"Ah, well, sir," he said, "if you put it like that, I'll take it, and Tricker and I both thank ye kindly; and you, miss. God speed ye," and he stood watching us for quite a while, as we made our way up toward the road which ran along the edge of the ridge above us.
As soon as we gained it, we saw the first of the cromlechs; and then, in a farther field, we saw another—great stones, standing upright in a circle of smaller ones, with a mighty covering slab on top, grey and lichened, and most impressive. They are supposed, as I have said, to mark the graves of warriors who fell in battle four thousand years ago; but the Irish peasantry explain them in a more romantic way, as the beds which Diarmuid prepared nightly for his mistress, Gráinne, during the year they fled together up and down Ireland to escape the wrath of her husband, the mighty Finn MacCool.
Gráinne, you will remember, was the daughter of King Cormac, and she it was who won that race up Slievenamon for the honour of Finn's hand. There was a splendid wedding at Tara; but as Gráinne sat at the feast, she looked at the man she had just married, and saw that the weight of years was on him; and then she looked about the board and noticed a "freckled, sweet-worded man, who had the curling, dusky black hair, and cheeks berry-red," and she asked who he was, and she was told that he was Diarmuid, "the white-toothed, of lightsome countenance, the best lover of women and of maidens that was in the whole world." And Gráinne looked on him again, and her heart melted in her bosom; and she mixed a drink and sent it about the board, until there came upon all the company "a stupor of sleep and deep slumber."
Then she arose from her seat and went straight to Diarmuid, and laid a bond upon him that he should take her away; and Diarmuid, who was leal to Finn, asked his comrades what he should do, and they all said he must bide by the bond she had laid on him, for he was bound to refuse no woman, though his death should come of it.
"Is that the counsel of you all to me?" asked Diarmuid.
"It is," said Ossian and Oscar and all the rest; and then Diarmuid rose from his place, and his eyes were wet with tears, and he said farewell to his comrades, for he knew that from that day he was no longer a member of the goodly company of the Fianna, but only a hunted man.
And he and Gráinne fled from Tara to Athlone, and crossed the Shannon by the ford there, with Finn's trackers close behind them; and for a year and a day they travelled through the length and breadth of Ireland; and every night Diarmuid built for his love a chamber of mighty stones, and carpeted it with sweet grass, and crept softly in beside her and held her in his arms till morning, so that no hurt might come to her. And there the chambers remain to this day, 366 of them, to prove the story true.
I wish I could tell the remainder of the legend, but there is no space here; besides you will find it and many others like it very beautifully told in one of the most fascinating Irish books I know—Stephen Gwynne's "Fair Hills of Ireland"; a book which I have pillaged remorselessly, and which I recommend to every one planning to visit the Island of the Saints.
There are really more than 366 of the cromlechs, though nobody knows the exact number; and they are the most venerable monuments reared by man in Ireland. The growth of peat around certain of them proves that they have stood where they now stand for at least four thousand years. How the huge covering stones, sometimes weighing hundreds of tons, were lifted into place, no one knows, just as no one knows how the Egyptians raised their great monoliths from the quarry.
There are two most impressive cromlechs at Carrowmore, quite close together, and my pictures of them are opposite the next page. The first one we came to stands near the road in a pasture, and it was merely a question of clambering over a wall to get to it; but to reach the other, it was necessary to cross a newly-cultivated field; and as there were some men working in it, I asked permission to do so.