“For, even the faintest relics of a shrine,
Of any worship, wake some thoughts divine.”[224]
After this transformation, Kilmalloch assumed an entirely Christian aspect; and the monastic buildings that crowded the town surpassed, in their style, anything similar throughout the island. The materials, however, of which those were constructed, being inferior in quality to the Tuathan composition, did not long keep place; so that now, whilst the Round Tower still maintains its bold preoccupancy, the Christian churches exhibit but a pile of ruins!
The dreariness of this once imperial site is a moving instance of worldly vicissitudes; and one can scarcely avoid, when passing by the loneliness of its dilapidated mansions, applying the apposite and melancholy apostrophe attributed to Ossian, “Why dost thou build the hall, son of the winged days? Thou lookest from thy towers to-day; yet a few years, and the blast of the desert comes, it howls in thy empty courts.”
Ard-Mulchan, the name of a village in the barony of Duleck, county Meath, comes from Ard, the high place, or mound, Mulchan of Moloch. And, however extraordinary it may appear to some readers, I cannot but hazard my opinion, that the name of the individual to whom St. Patrick had been sold during his captivity in this island, viz. Milco-Mac-Huanan, that is, Milco, the son-of-Huanan, originated in the circumstance of the family’s devotion to the service of this idol; and if a doubt remained as to the justness of this conclusion, it will, methinks, be removed, when we consider the close of his mortal career, and the unfortunate blindness with which he clung to his fatuity.
He was a petty prince of that part of the country, afterwards called Dalruadia, or the principality of the Dalruads, from the prevalence of that demi-tribe, in Ulster; and when Patrick—in prosecution of that mission of grace, to which he had been deputed by divine interposition; and impelled, perhaps, moreover, by a compassionate zeal and Christian recollection of his previous bondage—undertook, amongst other conversions, that of his former master, we find that the sentiment was not reciprocated on his part; but that, either ashamed of allowing himself to be persuaded, in his old age, to abandon the religion in which he had been early initiated; or marked out by Providence as an awful victim to the prevailing superstition, he plunged himself into a fire which had accidentally broken out in his castle, and so was consumed by that element which he had before worshipped as his God!
Athlone,—or as anciently and correctly written, Ath-luain,—the name of a town situated on the river Shannon, where it is fordable, bounding Leinster in Westmeath, and Connaught in Galway, is compounded of the words Ath, which signifies a ford, and luain, of the moon. The common people still call it Blah-luin, an evident corruption of Baile-ath-luin, that is, the village of the ford of the moon; equivalent to Moon-ford-town. This name establishes the analogy of the Syrian Astarte with the worship here paid to the “queen of night,” and the many lunettes, or gold crescents, found buried in the neighbourhood, are “confirmation strong” of the inference deduced.
The moon, whose course through the heavens regulated the months of the early lunar year, and whose influence was regarded by the ancients, in common with that of the sun, as one of the fertilising principles of nature, and as exerted chiefly amid wilds and woods, at a distance from the crowded abodes of man, had in this spot, apparently, a peculiar claim for her special appropriation. For here the aged majesty of the river Shannon, the Ganges of Ireland,—as we find reciprocally that Shannon is one of the Gangian names, and Saor, or Suir, the name of another Irish river, meaning “sacred” water, belongs also to the Indus itself,—displays its imposing grandeur in all the varieties of sublime and delightful scenery. Not far off is one of those beautiful lakes into which this monarch of waters expands himself, to bask, as it were, in repose, from the tiresome gaze attending the crowded path of his ordinary travels—
“Tho’ deep, yet clear; tho’ gentle, yet not dull;
Strong without rage; without o’erflowing full.”[225]
Lough Rea is the name of the lake above referred to, which, from its proximity to Athlone, gives concurrent sanction to the derivation above assigned. For Rea, in Irish, corresponds to Malcoth, or Astarte, i.e. queen, that is, Shamaim, of the heavens; as Righ does to Baal, or Molock, master, or king of the same; and both re-echoed in the regina and rex of the Latins.[226]
I should further notice, that in the Barony of Castle-reagh—a name, which, though prefaced by a modern adjunct, still testifies its devotion, at one time, to the moon—there has been, some years ago, dug up one of those beautiful plates of gold, shaped like a half-moon, at once confirmatory of the propriety of the local name, and of the nature of the worship of its primitive incumbents having been lunar or Sabian. This relic is now in the possession of the Downshire family.