legend, relics of bronze and pottery and stone can still be picked up in plenty on the sand dunes. Round the circuit of the bay half-a-dozen ancient earthworks may still be seen, connected with strands or harbours by old paths.

With the dawn of a new age the wanderings of St. Patrick gave to Lecale new memories—the wells which he blessed for the new faith; the wooden barn at Saul where he set up his church on the slope above the marsh along which the highway ran from Strangford to Down, and where the angel called him to die; the Dun of Patrick, or Downpatrick, given him for a Christian settlement on the old rath of Celtchair, where according to later legend he was buried, and where a great granite boulder now marks the traditional grave. Amid the majestic monuments of pagan heroes the lowly pioneers of the new faith raised their little buildings. The spit of land that separates the bay of Tonn Rudraidhe from that of Ardglass is fringed with low rocks black and jagged; and this point of danger to mariners, now marked by a lighthouse, was in early Christian times sanctified by a church. A tiny harbour cuts through the keen-edged rocks to a little strand where a couple of curraghs might lie: and there by the well the little company built their church—a small stone building twenty feet by thirteen, with the two narrow windows, one east and one south, to throw on the altar the light of the rising and the mid-day sun, and the western door for the departing day and the hour of benediction till the sun should make his circuit to the east. The name of St. John’s Point recalls that old dedication, and the early Irish devotion to their special saint, the beloved disciple of the Lord. Across the bay might be seen the austere cell of St. Donard lifted high, near 3,000 feet, on the topmost point of Slieve-Donard, dominating all Lecale, where an inspired solitary transformed the ancient pagan tradition to a new use, that as mighty men of old were in death commemorated by carns on the high hills, so on the mountain a Christian would shew afar the place of his burial to the world, and the place of his resurrection.

Lecale was soon filled with religious settlements and schools. Lying at the entrance to Lough Cuan of the hundred islands, now Lough Strangford, where a busy population tilled the fertile slopes, and sent out innumerable boats for the celebrated salmon-fishing, or for traffic, Lecale was as it were the guardian of their sanctuaries. Close to Downpatrick lies Crannach Dún-leth-glaisse, “the wooded island of Dún-leth-glaisse,” now known as Cranny island; there Mochuaróc maccu Min Semon, whom the Romans called the “doctor” of the whole world, lived early in the seventh century, and wrote down the calculus which his master Sinlan, Abbot of Bangor (+610), had first among the Irish learned from a certain wise Greek. Farther north, some twelve or fifteen miles from Ardglass, lies Inis-Mahee, where behind the boulder-strewn shore and the heavy seaweed thrown up by the waters on meadows and ploughed land over which sea-birds love to hover, past the harbour and the rude boat-shelter cut in the rock, we enter on a retreat where the light seems more translucent than elsewhere, the silence more penetrating and peace more profound, the colour as that of an everlasting spring—a space of wild wood, resonant with the song of birds, where the flowers spring thicker than the grass. There St. Mochaoi (Mahee) raised his wooden church about 450 a.d., first abbot and bishop. Legend told that as he was cutting wattles for his building, he heard a bright bird, more beautiful than the birds of the world, singing on the blackthorn near him, and asked who it was that made such a song. “A man of the people of my Lord,” answered the bird. “Hail,” said Mochaoi, “and for why that, oh bird that is an angel?” “I am come by command to encourage you in your good work, and because of the love that is in your heart to amuse you for a time with my sweet singing.” “I am glad of that,” said Mochaoi. One hundred and fifty years passed as a moment while he listened to the heavenly song; and when the bird vanished and he lifted up his bundle of wattles to carry home, a stone church stood there before him, and strange monks. They made him abbot once more; and there at last “a sleep without decay of the body Mochaoi slept.” The foundations of the little church with walls over three feet thick, the remnant of the round tower, the traces of other buildings on the west of the island hill, the well closed in, the triple ring of earthen entrenchments faced with stone that encircled the slopes of the island like a cashel, the port with its rough stone work into which “ships from Britain” sailed—these still tell of the days when Inis-Mahee was a school of religion and learning for all the district, where the famous St. Finian of Moville came to study. From the round tower the whole lough could be seen as far as Lecale and the passage to the sea. There must have been then, as there was later, much intercourse between the sea-going people of Mahee and Ardglass. For Ardglass was the port of the neighbouring monastery whose site we may still trace at Dunsford. A Protestant church was planted over it in Reformation times; but an old cross slab may still be seen, and from the graveyard there has been rescued an ancient stone font, and carried to the new church of the older faith; and here too an ancient Celtic cross from an old cemetery, of the type of those found at Clonmacnois, has been set over the church door.

Lecale was a rich land to plunder when the Danes descended on it. Not a creek that they did not visit. Their raids were followed by later raids of their Norman kinsmen, when in 1177 de Courcy came marching to the conquest of Ulster, dreaming himself the knight foretold by Merlin, and willing “to accommodate himself in dress, in gesture, in his shield, and even his white horse, to the prophecies; so that he looked more like a Merry-Andrew than a warrior.” The seizing of Lecale and Downpatrick was his first adventure; before a year was over (1178) he had attached Mahee to an English monastery, peopled it with monks from the other side of the sea, and along with Roger, the new lord of Dunsford, endowed it with large tracts of land about Dunsford and in Lecale. In spite of new wealth the spirit and fortunes of Mahee died for ever under foreign rule.

CROSS SLAB AT DUNSFORD.

By de Courcy and his followers the island of Lecale was ringed with castles from the great keep of Dundrum (“it is one of the strongest holds I ever saw,” said Lord Leonard Grey) to Downpatrick at the passage of the Quoile. The memory of one of his Norman knights is preserved in Dunsford church, a grave-slab with a fine cross and sword cut deeply on it, perhaps the tombstone of “Rogerus de Dunsford.” The strong rush of waters that poured through the narrow neck of Lough Cuan at every incoming or outgoing tide, once guarded on either side by earthen entrenchments that may still be seen, was now held by a Norman keep at Strangford; but the towers of the coast line from Ardglass to Down—Kilclief, Walsh’s castle, Audley castle, Quoile castle, and the rest—each set at the head of a little bay, were evidently planted there for trade; and all probably on the sites of older Irish communities. Thus at Kilclief, while Norman cross slabs tell of de Courcy’s plantation, there is in the churchyard a long forgotten tombstone marked with a Celtic cross of the type of Clonmacnois. How many were thrown out to build fences, or to be broken on the roads! The activity of trade along the coast even as late as the eighteenth century may be seen by the remains at Quoile harbour near Down, the custom-house, the great stores, the houses of merchants and officials of the harbour.

In the 106 miles of coast that lie between Kingstown mole and Belfast bay, Ardglass is the one harbour where a ship can enter at all stages of the tide without a local pilot. It must ever have been a chief harbour of eastern Ulster—a port open at all times of the tide and sheltered from every wind save one, when boats could take refuge in the southern port of Killough, “the haven of Ardglass,” linked with it by an old path along the shore. A wall was thrown round the little town of Ardglass strengthened by seven towers, four of which may still be seen; and within these defences a central castle was set on the rocky edge of the port, where boats could be pulled up to the very door. The harbour was the outlet for the trade of the rich agricultural and wool-producing lands of Down, Tyrone, and Armagh, and traffic was carried on in wines, cloth, kerseys, all kinds of fish, wool, and tallow. There is evidence of trade with France in the beautiful altar-vessel found at Bright, of gilt bronze and many shaded enamel, fine Limoges work of about 1200 a.d.

With the revival of Irish life in the fourteenth century, and the gatherings of English merchants to Irish fairs, commerce increased and flourished. Richard ii. gave the port of Ardglass and its trade as a rich reward to the Gascon commander, Janico d’Artois, his bravest leader against Art MacMurchadh (1398). It is said that a trading company with a grant from Henry iv. built the famous “New Works.” Close to the harbour ran a range of buildings two hundred and fifty feet long, with three square towers, walls three feet thick, pierced on the sea-side by only narrow loop-holes, and opening into the “bawn” with sixteen square windows, and fifteen arched door-ways of cut stone that gave entrance to eighteen rooms on the ground floor and eighteen above. It is still possible to trace the line of the New Works, the doors and windows, and the remains of the towers. There seems to have been a local school of art continued from the earlier centuries: fragments of a Virgin and Child of old Dunsford made by Irish hands of Irish stone from Scrabo at the north end of Strangford Lough, broken and scattered for ages, have been recovered and pieced together and set on the wall of the new Dunsford church, where it now stands in its old grace and dignity as the only example in Ulster, perhaps in Ireland, of such a pre-Reformation statue not utterly destroyed. All the churches of Lecale, old men told a traveller about 1643, had before the burnings of Captain Edward Cromwell been lightly roofed, probably with fine open wood-carving, and highly adorned with sacred statues and images.