place between them at Tailltinn, situated between Kells and Navan in the present county of Meath.[1] The gods, defeated, withdrew from the ken of the invaders, forming themselves into an invisible world of their own. They retreated into the hills and mounds of Erinn; so tradition associates them especially with the burial mounds and cemeteries of the country. A very remarkable group of these dot the banks of the Boyne: take, for example, the burial remains of Newgrange, in Meath; of Knowth, near Slane, in the same county, and only separated by the river from the ancient cemetery of Ros na Rígh; of Dowth, near Drogheda; and of Drogheda itself—all of which appear to have been plundered by the Norsemen in the ninth century.[2] Add to these the Brugh of the Boyne, the home of the Dagda, which he lost to his crafty son the Mac Óc, known thenceforth as the Aengus of the Brugh.[3] Euhemeristic tradition came to represent the Dagda and his sons as buried there, and pointed to the Síd, or Fairy Mound, of the Brugh, as covering their resting-place.
The older account, however, which relates how the Mac Óc got possession of it, says nothing about it as a cemetery; in fact it describes it as an admirable place, more accurately speaking as an admirable land, a
- ↑ Four Masters, A. M. 3500, & ed.'s note, p. 22.
- ↑ Ib. A.D. 861, & ed.'s notes.
- ↑ Ib. A. M. 3450, & note; Petrie's Round Towers of Ireland, in the Transactions of the R. Irish Academy, xx. 100-1; also O'Curry, iij. 122, 362. It may here be explained, that the word brugh, in older spelling brug or brud, is usually translated a 'palace.' The one in question was on the Boyne, at Broad-Boyne Bridge, near Slane, in the county of Meath.
