An Fear Breaga or the False Man

An Buchaill Breige on Luddenmore hill in Co. Limerick

An Fear Breaga or the "Lieing Man" seems to be a fairly common name applied to monuments particularly standing stones that look a bit like a person or "false man".

There is an interesting bit of folklore relating to the name which attributes a different type of story to the name, this time from the Glen of Aherlow.

"Fear Bréige - the old-time sun dial for the people who lived in the mid-valley (Glen of Aherlow). It stands out like a real Fear Bréige on the mountain sky line above Lough Muskery. When the sun is seen from the valley to be directly overhead it, it is 12 o clock noon. (Many a child weary from haymaking and longing for the dinner hour was told to look up and notice that the sun hadn't yet come overhead "fear bréige")."

https://www.duchas.ie/en/cbes/4922274/4866364/5052610

So this appears to have been a natural "Fear Bréige" or some kind of marker that may have looked like a standing stone on top of the Galtees and one of the mountain tops there is noted as Fear Breaga.

On the old OS maps it is marked as "stones" and looks a bit like a cairn to me.

There is also a great picture of a false man from the National Monuments Service here

https://www.facebook.com/563478597003852/photos/a.578592548825790/1711159485569085/?type=3&theater


Does anyone from the area have a picture of this "Fear Bréige" in the Galtees or know more about it?

Could we take all archaeological monuments into State Care?

Part of the hill-fort at Brusselstown Hillfort

There are over 138,800 recorded archaeological monuments in Ireland. Some are under state care, ie actually owned by the state and a lot of these are cared for by the OPW. The vast majority aren't but are protected under legislation under the National Monuments Act 1930-2004 with fines and/or imprisonment. The main issue with the state taking ownership of private property is the Irish Constitution. This could be amended by a referendum and the land taken from the various landowners and taken into state care. This would normally be termed "Nationalisation". It would then be up to all of us through our general taxation to care for the 138,800 monuments and adjacent lands. Personally I'm not sure how easy it would be to legally draft such an amendment without affecting the rights of all private property and it may set a precedent for other nationalisations. It may also affect the confidence of indigenous and foreign investors in the country. Alternatively we could try purchase them individually from the landowners, maybe under compulsory purchase. Some of the monuments such as hill-forts can be huge. For example Brusselstown Hill-fort in Co. Wicklow is 230 acres in size. Therefore if we were to take a conservative estimate of 10 acres per monument to include access etc then that would require 1,388,000 arces. At a market value of €10,000 per acre then this would be €1,380000000 or I think €1.4 billion (if someone can check the maths). I suppose that doesn't include many monuments that form part of houses such as castles or just can't be sectioned out without damaging the viability of farms and estates etc. So it would be maybe a lot more than that! I guess you would need the estimate then for the upkeep of the monuments on a yearly basis to see if it was feasible. Obviously I'd love to see it and maybe a idea as radical as this could be looked at and at the same time it would create a very strong heritage industry with tours and the upkeep of all these new monuments in state care.

The Centre of Ireland

The Birr Stone

As an irregular shaped island I'm not sure exactly how you can define the centre of it. There are a number of places that however claim to be its centre.

Near the Hodson Bay Hotel in Athlone there is a small island known as Temple Island. It seems to actually be a part of County Roscommon. Here according to information at the Hodson Bay Hotel is where a tower was built sometime in the 1700s that marks the geographical centre of Ireland.

The Hodson Bay Hotel Blog also has this bit of a mystery relating to a stone found on the island.

"In recent years, the tower has begun to crumble. It revealed a secret. A perfect replica of an ark-shaped stone boat remained hidden inside the Round Tower. The monks are thought to have originally carved the boat. It is still a mystery why Hodson hid the boat 300 years ago."

http://hodsonbayblog.com/how-hodson-bay-got-its-name/

What exactly that is I'm not sure, perhaps something related to the nearby monastery or something that General Hodson had carved to mark the geographical centre of Ireland.

Another candidate (not far from Tipperary) according to Geraldus Cambrensis in the 12th Century is the Birr Stone..

The stone, which was probably originally located in the townland of Seefin just on the edge of Birr, is reputed by oral tradition to have marked a meeting place of the Fianna. It was taken from Birr in 1828 by Thomas Steele to his residence Cullaun House, Co. Clare, to honour Daniel O'Connell and used as a Mass rock at that site.

It was returned to Birr Urban Council in June 1974 by the Department of Lands. The stone itself of local origin. It was probably part of a megalithic monument located at Seffin, the exact site of which now unknown.

It is reputed to have various markings on it including the cross that you can clearly see in the photo. In the IFC it states "This stone was a huge mass of limestone, marked with a number of incisions in the shape of fantastic crosses and other curious symbols. The people accounted for the number and shape of these cavities; by saying they were the impressions of the thumb and four fingers of Finn MacCoul".

Fionn McCool is literally all over the landscape in this area - In the book, Royal Inauguration in Gaelic Ireland by Elizabeth Fitzgerald, it is quoted that “A well formed, man sized, single shod footprint known locally known as ‘Finn McCools’ Footprint, (is) carved into the rock beside Killeen motte and bailey, two miles west of Birr".

Elizabeth Fitzgerald has since looked at the importance of Seefin placenames in the landscape and that is a fascinating study.

There are a lot of tentative connections in the area that may suggest that although it wasn't the geographical centre of Ireland, it may have been a ritual centre during the Bronze Age.

http://www.duchas.ie/en/cbes/5044654/5029269

Lastly I guess is the mythological centre of Ireland at the Catstone on Uisneach in Westmeath. You know your getting old when the last time you visited it was over 15 years ago. For more info on this amazing site or to get a tour follow Uisneach or see here http://uisneach.ie/history/

It is the reputed burial site of the Tuatha De Danann god Lugh whose festival you could argue is being celebrated today as Reek Sunday. One of the Irish Earth Goddesses Eriu is also supposed to have been buried at Uisneach (under the Catstone). Similar to the Birr Stone - The Cat Stone is thought to be the 'Umbilicus Hiberniae’, ‘Axis Mundi’, or ‘the Naval of Ireland’.
The god Dagda is also thought to have resided here and is linked in mythology to two souterrains that were excavated in the 1920s by MacAllister.

It is probably best known as the location of a fire cult from where the Beltaine fire ushering in Summer was lit. Legend says that the first Beltaine fire was lit here and from here others on hill tops around Ireland were lit upon seeing the fire on Uisneach. 

As a last note, although Carrauntoohill in Co. Kerry is the highest point in Ireland, Ard Eireann in Co. Offaly was known as the "Height of Ireland". Whether this was just symbolic or if people actually thought it was the highest part of Ireland I'm not sure.

https://www.logainm.ie/en/107000

Lurganboe and the Track of St. Patrick's Cow

I finally got a chance to do some more research on the Rian Bó Phadraig that I had previously written about here.
I decided to ask at a house in the area and as luck would have it I found the land-owner who was kind enough to allow me access to where the stone was thought to be. He had heard the story linked to the area but didn't know what specific stone it referred to.

Dermot Gleeson wrote about the track in the North Munster Antiquarian Journal in 1958. On the 1840s Os map on this track is marked "Lurganboe".

He says
"The only other tradition of the saint I know of in the Ormond area concerns not himself but his cow. This is the "Rinne Bó Phadruig" or track of St. Patrick;s cow at Grennanstown in Toomevara. On the ancient road, part of which still remains, between Latteragh and Tyone and just after it passes by the road from Ballinamona cross to Grawn, is found a large stone by the roadside with a depression in it said to have been made by the knee of the saint's cow when she fell while running from the devil"

There are two candidates for the stone one in situ where it seems to be indicated on the map and one at the man I talked to house. He told me that he brought a few stones from the field to his garden many years ago.

With the first one (above and directly below), a depression seemed to be filled up with clay over the years.

The second one below looks a lot more lie a knee depression that could have been associated with the legend.

I think myself the first is the most likely of the two.

The Lurganboe isn't a recorded monument and is likely to have been a natural rock or stone that became associated with a legend and so there is no issue with moving it (if this has occurred).

It is nice to be able to record these stories. Personally I feel they make the landscape come alive and give people more of a connection with it.

Thanks so much to the local man to allowed access to his land and for all his help and information.

Evidence of foodstuffs in Fulacht Fia

There has often been debate as to the function of Fulacht Fia or "cooking pits of the fianna" that are dotted around Ireland.

A new technique that was used at a rescue excavation at Errarooey More in Co. Donegal has allowed what was in "the last boiling episode" to be analysed.

"The lipid analysis suggests that a variety of plants along with large herbivores (possibly deer/cow) were processed within the trough. Interestingly, common vetch (Vicia sativa) and wild mustard (Sinapsis sp.) were recovered from the fill of the trough. Both species are anthropogenic indicators and have uses as a foodstuff in the archaeological and ethnographical record." (Hawkes & Malainey, 2018, 50, Archaeology Ireland, Winter Edition 2018).

The fulacht fia was dated to 2187-1898 BC.

There are records of at least 180 fulacht fia's in Co. Tipperary.

For a lot more information on fulacht fia's

http://ucc-ie.academia.edu/AlanHawkes

Below is the fulacht fia at Drombeg in Co. Cork.

Cloch a bhile, Lough Gur - Royal Inauguration Site

Was the stone known as Cloch a bhile at Lough Gur a symbolic echo of the world tree (as put forward by Michael Dames) or in reality was it an inauguration site of the medieval period?

It could of course be both.

Copyright OSI

However in The Archaeology of Lough Gur pg 334, Rose M. Cleary argues that the Cloch a bhile may have been used as an inauguration site of Munster Kings and later the Fitzgeralds who along with legendary Gearoid Iarla became "more Irish than the Irish themselves".

In 1573 Gerald fitz James Fitzgerald was released from jail following the 1st Desmond Rebellion in Ireland. He made a daring escape while under curfew in Dublin with the help of Rory Oge O'More and Piers Grace and returned to Munster.

"On his return to Munster, Gerald received widespread support. 'His wife met him at Bealadrohid and they continued to Lough Gur' (McCormack 2005, 132). Edwards (2016, 342) records that when the earl arrived at Lough Gur 'he was greeted by an assembly of local landowners who gathered at the ancient inauguration site that stood close by', and that 'with great ceremony he removed his clothes he had worn since leaving Dublin, his "English apparel", and "put on his Irish raiment". The inauguration site may have been located at Grange, where Lynch (1895, 299) noted that 'an ancient line of Munster kings were inaugurated' under the tree near the standing stone at Cloghavilla."

So there is record of this stone as being linked to the inauguration of local Earls or Chieftains and this is likely to have gone back to the previous Gaelic Chiefs of the area.

The counter-argument seems to rest with Michael Dames book 'Mythical Ireland' where on pg 79 he says
"Cloch a bhile, 'The Stone of the Tree'. It stands two metres high, grey,runnelled and lichened, a reminder of the phantom tree formerly revealed beneath the lough at seven-year intervals. The stone is a permanent reminder of the ideal World Tree, for lack of which all the forests of the world fall into danger. In myth, the divine tree has the power to en-green the entire forest." 

Now it does seem that there is folklore related to a tree under Lough Gur and Howard Golbaum on his wonderful website recorded the story in an interview with local man Tom McNamara in 1999.

Under the heading The Stone of the Tree

The Stone "is connected in myth to the magical tree growing on the bottom of Lough Gur, said to rise up to the surface once each seven years. Its moss and liche covered mantle gives it an organic appearance that resonates with the story of "The Green Cloak", as told by Tom McNamara."

https://voicesfromthedawn.com/lough-gur/

However I think there is a "jump" in linking this legendary tree under the lake to Cloch a bhile or Cloghavilla which may not necessarily be justified. I personally had always taken the account by Michael Dames of the myth surrounding the Cloch a bhile at face value (and passed on to many people) but I wonder now whether this was his own interpretation rather than something that was actually recorded in folklore in the area.

Grange Lios astronomical alignment

From 5th February 2015.

I was treated to a beautiful near-Imbolc sunset at the Grange Lios or Circle B at Lough Gur in Co. Limerick.

The Grange Lios is normally regarded as the biggest stone circle in Ireland and at Lough Gur is one of the most interesting and impressive megalithic landscapes in the country.

I also discovered something very interesting from my observations - on the cross quarter day the shadow of the "horned" stones that mark the cross quarter, slowly cast a shadow that almost ends up touching the "entrance" stones. It didn't touch them exactly as the tree and the house were in the way but may have done so in antiquity.

The cross-quarter sunset was first proposed by famous archaeoastronomy Boyle-Sommerville who was a cousin of Windle who carried out a survey of the antiquities in the area in the early 1900s.

The shadows of the horned stones creeping across the circle towards the entrance. 

Link to my original post on facebook.
https://www.facebook.com/MegalithicArchaeoAstronomy/posts/1005090912853755