Were ever buried at Talten,
Until the death of that triumphant man,
Through which they lost their glory."[253]
The distance of the spot from Telltown, the modern representative of Talten, is twelve miles, which to some might appear an objection, but it must be remembered that Brugh is ten miles from Tara, where all the kings resided, who were buried there; and as Dathi and others of them were buried at Rath Croghan, sixty-five miles off, distance seems hardly to be an objection. Indeed, among a people who, as evidenced by their monuments, paid so much attention to funeral rites and ceremonious honours to their dead, as the Pagan Irish evidently did, it must have mattered little whether the last resting-place of one of their kings was a few miles nearer or further from his residence.
It must not, however, be forgotten, that the proper residence of the Ultonians, who are said to have been buried at Talten, was Emania or Armagh, forty-five miles distant as the crow flies. Why they should choose to be buried in Meath, so near the rival capital of Tara, if that famed city then existed, is a mystery which it is not easy to solve; but that it was so, there seems no doubt, if the traditions or Books of the Irish are at all to be depended upon. If their real residence was so distant, it seems of trifling consequence whether it was ten or twelve miles from the place we now know as Telltown. There must have been some very strong reason for inducing the Ultonians to bury so far from their homes; but as that reason has not been recorded, it is idle to attempt to guess what form it took. What would appear a most reasonable suggestion to a civilized Saxon in the nineteenth century would in all probability be the direct antithesis of the motive that would guide an uncivilized Celt in the first century before Christ, and we may therefore as well give up the attempt. Some other reason than that of mere proximity to the place of residence governed the Irish in the choice of the situation of their cemeteries; what that was we may hereafter be able to find out,—at present, so far as I know, the materials do not exist for forming an opinion. If, however, this is not Talten, no graves have been found nearer Telltown, which would at all answer to the descriptions that remains to us of this celebrated cemetery; and, till they are found, these Lough Crew mounds seem certainly entitled to the distinction. I cannot see that the matter is doubtful.
If this is so, there is little difficulty in determining who were buried here. Besides the testimony of the poem just quoted, it is stated in the Book of the 'Cemeteries'—"At Tailten the kings of Ulster were used to bury vigt. Ollamh Fodhla with his descendants down to Conchobhar, who wished to be carried to a place between Slea and the sea, with his face to the east, on account of the faith which he had embraced." This conversion of Conchobhar is one of the most famous legends in Irish ancient history. He was wounded in the head by a ball that remained there, and was ordered by his physician to remain quiet and avoid all excitement as his only chance of surviving. For seven years he followed this advice; but when he saw the eclipse of the sun, and felt the great convulsion that came over nature, the day that Christ was crucified, he turned to his Druid and asked, "What is this?" To which Bacrach, the Druid, replied: "It is true, indeed, Christ, the Son of God, is this day crucified by the Jews." "At the recital of this enormity, Conchobhar felt so indignant that he went nearly mad: his excitement was so great that the ball burst from his head, and he died on the very Friday on which the crucifixion took place."[254] All this may be silly enough, as the electric telegraph was not then in use, but it is worth quoting here, as it seems that it was to establish this synchronism that the chronology of the period was falsified to the extent of half a century at least. Conchobhar and Crimthann were the two kings of the two great dynasties then reigning in Ireland whom the annalists strive to synchronize with Christ, and though they fail in that, they establish beyond much doubt that those kings were contemporaries. If to this we add the fact so often repeated by the authorities quoted above, that Conchobhar was the last of his race buried at Talten, and that Crimthann was the first of his line buried at Brugh, we obtain a tolerably clear idea of the history of these cemeteries. Brugh, in fact, succeeded to Talten on the decline of the Ultonian dynasty and the rise of Tuatha de Danann after the victories at Moytura had established their supremacy and they had settled themselves at Tara.
The character of the sculptures in the two groups of monuments fully bears out this view. The carvings at Lough Crew are ruder and less artistic than those at Brugh. They are more disconnected, and oftener mere cup markings. The three stones represented in the preceding and following woodcuts (Nos. 75 and 76), are selected from a great many in the Conwell portfolios as fair average specimens of the style of sculpture common at Lough Crew, and with the woodcut No. 73, representing the Hag's Chair, and No. 75, the chamber in cairn L, will convey a fair notion of the whole. In no one instance does it seem possible to guess what these figures were meant to represent. No animal or vegetable form can be recognized, even after allowing the utmost latitude to the imagination; nor do the circles or waving lines seem intended to convey any pictorial ideas. Beauty of form, as a decoration, seems to have been all the old Celt aimed at, and he may have been thought successful at the time, though it hardly conveys the same impression to modern minds. The graceful scrolls and spirals and the foliage of New Grange and Dowth do not occur there, nor anything in the least approaching to them. Indeed, when Mr. Conwell's book is published, in which they will all be drawn in more or less detail, I believe it will be easy to arrange the whole into a progressive series illustrative of the artistic history of Ireland for five centuries before the advent of St. Patrick.
