—no one returned. He sneers at Jocelin’s story of St. Patrick cursing the river Selen, and says the Blackwater abounds in fish.
Sir William Wilde, besides his account of the “marriages,” tells, in 1849, how the soul of Leogaire, the High King, was put by St. Patrick into a hole near the Blackwater called “the short road to Hell”; thence arose a huge serpent with a long mane, “the old King of the Black Rath,” scaring some men who cut peat in the marshy hollow. He tells a rather conventional story of Leogaire sending a savage bull to kill the saint. It is eaten by Patrick’s workmen and the saint, when the wicked king comes to enjoy his triumph, wraps the bones in the hide and throws it into the Blackwater, when the beast comes to life and swims across to the King.[1]
Eugene Conwell[2] was misled, in 1864, by Fergusson’s[3] unsupported conjecture that Tailltiu was at Loch Crew Cairns. Still he notes the remains at Telltown—the Rath Dubh, the three artificial lakes, the “parallel” mounds known as the “Knockans,” and “the Vale of Marriage,” the Knockans being “the Hill of Separation,” where contracted couples could separate by standing back to back and walking away. This was, however, told of Rathduff in 1836.
The Remains.
I need do very little beyond enumerating the remains. They are (1) the Rath Dubh. It is a raised, nearly circular platform, once with a ring, fosse, and outer ring. The last
- ↑ Probably based on the early name of the stream, “Bo Guaire,” as the Boyne was “Bo find” (Metr. Dind. S. x. pp. 33-5 and note p. 481).
- ↑ Proc. R.I.Acad. v.. ser. i. pp. 170-355, and i. ser. ii (xv. consec.) p. 72. Despite his bias he gives all the facts most candidly.
- ↑ Rude Stone Monuments of All Countries (1872), p. 199. So careless are the author’s other statements that he says that Ireland has only a few standing solitary dolmens (p. 224), and endorses the absurd theory of the sixth century dolmen at Ballina Mayo (p. 233).
