101 Things You Didn't Know About Irish History

The People, Places, Culture, and Tradition of the Emerald Isle

Ryan Hackney, Amy Hackney Blackwell, Garland Kimmer

• Publisher: Adams Media
• Year: 2006
• ISBN:
  9781440517181
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Irish History
• Index: History

Discover the truth behind the myths of the Emerald Isle Forget about shamrocks, leprechans, and all that blarney; 101 Things You Didn't Know about Irish History dispels the myths and tells the true story of the Irish.Inside, you'll learn about:

• Lives of the ancient Celts before the British invasions
• Famous Irish including Michael Collins, Charles Parnell—and Bono!
• The potato famine and emigration (were there really gangs of New York?)
• Irish music and dance

Complete with an Irish language primer and pronunciation guide, 101 Things You Didn't Know about Irish History is an informative reference for anyone who loves the Irish.

Part 1

Prehistory and Mythology
of Ancient Ireland

Ireland is an island with a past. People lived there for millennia before anyone started recording history, and they left their mark on the landscape—standing stones, odd-looking structures, great mounds of earth. The presence of so many prehistoric remains, a lot of which are pre-Celtic, ties Ireland’s past to its present. Celtic culture is everywhere in Ireland, from the stone-crosses in the countryside to patterns knit into wool sweaters. The influence of the Celts is remarkable, considering how little is actually known about them.

1 The Earliest Inhabitants

Compared with the European mainland, Ireland hasn’t been inhabited for very long. Africa, the Middle East, and central Europe have all housed humans for hundreds of thousands of years, and there is evidence of humans in England going back at least 250,000 years. But it was only about 9,000 years ago that anyone ventured to the Emerald Isle. Why was this? One word: ice.

Ireland was covered with ice for a very long time. It had few plants, and the only animals who lived there were creatures that preferred snow and ice, such as reindeer, woolly mammoths, and the spectacular Irish giant deer. The temperature fluctuated, but mostly just in variations on the same theme of cold.

About 13,000 years ago, the ice finally started to recede, and Ireland warmed up. This was bad for some of the larger mammals, which became extinct, but it was good for smaller creatures and plants. No one knows for sure how Ireland’s wildlife got there; maybe it floated across the Irish Sea, or maybe there was a temporary bridge of land between Ireland and what is now called England. In any case, by about 5000 B.C.E. Ireland was covered with forests and full of wild beasts.

2 Mesolithic Age And The First Farmers

These conditions made Ireland even more attractive to humans. The early settlers did not leave behind much information about themselves. Mostly, archaeologists have found stone tools—things like axes, knives, and scrapers. People used these tools to chop plants or skin animals. Ireland is full of these stone tools, many of which have been picked up by amateur collectors.

Flint is one of the best stones for tool making, and the best flint in Ireland is in the northeastern corner. And that’s where most of Ireland’s stone tools have been found—in Antrim, Down, and the Strangford Lough area. One of the best Mesolithic sites is Mount Sandel in County Derry, where archaeologists have found the remains of several little dome-shaped huts, built there between 7010 and 6490 B.C.E. Here, people lived, huddled around their fires, eating nuts, berries, pigs, birds, and fish.

The Mesolithic Period, also known as the Middle Stone Age, lasted for several thousand years. Stone technology did not change much during this time. People lived a fairly migratory existence, moving around in pursuit of plants and animals. Around 4000 B.C.E., things changed. People began to grow food and make pottery. They cleared forests for their fields and built more permanent settlements. Archaeologists call this new period the Neolithic Period, or New Stone Age.

It’s possible that the Mesolithic Irish developed this new technology on their own, but it’s more likely that these changes came over the ocean with new immigrants. The newcomers either conquered the people already living there, or, more likely, they just assimilated them, intermarrying and sharing techniques for making tools and growing food. This assimilation worked in both directions. It brought new things while keeping the old, and this layering was vital to Irish culture later.

Neolithic people built their houses out of wood. These houses have mostly decayed, but their foundations are still visible. Archaeologists have also found lots of new tools for grinding wheat and a huge number of polished stone axes made from a stone called porcellanite.

3 Legends And Archaeology

Stone Age people built a lot of tombs or tomblike structures out of gigantic rocks covered with mounds of earth; this building technique makes the tombs look like big, grassy mushrooms from the outside. These ancient tombs continue to intrigue people today; there are so many of them all over the landscape, they’re hard to miss.

The megalithic tombs were probably constructed shortly before the arrival of the Celts, who called them fairy mounds and believed that the spirits of ancient people—bold heroes and brave maidens—lived there. The Celtic creator gods, the Tuatha Dé Danann, were known to be fabulously good at building things, and perhaps it was they who constructed the tombs dotting the countryside.

Eventually, the spirits inhabiting the fairy mounds transformed into the little people of later Irish legends—leprechauns and fairies and brownies, whose spirits are said to haunt the land.

Many of these tombs are called passage tombs because they contain passages leading to burial chambers underneath the mound. The walls of the passage and chamber are made of rock that is often elaborately carved.

Court tombs, or cairns, have an open, roofless courtyard in front leading into two, three, or four chambers at back. Archaeologists have found human remains in them but think that they might originally have been built as temples. They tend to be evenly distributed about 3 miles apart instead of clustered like graves; generally structures that are spaced like that are places of worship, but there’s no way to tell for sure how people used them.

Wedge tombs also occur primarily in the northern part of Ireland. These tombs have stone walls and roofs; the roof gets lower and the passage narrower as one goes into the tomb, hence the name wedge. Most of them face west or southwest, toward the setting sun.

Wedge tombs are numerous; there are about 500 of them all over the northern part of the country, although some can be found on Ireland’s eastern coastline. The ones that have been excavated contain human remains, and some contain pottery, which suggests that they were made toward the end of the Neolithic period. Labbacallee (“Hag’s Bed”), in County Cork, is an excellent wedge tomb. It got its strange name because it contained the skeleton of a headless woman when it was first opened.

Portal tombs, also called dolmens, consist of several large upright stones topped by a giant capstone. Putting these rocks in place must have been a stupendous effort—some capstones weigh as much as 100 tons. These dolmens were originally surrounded by mounds of earth, and people were buried inside them. A giant dolmen at Poulnabrone, County Clare, had more than twenty people buried in it over a 600-year period; this might mean that only royalty was buried there. There are dolmens all over Ireland, as well as in Wales and Cornwall. The Kilclooney More dolmen in County Donegal is particularly cool—its capstone is almost 14 feet long.

Some of the most spectacular archaeological sites from the Neolithic period are in the Boyne Valley in County Meath. These sites are called Brú na Bóinne, which means “Boyne Palace.” They consist of large stone tombs built around 3200 B.C.E., several centuries before the great pyramids of Egypt. The three main components of this site are Newgrange, Knowth, and Dowth.

People have known about these tombs for centuries; Vikings plundered them, while Victorians hunted treasures there and carved their initials on the walls. The sites gradually deteriorated and were even quarried at one point. The Republic of Ireland has become very interested in its history, however, and consequently, the tombs have been extensively restored.

The tombs at Newgrange are built inside a huge, grassy mound of earth. The stones at the entrance and some of the stones holding the tomb together are elaborately carved with spirals.

These stones are not local; some of them came from Wicklow, 50 miles away, and others from Northern Ireland. This indicates that whoever built them was very organized—it’s not easy to assemble the manpower to transport big rocks over that many miles. The tomb might have been surrounded by a ring of giant stones, though only twelve of these now remain. It sounds a little like Stonehenge, something to which the tomb has been compared.

Inside the mound is a long passageway leading to a subterranean burial chamber. Inside this chamber are three recesses for holding remains. The front door of Newgrange is a solar observatory extraordinaire. When the tomb was first excavated by experts, archaeologists found the remains of at least three cremated bodies and some human bones. Offerings of jewelry were probably once there as well, but these were stolen long ago.

No one knows exactly why these mounds were built. They might have been burial places for kings; ancient legends certainly suggest that as a possibility. Or they might have served as calendars. Many megalithic sites are constructed to catch the sun at particular times of the year, and they are astonishingly accurate.

Newgrange is the best-known example of this. Every year during the winter solstice (December 19–23), the rising sun shines through a slit over the entrance and lights up the burial chamber for seventeen minutes. At the time the tomb was built, the sunlight would have shone directly onto a spiral design carved into the wall.

Similar solar phenomena happen at other megalithic sites. The light of the setting sun at winter solstice illuminates one of the chambers inside Dowth. At Knowth, the eastern passage seems to have been designed to catch the rising sun of the spring and autumn equinoxes, while the western passage might have caught the setting sun on those same days.

The tombs at Brú na Bóinne are an extremely popular tourist destination. The tour of Newgrange features a fake winter solstice sunrise, so that visitors can see how the sun illuminates the chamber. But don’t get your hopes up about seeing the real thing; Newgrange at sunrise in December is booked solid for the next fifteen years, and the waiting list has been closed.

The River Boyne, which flows past these mound tombs, has long been very important spiritually to the Irish people. Legend says that the first occupant of Newgrange was named Elcmar. His wife was Boann, the spirit of the river.

4 The Bronze Age

Around 2400 B.C.E., life in Ireland began to change again. People started making tools out of metal instead of stone. These metalworkers might have been a new wave of immigrants bringing their craft with them, or they might have been the folks already in Ireland. Whoever they were, their metal tools were much better than stone ones.

This period is called the Bronze Age because most of these tools were made of bronze, an alloy made of copper and tin mixed together. Ireland has tons of copper, and archaeologists have found traces of many copper mines. Tin is harder to get; people might have imported it from England or possibly from Brittany in France.

Smiths shaped bronze into all kinds of objects, including axes, spearheads, and jewelry. They decorated some of these with triangles and zigzags, which gives the impression that these objects might have been more for show than for use.

Ireland also had a fair amount of gold hidden in its hills, and Bronze Age smiths used it to make some spectacular jewelry—thick bracelets and necklaces called torques, fancy hairpins, and half-moon-shaped trinkets that they probably hung around their necks. They also made disks of thin sheets of gold with hammered decoration; these are called sun discs, and people might have worn them as jewelry, too. Examples of these jewels can be seen at the National Museum of Ireland in Dublin.

5 Iron Comes To Ireland

The Bronze Age in Ireland ended around 800 B.C.E. Bronze tools disappeared and iron ones took their place. This must have been the result of increased contact with Britain, which was in closer contact with the rest of Europe, where iron was all the rage.

Early iron wasn’t superior to bronze—in the days before steel was invented, iron was ugly and of poor quality. But iron ore was readily available almost everywhere, and supplies of tin, necessary for making bronze, were not. And so blacksmiths stuck with it and gradually got better at using it.

The Iron Age didn’t start all at once. People gradually started using more iron and less bronze. In the late eighth century B.C.E., iron was prevalent on the Continent, and a century later it was widespread in Britain. Irish smiths at this time were working with both metals, producing distinctive swords and other artifacts.

The iron-using people also had horses. Archaeologists have found many bits for bridles and other tidbits of equestrian gear. They have also unearthed miles and miles of wooden tracks beneath the bogs, paths made of giant oak planks laid side by side; these would have made transporting goods by horse and cart much easier than dragging them through Ireland’s soft soil.

The advent of iron is often associated with the arrival of the people called the Celts. By 300 B.C.E., the Celtic artistic style was thoroughly established in the northern part of Ireland. The Celts spread their culture and language throughout Ireland over the next several centuries, mixing their beliefs with Christianity and resisting foreign assailants as long as they could.

6 Who Were The Celts And Kings?

It’s hard to say anything conclusive about the Celts, because they didn’t record their history themselves. They coul...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Introduction
• PART ONE: PREHISTORY AND MYTHOLOGY OF ANCIENT IRELAND
• PART TWO: THE ARRIVAL OF CHRISTIANITY (AND THE BRITISH TOO!)
• PART THREE: PRESERVING IRISH CULTURE AND HISTORY
• PART FOUR: EMIGRATION TO MODERN LIFE
• APPENDIX A: A PRIMER OF THE IRISH LANGUAGE
• APPENDIX B: IRISH PROVERBS AND BLESSINGS