Archipelago

Tim Robinson (nine) | The Gods of The Neale

For reasons not worth rehearsing, when I set out to begin my map of Connemara, in 1979, it was from the humdrum little town of Claremorris in the flatlands of south Mayo. Slightly nervously I wheeled my overladen bike out into the busy street and wobbled off in the direction of the mountains that formed a long rim to the western horizon. The day was perfect April, compounded of sun and breeze; the roads were almost empty of traffic, the countryside very quiet. As I approached the village called The Neale I noticed a small pyramid or ziggurat of nine stages in a field by the road, and went to look at it. A largely illegible inscription seemed to identify it as 'Templum Fortunae' and date it to 1750 or 1760. Back on the road, I overtook a lady walking between two sticks, who told me that she was paralysed on one side after a brain haemorrhage. I asked her about the monument, and she was very informative. Lord Kilmaine, she said, had been one of the good landlords, and had employed the farmers ('such as they were') on building this folly as well as a small round Greek temple visible in the distance. I should go and see 'The Gods of The Neale', since I was interested in things like that. She could not explain what these Gods were, but I would find them, she said, by taking a turning to the left just ahead.

The turning sent me down a little road with a tall demesne wall along its left-hand side, overtopped by old trees. Unable to identify anything that might be a God or Gods, I spoke to some children playing football in a little schoolyard on the right, who directed me onwards to a hole in the wall, which I was able to jump through. I spent some time wandering around the low remains of the mansion, tumbledown outhouses and overgrown gardens, and finally came across a monument, perhaps ten or twelve feet tall, set against a thicketed bank. Three medieval-looking rectangular bas-reliefs were inserted in its frontage; the lowest of them, horizontal, represented a slender four-footed creature, a lion to judge by its curly mane and fierce claws, with a long whip-like tail ending in what looked like a hand of three fingers and a thumb. Above that the other slabs stood vertically and side by side: on the right, an angel in a long dress, facing forwards and holding a small shield or perhaps a book against its breast; on the left a horse, perhaps a unicorn, which appeared to be sitting on its tail and looked to me as if it should have been set horizontally. Below these carvings was a broad limestone plaque with a long inscription of an eighteenth-century appearance, which in this shadowy retreat was hard to make sense of. Some phrases stood out that were given resonance by the obscurities in which they were embedded and the empty-echoing mansion nearby:

The Irish characters on the above stone import that in this cave we have by us the Gods of Cons . Lett us follow their stepps sick of love with FVLL confidence in Loo Lave Adda . the Shepherd of Ireland of his era . These images were found in a cave behind the place they now stand & were the ancient Gods of the Neale which took its name from them. They were called De´ithe Fhe´ile or the Gods of Felicity from which the place in Irish is called Ne Heale in English The Neale LL reigned AM 2577 PD 927 AHTE C1496 and was then 60: CEDNA reigned AM2994 & 64 of Edna was wel 50 CON MOIL was ye son of Heber who divided this kingdom with his brother and had the western parts of this island for his lott all which was originally called from Con Conovcht or Cons portion and his son LOO LAVEADDA who found the Druids was thought to have drawn all his knowledge from the SVN Thus the Irish history. N.B. the smaller letters on the upper part of the great plinth import that it was erected by Edna Loos Gods were adopted by Con and Edna of the line of Heber established their worship there 1753.

Whether myth is the consolidated sediment fallen out from the ceaseless perturbed flow of folktales, or folktales the crumbled remains of forgotten myth, scholarship conditions us to prefer deeper layers to later ones. So, to clear away some of the misidentifications of earlier misidentifications, I add here my findings, fruit of subsequent rummaging in archives and reference books.

Con is clearly Conn of the Hundred Battles, the king who divided Ireland with Eoghan Mo´r (not his brother), and took as his portion the part known from him as Connacht. Heber is probably E´ibhear, the mythical leader of the Gaels, who ruled over the southern portion of Ireland for a year. Loo Laveadda is a phonetic attempt at Lugh La´mhfhada, Lugh of the long hand, in origin a Celtic deity, hero and master of all the arts; he was not the son of Con. Lugh led the otherworldly Tuatha De´ Danann to victory in the fabulous Battle of Moytura, said to have occurred a few miles west of The Neale. Edna or Edana was a poet and prophetess of the Tuatha De´ Danann. The jumble of figures in the middle of the inscription are dates; AM stands for Anno Mundi, the 'year of the world' in the system based on the date of Creation, 4004 BC, concocted by Bishop Ussher in the seventeenth century; what the other abbreviations stand for I do not know. The old idea that the village name, The Neale, is an anglicisation of the Irish An Fhe´ile, the festival, felicity or generosity, is not favoured by placename experts nowadays.

Estate records of The Neale say the various follies were designed by Lord Charlemont, whose sister married Sir John Browne, later to become the first Baron Kilmaine, in 1764. But Charlemont was an enthusiast for classicism (the Casino at Marino in Dublin was his pleasure house, and his main residence, Charlemont House, is now the Dublin City Gallery), so even if he is responsible for the symmetrical form of the monument, which tapers upwards stepwise to a little pedestal bearing a stone sphere (now missing), he would not have approved either the style or the substance of the garbled inscription. The first investigator to transcribe the plaque was seemingly the travel writer and actor Richard Hayward in 1941 or 1942; a unionist with nationalistic sympathies, he dismisses the monument as a whim of the irresponsible landlord class: 'a more absurd conglomeration of unrelated objects never confronted the eyes of man.' In stark contrast, the archaeologist Peter Harbison writes:

The inscription and the whole monument should be seen not just as a piece of romantic dilettante erudition, but also as an extraordinary piece of reverence to the Celtic past by a member of the landed aristocracy in the west of Ireland.

Is it possible then that the date 1753 at the end of the inscription refers to a re-establishment of the worship of the ancient Irish gods by members of the landlord's family? What trace, what presence, might such a cult have left in the atmosphere of this ruinous and overgrown corner? Looking around me, I thought of M.R. James' Ghost Stories of an Antiquary. All the props of an incipient tale in his vein were here: the unfrequented ruin, the puzzling inscription, the premature dusk gathering under the trees. I did not linger, but found my way back to the hole in the wall and scrambled out into the coolly rational summer afternoon. *The above account is an accurate reflection of this curious experience, written in a B&B in Connemara five or six hours later, bulked up with some material from subsequent research. But before I looked it up in my diary my clear and unarguable memory of the episode was somewhat different. Soon after leaving the commonplace little town I became aware of the absence of traffic. The broad, shallow farmlands breathed a disquieting silence. The first person I saw on the road was an elderly man on a bicycle; I caught up with him just as we passed the monument with nine tall steps leading up to nothing. I asked him what it was, and he told me about the landlord who had had his hungry tenantry build it in the famine time. Then he went on to urge me, insistently, to visit the Gods of 'The Neale', the nature of which entity he could not articulate. A little further on we passed a small community hall that, he told me, was named from a young republican killed in 1921 by the Black and Tans in the Tourmakeedy ambush. We went on to talk of the troubles in the North, which were at their most murderous at that time. Recognising that I was English, he hastened to tell me that the history being taught nowadays made the present IRA think they were emulating the old IRA of the War of Independence, which they were not; I was not to think that Irish people in these parts had any sympathy for those people.

When we parted he continued westwards and I turned down the lane he had told me would lead me to the mysterious Gods. The children in the village school playground pointed me on my way; I climbed from sunlight into tree-shadow through the broken-down demesne wall with a sense of achievement, of escape from the everyday net of public ways, into the realm of the unexpected. The monument reared up before me as I parted the rampant vegetation. I took out my notebook and set myself busily to transcribe its inscription, perhaps to disperse the rather oppressive eeriness of its unfrequented and neglected setting. I could only make it out in parts and by degrees, but this much was clear: '. Lett us follow their stepps sick of love with FVLL con dence in Loo Lave Adda . the Shepherd of Ireland of his era .' What exactly did that mean? What did 'sick of love' mean in the eighteenth century? Are we tired of loving our old ways, or overcome by love of these...