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FORTHS AND SHEOGUEY PLACES
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FORTHS AND SHEOGUEY PLACES
When as children we ran up and down the green entrenchments of the big round raths, the lisses or forths, of Esserkelly or Moneen, we knew they had been made at one time for defence, and that is perhaps as much as is certainly known. Those at my old home have never been opened, but in some of their like I have gone down steps to small stone-built chambers that look too low for the habitation of any living race.
Had we asked questions of the boys who led our donkeys they would in all likelihood have given us, from tradition or vision, news of the shadowy inhabitants, the Sidhe, whose name in the Irish is all one with a blast of wind, and of the treasures they guard. And the old writings tell us that when blessed Patrick of the Bells walked Ireland, he did not refuse the promise of heaven to some among those spirits in prison, the old divine race for whom Mannanan himself had chosen these hidden dwellings, after the great defeat in battle by the human invaders, the Gaels, or to some they had brought among them from the face of the green earth. It was one of their musicians who played to the holy Clerks till Patrick himself said, "But for some tang of the music of the Sidhe that is in it, I never heard anything nearer to the music of heaven." That music is heard yet from time to time; and it was into one of those hill dwellings that the father of McDonough the Galway piper, my friend, was taken till the Sidhe had taught him all their wild tunes and so bewitched his pipes that they would play of themselves if he threw them up among the rafters. There were great treasures there also in Saint Patrick's time, golden vats and horns, and crystal cups, and silks of the colour of the foxglove. It may be of these treasures that so many dreams are told.
As to the women of the Sidhe, some who have seen them, as old Mrs. Sheridan, tell of their white skin and yellow hair, for age has not come on them through the centuries. When one of them came claiming the fulfilment of an old promise from Caoilte of the Fianna, Patrick wondered at her young beauty, while the man who had been her lover was withered and bent and grey. But Caoilte said that was no wonder "for she is of the Tuatha de Danaan who are unfading and whose life is lasting, while I am of the sons of Milesius who are perishable and fade away." Yet then as now, notwithstanding their beauty and grandeur, those swept away into the hill dwellings would rather have the world they know. One of Finn's men meeting a comely young man who had been his comrade but was now an inhabitant of one of those hidden houses, asked how he fared. And for all his fine clothing and his blue weapons and the hound he held in a silver chain, the young man gave the names of three drudges "who had the worst life of any who were with the Fianna," and then he said, "I would rather be living their life than the life I am leading now."
The name of these tribes of the goddess Dana is often confused with that of the northern invaders who were afterwards a terror to Ireland. And so it was of those unearthly tribes an old basket-maker was thinking when he said, in telling of the defeat of the Irish under James, "The Danes were dancing in the raths around Aughrim the night after the battle. Their ancestors were driven out of Ireland before, and they were glad when they saw those that had put them out put out themselves, and everyone of them skivered."