The “Mount Pleasant” at Hackney may be connoted with the more famous “Mount Pleasant” at Dun Ainy, Knock Ainy, or the Hill of Aine in Limerick. The “pleasant hills” of Ireland were defined as “ceremonial hills,” and it was particularly on the night of All Hallows that the immemorial ceremonies were there observed. To this day Aine or Ana, a beautiful and gracious water-spirit, “the best-natured of women,” is reverenced at Knockainy, and the legend persists that “Aine promised to save bloodshed if the hill were given to her till the end of the world”.[305] That Mount Pleasant at Hackney or Hackoney was similarly dedicated to High Aine or Ana is an inference to which the facts seem clearly to point.
It would also be permissible to interpret Hackney as Oaken Island, in which light it may be connoted with Glastonbury, the word glaston being generally supposed to be glasten, the British for oak. Glastonbury, the celebrated Avalon, Apple Island, Apollo Island, or Isle of Rest, was a world-famous “Mount Pleasant,” and on its most elevated height there stands St. Michael’s Tower. Glastonbury itself,[306] “its two streets forming a perfect cross,” is almost engirdled by a little river named the Brue. The French town Bray is in the so-called Santerre or Holy-land district: the remains of a megalithic santerre, saintuarie or sanctuary are still standing at Abury or Aubury in Wiltshire, and we may equate this place-name with abri, a generic term in French, “origin unknown,” for sanctuary or refuge.
Near Bray, Santerre, is Auber’s Ridge, which may be connoted with Aubrey Walk, the highest spot in Kensington, and it would seem that Abury’s, abris, or “Mount Pleasants” were once plentiful in the bundle of communities, townships, parishes, and lordships which have now merged into the Greater London: Ebury Square in the South-West may mark one, and Highbury in the North, with its neighbouring “Mount Pleasant,” another.
The immortal Mount Pleasant of the Muses was named Helicon, and from here sprang the celebrated fountains Aganippe and Hippocrene. At Holywell in Wales there is a village called Halkin lying at the foot of a hill named Helygen: there is a Heligan Hill in Cornwall, and a river Olcan in Hereford: there is an Alconbury in Hunts, and an Elkington (Domesday Alchinton) at Louth. An Elk is a gigantic buck whose radiating antlers are so fern-like that a genus has appropriately been designated the Elk fern. Ilkley in Yorkshire is thought to be the Olicana of Ptolemy, and there is standing to-day at Ramsgate a Holy Cone or Helicon modernised into “Hallicondane”. The dane here probably implies a dun or hill-fort, and the Hallicon itself consists of a peak crossed by four roads.[307] This Ramsgate Hallicondane, which stands by Allington Park, may have been a dun of the Elle or Elf King: in France Hellequin is associated with Columbine, and the little figure labelled Cuin (infra, p. 397 Fig. 336), may be identified with this virgin. The Alcantara district to which this Cuin coin has been attributed was, it may safely be assumed, a tara, tre, or troy of Alcan.
On the top of Tory Hill in Kilkenny, i.e., Kenny’s Church, stood a pagan altar: the more famous Tara or Temair is associated primarily with a “son of Ollcain”; it is said next to have passed into the possession of a certain Cain, and to have been known as Druim Cain or “Cain’s Ridge”.[308]
Halcyon days mean blissful, pleasant, radiant, ideal, days, and of the Holy King or All King the blue jewelled King-fisher or Halcyon seems to have been a symbol. Whether there be any connection between Elgin and the Irish Hooligans, or whether these trace their origin to the “son of Ollcain,” I do not know. From the colossal Kinia and Acongagua down to the humblest peg, every peak seems to have been similarly named. The pimple is a diminutive hill or pock, and the pykes of Cumberland are the peaks of Derbyshire. At the summit of the Peak District stands Buxton, claiming to be the highest market-town in England: around Buxton, formerly written “Bawkestanes,” still stand cromlechs and other Poukelays or Buk stones: Backhouse is a surname in the Buxton district, and the original Backhouses may well have worshipped either Bacchus, i.e., St. Baccho, or the gentle Baucis who merged into a Linden tree.
Fig. 137.—Ancient Pagan Altar on Tory Hill. From Sketches of Irish History (Anon., 1844).