King Brian Boru engaged his daughter to the King of Leinster, who came to fetch her. But Brian's wife did not like the match, and sent soldiers to hide on the hill. They attacked the Leinster Prince, and after "a big fight" several of his men were slain and he was mortally wounded. He entreated his men to carry him to the head of the pass so that he might die in sight of Leinster, and they did so, and buried him there, facing Leinster. They alsa buried their slain comrades down the hillside under the stones called "The Graves of the Leinster Men" (see Plate VII.).
Such was the older story, evidently not derived from a book, but now there is an altered version. In 1906 I heard that the King of Leinster came to pay his rent to Brian Boru, and brought a "maypole" as a present. When he came to Kincora, "Brian's bad wife" called him "a sneak" for paying taxes and sent him away, and then told her husband that the King would pay no rent. Brian, in a passion, went with all his men by the short cut under the river from Ballyboru to Rine Innish, and caught and beat the Leinster men. And when their King fell, "badly hurt," "Brian came to abuse him and heard all, and he was very sorry and carried him up to where he could see Leinster," and "set by him till he died, and buried him there." The tales vary on the mountain as to Brian's subsequent meeting with his wife; "he ran and broke her head," says one, and "she ran off to the Danes when he offered to bate her," says another. My uncle's gamekeeper at Townlough said that old people told how "they" dug behind the Knockaun "and got big bones there." As will be seen, the early story is free from all those details from The Wars of the Gaedhil with which the later version is amplified and overlaid.[1] Possibly the original tale did not refer to King Brian at all, as the cairn burial seems to date it long before 1014.[2]
In 1889 it was related at Killaloe and O'Brien's Bridge that Brian Boru broke down the curious half-rebuilt O'Brien's Bridge to escape from the hot pursuit of a great Danish army from Limerick. The stone-vaulted romanesque church beside the Cathedral of St. Flannan was said to be "Brian Boru's vault," and the far later richly-carved doorway of the older Cathedral was said
