Fig. 198.—Dug-out Canoe found near the Crannog of Lough Mourne.
Lisnacroghera crannog lies at a little distance from Broughshane, in the parish of Skerry, barony of Antrim. About the year 1882, workmen employed in cutting turf—bared by the partial drainage of the lough—came upon oaken timbers laid in regular order; unfortunately nearly all were removed before anyone acquainted with the peculiarities of crannog structure had seen them, and in the autumn of 1883, most of the timbers had disappeared, though a few of the encircling piles remained in position. Some remarkable antiquities, discovered either within or around it, have been rescued from oblivion and destruction. A spear with iron head and butt, and rivets of bronze, and the iron sword-blades enclosed in sheaths of bronze (which are now in Canon Grainger’s museum), seem to call for prominent notice. With regard to these the Rev. James Graves says:—“It cannot be denied that this crannog find is one of the most important and valuable yet recorded in Ireland, especially in its bearing on the style and the chronology of the art of that early period when the bronze and iron eras overlapped. The spears have bronze butts, with terminal iron heads, for such were discovered in the crannog, whilst no spear-heads of bronze—an imperishable metal—were found. The bronze rivets remained in the shafts by which the iron heads had been secured. All this reminded one of the ninth century legend of the armourers of the Tuatha dé Danann when preparing for battle with the Fomorians at the northern Moytura. The mode of workmanship is graphically described:—Goibniu at his forge finishes the spear-heads in three hammer-strokes (probably they went through three processes in their fabrication); so it was also with the work of Luchtiné on the ashen spear-shafts, and Creidné on the bronze rivets. When Goibniu had finished the iron lance-head, he seized it with his pincers and sent it quivering into the door-post. Then Luchtiné launched the finished shaft so surely aimed that it found the socket of the lance-head, and penetrating to the bottom was firmly fixed there: whilst Creidné instantly flung from his pincers the finished bronze rivet with so sure and true an aim that it entered the rivet-holes to the required depth, and so the weapon was completed (Three Irish Glossaries, p. 32, Sanas Cormaic, p. 123). Hence, without assuming that the bronze-iron age should be thrown back to the mythic period of the Tuatha dé Danann and the Fomorians, it is evident that in the ninth century there was a tradition of its characteristics and existence in Ireland, and that of so remote a date as to suit the myth of the contest of the gods of light and life with the deities of darkness and death. The fashion of the spears, of the swords, and of their sheaths, prevailing at this early period, when the use of bronze and iron overlapped, has been hitherto but sparingly revealed to us by finds of weapons in England, Scotland, and Scandinavia. Kemble, in his Horæ Ferales, engraves several examples of short swords or daggers, the fashion of which is identical with that now for the first time so clearly shown us by the Lisnacroghera crannog find.” Professor Anderson, in his Rhind Lectures, has recorded the discovery of a bronze spear-butt, exactly similar, in one of the brochs of Scotland; it is correlated by him with the pagan iron age; and in a recent number of the Proceedings of the Royal Society of Antiquaries of Denmark there is engraved an iron sword-blade, with bronze haft-mountings, nearly identical in form and fashion with those discovered at Lisnacroghera.[195]
Plate XXXIX.
Haft of Iron Sword, with Bronze Mountings, from Lisnacroghera. Full size.
The antiquities found in this crannog consisted of a plain bronze sheath ([plate XII., fig. 1]), containing an iron sword (p. [61], [fig. 17]): the haft is represented full size ([plate XXXIX.]). One side of ornamented sheath slightly smaller than the former ([plate 12, fig. 2]): a full-sized representation is given ([plate XL.]).