Endurance by Dermot Somers

Author:Dermot Somers [Dermot Somers]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: endurance
Publisher: The O'Brien Press
Published: 2012-09-17T04:00:00+00:00

GRANARD

At this point, the Táin army was conscious of being observed – an uneasy feeling in the back of the neck. A prophecy of doom was bayed aloud in the camp at Longford, and the war spirit left the troops terrified and sleepless. Groups started up in panic, prepared to flee for home, no doubt, until Medb came and calmed them. Next day, the army headed for high ground – not easy to find, it might be thought, in the central plain of Ireland, dented as it is by the weight of an ice age. But, in fact, the plain is studded with ridges. The town of Granard lifts to a central hill with huge views across the countryside in all directions. There are hills sketched in the distance on every horizon. Enemies moving out there would have been visible to Medb’s army from their camp at Granard.

Fergus, the Ulster exile, chief tactician of Medb’s army, sent a message north to his former comrades, warning of Medb’s attack – a delicate exercise in loyalty and betrayal. He knew that the Ulster army, to a man, was flat on its back. The northern warriors suffered the pangs of childbirth in times of emergency. This was the vengeance of Macha, another aspect of the war goddess, who had cursed the Ulstermen for forcing her to race the king’s chariot while she was pregnant.4

Granard is dominated by a tall church, Gothic Revival, with a darkly elegant spire. A grassy dome peers oddly over the shoulder of the church. It is a prominent Norman ‘motte’, heaped up on the highest point of the landscape. Long before any church was built, this flat-topped mound had a timber stockade around the perimeter of the summit, enclosing a wooden tower. No doubt it incorporated earlier fortifications on this strategic position, and probably prehistoric structures as well. Medb’s army would have posted lookouts there, perhaps a thousand years before the Normans came in the twelfth century.

Today, a statue of St Patrick dominates the mound. It commemorates fifteen hundred years of Irish Christianity. The broken hand and the rusty claw, typical of ageing statues, suggest the iron will required to convert a pagan country and to throw that steep spire skywards within a shout of the ancient mound.

The army of the Táin was about to come under the surveillance of Cuchulainn, the Hound of Ulster. Well might their neck hairs bristle. Born on the Plain of Muirtheimhne, east of Dundalk, he was exempt from the phantom pregnancy that crippled the northern warriors. The defence of the province fell to him.

Cuchulainn’s qualities in the Táin have a definite sense of plurality about them. His hair is of three distinct kinds – ‘brown at the base, blood red in the middle, with a crown of golden yellow’. He has seven irises in each eye, seven fingers on each hand. The sheer force of his role would justify its division among a sizeable crowd.

Cuchulainn observed the Táin journey first from the hill of Iraird Cuillenn, which is Crossakeel in Co.

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