by the invaders. A Connaught account of the battle, contained in the Life of St. Ceallach, preserved to us by the great Sligo antiquary of the 15th century, Gilla Isa Mor Mac Firbis in his Tribes and Customs of Hy Fiachrach, states, on the contrary, that the Connaught men buried this monarch, according to his orders, “with his red javelin in his hand . . . . his face towards the north on the side of the hill by which the Northerners passed when flying before the hosts of Connaught,” This was done, and ever after the invading Northerners were routed, panic-stricken, until at last they made a great hosting and raised the body of Eoghan and carried it northwards, and “buried it with the mouth down, so that it might not be the means of causing them to fly before the Connaught men.”[1] Dr. O’Rorke finds this monument of Eoghan Bel in a cairn upon the top of Knockarea, a hill overlooking the Carrowmore plain, and looks upon the cromlechs and other monuments of the plain as funereal memorials to the Connaught chiefs. It should be noted that Dr. O’Rorke’s identification of the site of this battle differs from that of previous writers, and is chiefly determined by his preconceived notion that the Carrowmore monuments do commemorate it (though it must be admitted that he has other and ingenious arguments in favour of his theory); that one account of the battle makes the whole hypothesis untenable, and that the other account, whilst speaking of the cairn to the king, says no word about the countless other monuments, described by Petrie, “as the most remarkable collection of the kind in the British islands.”[2] By a kind of afterthought Dr. O’Rorke notices the absence of any bronze or iron weapons found in connection with these monuments (“but they may have been picked up in the last thirteen centuries”), the presence of fire-marks on objects connected with the cromlechs (“but then the Connaught men had their camp-fires for cooking and heating in all directions”), the bones and shells of animals met with in excavations (the “remains of the rabbits and
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Celtic Myth and Saga.
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