A step back in timeMayo’s history is a long and winding path, with reminders of many eras remaining today, write Áine Ryan and Eithne Heveran
THE EPIC story of County Mayo stretches back over the millennia and unfolds a multi-layered narrative of a people who were largely challenged by harsh circumstances in their quest for a basic livelihood. It is a story of landlord and tenant, farmer and fisherman, rebel and informer, poet and priest.
Remarkably, this one-time remote county’s geological and physical history both dwarfs and mirrors its tumultuous human tale.
The Mayo landscape is a testimonial to the momentous impact of the Ice Age (circa 10,000 years ago) and its generous gifts of lyrical and dramatic terrain: mountains and glens, precipitous cliff-faces and meandering seashores.
Ireland’s oldest rocks are found in its Atlantic coastline mountains, with the granite at Annagh Head on the Mullet peninsula over 200 million years old.
This same land is also a monument to the extreme exigencies and horrors of dense colonisation in the late 18th century and subsequent decimation throughout the 19th century as a result of repeated famine and an unwieldy political system.
Indubitably, no landscape in Ireland still resonates so clearly with the grey spectre of a poverty-stricken peasantry’s total dependence on the pratie (potato).
In the vast cross-millennial scheme of things, human intrusion on this sometimes desolate, but always beautiful, landscape is a mere 6,000 years old.
Over the millennia there have been Neolithic farmers, Celtic cattlemen, Christian cultivators, pirate queens, rebel leaders, social innovators, visionaries.
The story of County Mayo is above all a proud and heroic one. It stretches seamlessly into pre-history, providing such mythological tales as the Battle of Moytura, which reputedly took place in Cong in the 9th century. This battle for the control of Ireland was fought between the Fir Bolgs, under their king, Eochaí, and the victorious Dé Danann – followers of the Celtic goddess, Danu.
The famous myth, The Children of Lir, also holds a County Mayo connection. According to legend the wife of the king of the Dé Danann bore two sets of twins before her early death. After her sister later married the king, she became jealous of these children and used her magic powers to transform them into swans. They were forced to spend 900 years wandering Ireland in this shape, the last 300 of which were to be spent on an island off the Erris peninsula. There, on the island of Inishglora, they were returned to their human form by the legendary Christain missionary, St Brendan.
This was a time when Ireland had become known internationally as the land of ‘Saints and Scholars’. St Patrick’s pilgrimage, in 441AD, along an ancient pagan chariot route – later called the Tóchar PhΡdraig – to holy mountain Croagh Patrick, and his 40-day fast, confirmed this area’s spiritual appeal and dozens of religious cells and monasteries, such as St Brendan’s, were founded in the following centuries.
It wasn’t until 1235 that Ireland’s Anglo Norman invaders arrived in Connacht, thus challenging the reign of the principal provincial Kings of Connacht, and overlords of Mayo, the royal O’Connor line. However, Mayo’s remoteness ensured a certain natural immunity from these foreign interlopers and it would be almost four centuries more before the Tudor conquest of the country had any real impact on these western fiefdoms.
The O’Malley clan was one of the few Gaelic families to defy this invasion, face down Queen Elizabeth I and negotiate a mutually beneficial settlement. It was around the stormy shores of this county that its most infamous member, 16th century pirate queen, Grace O’Malley (Granuaile) built her many castles and moored her fiery fleet.
Ironically, it was during these violent times that the area of ‘County Mayo’ was first delineated as an administrative entity. The county was named after the Abbey founded by St Colman in the 7th century, known as Maigh Eo, which means ‘plain of the yew trees’.
By 1649, with Grace O’Malley long buried in the Cisterscian Abbey on Clare Island, Oliver Cromwell – the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland – and his forces arrived in County Mayo. They would brutally continue the repression of the Catholic Church and its many monasteries. This sustained cultural cleansing and spiritual suffocation was further exacerbated by the introduction of the draconian Penal (or popery) Laws in 1695.
These laws affected the rights of Catholics to own properties, thus excluding them from the medieval-like political system; they also restricted and forbade aspects of education and religious ordination. It is not surprising that an under-world of cultural and religious rebellion simmered and survived throughout these years; notwithstanding the ever-present treachery of ‘the informer’ or ‘priest-catcher’. The most notorious of these traitors was a man called John Mullowney, better known as SeΡn na Sagart (SeΡn of the Priests), who was murdered near Ballintubber Abbey while hunting a priest.
Whilst the campaign for Catholic Emancipation and the failed United Irishmen’s Rebellion of 1798 followed, the reign of colonial oppression survived into the 20th century. Ireland and County Mayo had yet to face one of its most difficult, disastrous and widespread challenges: the Great Famine of the 1840s.
While today Mayo remains one of the least populated areas of the country – with a density of about 20 people per square kilometre – prior to the Great Famine the population had peaked at 388,887, over three times the present number.
This population explosion was largely due to the introduction of the potato by Sir Walter Raleigh and its suitability for the heretofore untilled, boggy, lands of the uncultivated west. Dramatically, throughout the 19th century, this peasant population, who lived in basic hovels, would be decimated by the ravages of repeated potato blight and the intransigence of the ascendancy landlord system. A laissez-faire political ethos imposed from the British Houses of Parliament further compounded these dire circumstances that led to mass emigration in the notorious Coffin Ships and widespread death and disease.
Mayo’s topography is littered with poignant symbols of this period, with Achill Island’s ‘Deserted Village’ – abandoned in the late 19th century – a particularly moving symbol of desperation and forced abandonment.
With the dawn of the so-called Celtic Revival, the eventual self-determining dividends of the 1916 Rising and the fading shadow of poverty, County Mayo proceeded to dismiss the shackles of disadvantage, throughout the 20th century.
General Jean Joseph Amable HumbertFRENCH General Jean Joseph Amable Humbert, along with an army of 1,100 soldiers, landed at Kilcummin, near Killala, in north Mayo on August 22, 1798. He led one of three expeditions authorised by the French Directory to support the famous United Irishmen’s rebellion. His force of three frigates had evaded the vigilance of the British Navy by taking a circuitous route from Rochefort.
Unsurprisingly, the French forces were quickly joined by Irish insurgents who helped capture Ballina, before spectacularly defeating the British at the famous ‘races of Castlebar’. Ironcially, Castlebar was, at that time, the great garrison town of Connacht. Despite the fact that the town had been reinforced by British Generals Lake, Hutchinson and Trench, Humbert’s force managed to out-manoeuvre them.
By August 31, Humbert’s forces had liberated more towns and declared a Republic of Connacht. He was defeated, however, a week later at the bloody Battle of Ballinamuck.
General Humbert is still honoured annually at the acclaimed Humbert Summer School, founded over 20 years ago.
Michael Davitt CO-FOUNDER of the Land League, Michael Davitt was born on a tiny holding in Straide in the worst year of the Great Famine, 1846. Like many other contemporary families, his was evicted and forced to emigrate. Relocated in the industrial British town of Lancashire, Davitt started work at an early age in a textile factory, where he tragically lost an arm in an accident. The philanthropic intervention of a local businessman ensured further education for Davitt who went on to become an activist in the Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB) and the Fenian Rising of 1867. Three years later he was sentenced to 15 years’ penal servitude in Dartmoor prison.
Having returned to his native Mayo, to a hero’s welcome, he quickly became involved in the ‘land question’. On August 16, 1879, along with James Daly, the Mayo Land League was established in Daly’s hotel, on The Mall in Castlebar. The league quickly expanded into a national and mass agrarian organisation that attracted help from the country’s huge diaspora in Britain and America.
Grace O’Malley (Granuaile)Legendary Pirate Queen, Grace O’Malley (c1530-1603) was the daughter of the king of the O’Malley clan, Owen O’Malley, whose motto was Terra Marique Potens (Powerful on Land and Sea). This merchant, seafaring clan lorded over lands and seas stretching from Connemara (in County Galway) to Westport.
Grace – or GrΡinne Mhaol (bald), due to her unusual short-cropped hair – was first married aged 15 to Donal O’Flaherty, a Gaelic chieftain of Connemara. After his murder, she married Richard Iarainn Bourke, whose clan owned lands to the north of Clew Bay.
After his death in 1583, flouting traditional custom, she claimed Bourke’s entire property, thus coming to the attention of the Lord President of Connacht, Richard Bingham.
Meanwhile, Grace continued to maintain strongholds on Clare Island and at Carraigahowley, from where she commanded her own fleet of speedy vessels, ideally designed for quick sorties on passing cargo ships.
Eventually, Bingham succeeded in eroding her dominance over the western coastline, leading Grace, then in her sixties, to appeal directly to Queen Elizabeth I.
In September 1593, Grace, through the medium of Latin, managed to secure favourable terms from Elizabeth for her clan, including offspring Tibbott-ne-Long (Theobold of the Ships). He was reputedly born aboard one of her vessels during a raging battle, to which she returned immediately after the birth. Coincidentally, Grace and Elizabeth both died in 1603.
The Céide FieldsAs you drive along the windy R314 from Killala to Ballycastle in north Mayo, the lush green fields slowly give way to a blanket of bog. To your right, the waves of the Atlantic crash against spectacular cliffs. And there, in the distance, emerging from the bog like a giant Pyramid, the Céide Fields Visitor Centre rises up. The building has won numerous building awards, including Ireland’s most prestigious Gold Medal architectural award. Inspiration for the shape of the building is said to come from two islands, The Stags of Broadhaven, jutting from the Atlantic Ocean to the north west of the centre.
But the visitor centre is much more than a beautiful building in a striking landscape. It houses exhibitions that give an insight into the archaeology, geology and botany of the Céide Fields and its surrounding area.
It was in this area in 1968, that archaeologist Seamus Caulfield discovered the oldest and most extensive Stone Age settlement in the world. Older even than the Egyptian Pyramids. Buried deep beneath the bog, there are miles of stone walls built in parallel lines, megalithic tombs, evidence of houses and animal pens, untouched and unmoved by human hands for 5,700 years. The Céide Fields measures approximately four square miles, though the Stone Age settlement covers a much more extensive area.
Working through the exhibits from the ground floor to the viewing platform at the top of the visitor centre, you will see how the stones were found by Seamus Caulfield’s father, Patrick, in a bog in the 1930s while cutting his turf with a sléan. There are models of how the houses once looked, and images of how Stone Age lives were lived.
There are panoramic views from the viewing platform on the third floor. Staring out across the Atlantic, you can imagine the farmers all those years ago standing on the hill behind you, staring out at the same unchanged view.
The houses of Belderrig nestle against a hill five miles to the west. To the east is Dún Briste, a 50-metre high sea stack, separated by the sea from Downpatrick Head in 1393.
Just a few short steps take you out onto the Céide Hill where you can take a guided tour around one of the fields and see the round stone walls where an old log house stood. Not all of the ancient walls in the Céide Fields have been excavated. Instead many of the walls have been marked out with posts.
The Céide Hill is the backdrop to the dramatic cliffs and coastline of north Mayo.
Across the road from the visitor centre is a platform where you can view the spectacular cliffs up close. At 370 feet high, and 350 million years old, the cliffs are truly magnificent. The clearly-defined layers of stone separate one millennium from the next. On a fine day, 50 miles across the bay, the cliffs of Slieve League in Donegal can be seen.
The Clew Bay Archaeological TrailStep back 6,000 years to pre-Christian and early-Christian archaeological sites on this amazing journey. The trail, stretching from Westport to Louisburgh, and finally to Clare Island – the largest island in Clew Bay, takes in 21 sites – including the statue of St Patrick at the foot of Croagh Patrick; the pre-historic Clapperbridge; and on Clare Island, the home of Granuaile, Ireland’s Pirate Queen from where she preyed on passing ships.
Using a guidebook, you can make your way along the trail, exploring how people lived, farmed, and prayed. Marked with distinctive signposts, you can choose to visit all the sites, or choose whichever most appeal to you.
The first stop along the trail is The Clew Bay Heritage Centre on The Quay in Westport which traces the history of the area from pre-Christian times. All the sites are amazing, and the Neolithic carvings in the Boheh Stone dating back to the late Stone Age/early Bronze Age are truly special. With a full view of Croagh Patrick, the stone is also known as St Patrick’s chair. On two days a year, April 18 and August 24, the sun sets on the summit of Croagh Patrick, and instead of dropping behind the mountain, it appears to roll down the side.
The National Famine Monument depicting a coffin ship is further along the route, at site Number 7. One million people died during the famine in Ireland, and thousands died on crossings on ill-equipped ships to America, Australia and Britain.
Cairn of BallymagibbonThree and a half miles north east of Cong is the Moytura Battlefield. Dating back 5,000 years, legend has it the field is the site of a fierce four-day battle between the soldiers of the ruling Fir Bolg and the invading Tuatha De Dannan. It’s said that after battle every evening each soldier of the Fir Bolg carried back to their King, Eochaid MacEirc, a stone and the head of a fallen Dannan. The stones piled up to what is known as the Cairn of Ballymagibbon.
Ballintubber AbbeyBallintubber Abbey was founded by King Cathal O’Connor in 1216. Despite many attempts to burn and destroy it, Mass has been celebrated there every day since then. The Abbey marks the start of the old pilgrim road ‘Tóchar Phadraig’ to Croagh Patrick. Nearby is the well where St Patrick baptised his converts.
Round Tower of AughagowerThe Round Tower at Aughagower on the R330 between Westport and Partry dates back to between 973 and 1013. It is preserved up to the fourth floor. According to legend, the roof of the tower was struck by lightning and landed half a mile away on the hill of Tavenish. A local woman found the heavy cap stone and carried it back, in her apron to the church, where it can still be seen today.
Mayo’s archaeological gems include the Stone Age Céide Fields, Clare Island Abbey and Granuaile, the Pirate Queen’s castles
