A History of Ireland in 100 Objects

by Fintan O'Toole

  But that plenty depended on the reign of the ‘proper’ king. Eamonn Kelly of the National Museum speculates that the cauldron may have been associated with a ritual for the choice of a new king, in which a bull was sacrificed. In his view, the cauldron is best understood in association with two other kinds of objects from the same period that also feature in the huge hoard found at Dowris, Co. Offaly: bronze horns that, when blown, produce ‘a deep bass note, resembling the bellowing of a bull’; and so-called crotals, pear-shaped bronze objects that look like hand grenades but were perhaps meant to represent the bull’s scrotum. We cannot know for sure whether the cauldron was indeed part of a coherent bull cult, but it is reasonable to see such cauldrons as aristocratic possessions that were put to periodic use. Moreover, the fact that so many have been recovered as single deposits in bogs may indicate a special ceremonial significance.

  What is clear is that the practice of using bronze feasting equipment belongs to a widespread central and western European Bronze Age elite fashion. The distribution of such prestigious items as cauldrons, and of swords, shields, personal ornaments and a range of other metal artefacts, shows strong interaction between the aristocratic elements of various European communities, and how elite fashions travelled among them. These are only the most visible expression of inter-relationships that must also have included the movement of less durable items. This Later Bronze Age ferment of activity and the frequent contacts it implies may well be one of the elements in the evolution of a common ‘Celtic’ language. And for all of these elites, the cauldron expressed the double nature of kingship. It unites ritual power with the most basic fact of life: the need to eat. A ruler who cannot guarantee the one has no right to claim the other.

  14. Iron spearhead, 800–675 BC

  The past is unpredictable. This iron spearhead, found in the River Inny at Lackan in Co. Westmeath, is of a kind familiar enough from the Ireland of ad 500. Andy Halpin of the National Museum says that it ‘would not be out of place in the early-mediaeval period…When you think of the Iron Age legends of Cúchulainn, this is the type of weapon that people think of them carrying’. The problem is that recent radiocarbon dating of the remains of its wooden shaft suggests that this spear may be more than 1,200 years older than that. If this is so, it explodes a myth about how the Iron Age came to Ireland.

  The long-held belief was that the use of iron in Ireland was a result of the invasion of the Celts. Greek writers refer to the existence of ‘Keltoi’ in central Europe in the sixth century BC. It seemed logical that the ‘sudden’ appearance of iron in Ireland must be evidence of the arrival of these Celts. Conversely, if there was no late and sudden arrival of iron, the idea of a Celtic invasion looks highly dubious.

  No one doubts that the influence of these central Europeans is evident in some Irish artefacts from the third century BC onwards. There are, however, no Irish metal artefacts, never mind ones with continental influence, between 600 and 300 BC. Iron corrodes and is very hard to date. So far, Iron Age iron objects found in Ireland have been pretty crude and relatively late, dating no earlier than 300 BC. The Lackan spearhead, though, is certainly not crude: it is elegantly made. It is almost freakishly well-preserved: it would be unusual to find a weapon from the Middle Ages in such good condition. It is not an obvious import. And it seems to be very, very old. The radiocarbon tests date the ash shaft somewhere between 811 and 673 BC. Halpin urges caution, but there is no reason why this date has to be regarded as wrong.

  It is the combination of this early date and its superb quality that makes this spear so startling. ‘We are beginning’, says Halpin, ‘to get other evidence for ironworking technology at an earlier date than we thought. The idea that ironworking was happening here in maybe 600 or 700 BC would not really be disputed any more. But the idea that something as fine as this was being produced at that period suggests not only that iron was being worked here, but also that it was being worked by very competent smiths much earlier than we think’.

  Those smiths were not invading ‘Celts’. They may well have been part of the same culture that was producing the dazzling gold and bronze objects we have already seen.

  15. Broighter boat, c.100 BC

  This delightful gold model-boat, just under 20cm long but rich in detail, is a rare thing in early Irish art: a realistic depiction of a real object. It appears to be a precise model of an ocean-going vessel, probably wooden but possibly made of hide. The boat originally had nine benches for the rowers and eighteen oars with rowlocks, a long oar for steering at the stern, three forked barge-poles, a grappling-iron or anchor and a mast. This might have been the kind of boat in which Irish people traded with Britain and western Europe, bringing back not only goods but also ideas, technologies and fashions.

  The realism of the boat does not mean, however, that it was not also symbolic. It was contained in a hoard of gold objects found in what had once been a salt-marsh on the shore at Lough Foyle, in Broighter, Co. Derry. The hoard might have been a votive offering to the sea god Manannán Mac Lir. The sea was, as it still is today, an unpredictable force. Manannán, who ruled his otherworld kingdom and could ride out over the waves on his chariot, was the ultimate master mariner, impervious to the sea’s deadly turbulence. It is easy to understand why those who sailed in open boats like this one would seek his help and protection. Apart from the delight of the boat itself, what is striking is that the gold objects found with it are mostly imports, including two neck chains that come from the eastern Mediterranean, possibly from Roman Egypt.

  Ireland, which had previously been the great producer of goldwork in western Europe, is now bringing it in from the outside. What has happened to the people who once had such staggering wealth in bronze and gold? Have they been displaced by those who use the new metal, iron? One possibility is that the change from bronze and gold to iron is evidence of a shift in social power. Those lower down the social scale start to use the cheaper iron, challenging the dominance of the elites who controlled the bronze industry. It is striking that many of the early iron objects in Ireland are practical working tools, especially axes. As archaeologist John Waddell puts it, ‘it is possible that the hewers of wood rather than the yielders of swords were the beneficiaries of the new iron technology’. This may be one of the reasons why the burial of gold and bronze objects as offerings to the gods declines after 700 BC.

  Whatever shifts of power were taking place within Ireland, the beauty of the Broighter boat and the care lavished on its creation suggest that trade with the world beyond its shores was one of the drivers of change.

  16. Armlet, Old-croghan man, 362–175 BC

  The dazzling regalia that survives from ancient Ireland suggests that the rulers of the time had enormous prestige, both physical and spiritual. By the Early Iron Age at least, however, power had become highly conditional. The deal for the ruler was clear and brutal: produce the goods or be ritually slaughtered and sacrificed. If the king could not guarantee peace and prosperity, he was sent back into the land to which he was ritually wed.

  In 2003, shortly after a well-preserved Iron Age body was found in a bog in Clonycavan, Co. Meath, another was found at Croghan Hill in Old Croghan, Co. Offaly. Both bodies, on close examination, had the marks of high status. Clonycavan Man’s hair contains an imported gel. Old-croghan Man has a leather and tinned bronze armlet, with stamped metal clips representing the sun and decorated in the fashionable continental style, on his arm. His hands show no sign of manual labour, implying special or aristocratic status.

  Most bog bodies are a tribute to the preservative qualities of Irish bogs and provide important information on dress, etc. Such bodies are often clothed and represent accidental death or casual burial; most are of mediaeval or more recent date. A very small number of bog bodies are Iron Age sacrifices of naked or nearly naked males, providing grim proof of sinister rituals. These bog bodies appear to have been ‘killed’ three times: by strangulation, by stabbing and by drowning. However ritualised, O
ld-croghan Man’s death was garishly violent. Hazel rods that may be the remains of a spansel were threaded through holes in his upper arms. He was stabbed in the chest, struck in the neck, decapitated and cut in half. (All that has been found is his torso and arms.) But the violence was not mere sadism. ‘This’, says Eamonn Kelly of the National Museum, ‘is not done for torture or to inflict pain. It is a triple killing because the goddess to whom the sacrifice is made has three natures. She is goddess of sovereignty, of fertility and of war/death. So sacrifices are made to her in all her forms’.

  Poignantly, Old-croghan Man has a wound on his arm, which he lifted instinctively to try to shield himself from the weapon with which he was stabbed in the chest. Before his death, he was fed a ritual meal of milk and grain: not the high-status meat-based diet that is revealed by analysis of his nails, but one meant, rather, to symbolise the earth’s fertility. He had been a huge man, almost six-feet-three-inches tall. It is easy to imagine him as a champion or hero. He was young and healthy, and, as mentioned, there is little sign that he did physical labour. The bog where his body is found is close to the foot of the hill where the kings of the Uí Failge were inaugurated.

  This culture of brutal sacrifice may tell us something about the mood of the times. In the last centuries BC, Ireland became colder and wetter. Food may have been more scarce. The great prestige of those who ruled had always been linked to their claim to reflect the views of the other world. When times were bad, this very claim became fatal.

  17. Loughnashade trumpet, c.100 BC

  One of the most famous pieces of ancient sculpture is The Dying Gaul, until recently regarded as a Roman copy of a lost Greek original of c. 220 BC from Pergamon in Asia Minor. It may in fact be an original. It is an arresting and deeply moving image of a naked warrior lying on his shield, a gaping wound in his side, his head bowed, awaiting death. The original was almost certainly commissioned to commemorate a Greek victory over the Celtic Galatians, and as such it provides easily the most memorable visual image of the Celts. The Dying Gaul is sometimes called ‘The Dying Trumpeter’: coiled around the warrior’s legs is a large, curved, bronze trumpet. Trumpets such as this were used in battle by Celtic peoples. The Roman historian Polybius wrote of one battle that ‘the noise of the Celtic host terrified the Romans; for there were countless trumpeters and horn blowers and…the whole army was shouting its war cries at the same time’.

  This splendid bronze trumpet, one of four found in a dried-up lake at Loughnashade (‘lake of the treasures’), near the important royal centre of Emain Macha, in Co. Armagh, is similar to the one at the feet of The Dying Gaul and to those that so terrified the Romans. It is an outstanding piece of Celtic art. The main section of the tube is a masterpiece of skilled riveting. The bell end is superbly decorated with a lotus-bud motif, the origins of which lie in Mediterranean art. The style, with elaborate curved patterns, is that of high Celtic art, called La Tène after a site in Switzerland, and it would dominate Irish art for many centuries.

  The Loughnashade trumpet is thus strong evidence of Celtic influence in Ireland. Does it mark what is still referred to as ‘the coming of the Celts’? No. La Tène objects of this period are rare and heavily associated with a warrior aristocracy. There is simply no evidence of a large-scale invasion of Ireland by new peoples. What about the Irish language, which is part of the Celtic linguistic family? There is no reason to suppose that it arrived in Ireland with invaders during the Iron Age. It is probably much older. Barry Cunliffe suggests that contacts between what he calls the communities of the ‘Atlantic zone’ were intensified in the period 1300–800 BC. ‘It would not be surprising to find the development of broadly similar languages evolving out of the common Indo-European’ with which they all started. What the Loughnashade trumpet tells us, therefore, is that there were strong contacts between Ireland and the European continent in the last century BC, as had been the case for thousands of years, and that over the course of that time some Irish elites adopted influences from the latest European style.

  18. Keshcarrigan bowl, early first century AD

  There was no Celtic invasion of Ireland. This does not mean, however, that the island was un­affected by the upheavals in Celtic Europe caused by another invasion: the spread of the Roman Empire into Gaul and Britain.

  In the decades after 60 BC, Rome pushed its frontiers northwards through Gaul (roughly today’s France) to the Rhine, and westwards to the Atlantic. In 43 BC, Emperor Claudius set in train the full-scale invasion that gradually created the Roman province of Britannia. The conquest of Britain was slow and violent, and the shock waves were certainly felt in Ireland. This small bronze bowl, found in a tributary of the Shannon in Co. Leitrim, was polished to a fine finish on a lathe. Its glory, however, is the superb handle, cast in the shape of a bird’s head with a long, curving neck, an upturned beak and big, staring eyes that were once inlaid with glass or enamel. It is probably a stylised version of a duck. Birds have a strongly supernatural aspect in early Irish culture, as messengers from the otherworld or mediators between gods and humans. The bowl was thus probably used in drinking bouts that had a ritual as well as a social function: we know that a drinking ceremony was part of royal inaugurations.

  The Keshcarrigan bowl is similar to examples in bronze found in Devon and Cornwall and in Brittany. In a further reflection of Atlantic links, Armorican potters probably copied similar vessels in pottery; there is a horse-head bowl from Hennebont on the Côtes d’Armor, for instance. The Keshcarrigan bowl may have been made in Ireland (a hoard with similar objects has been found near Ballinasloe, Co. Galway) but using British prototypes. There is little doubt that it represents some movement of people into Ireland. Some of the Gallic Belgic tribes crossed into Britain as refugees from the Romans, displacing native people. These movements of population reached Ireland in the century before and the one following the birth of Christ.

  Southwestern England had connections with Ireland going back thousands of years: Cornish tin was used to make Irish bronze. It is not surprising that, in times of stress, trading contacts would deepen into actual movement of people. A bowl similar to this one, found at Fore, Co. Westmeath, is associated with what seems to be a Gallo-British-type burial and perhaps also with a Roman boat. The technique of finishing the Keshcarrigan bowl with a lathe is also new to Ireland, though it becomes central to later Irish art, including that of the Ardagh and Derrynaflan chalices.

  There is a cemetery on Lambay Island, Co. Dublin, dating perhaps a little later than the Keshcarrigan bowl, that contains the remains of people from north Britain, possibly well-to-do members of the Brigantes, a tribe whose revolt against the Romans was crushed in AD 74. Roman expansion was the central fact of European life at this time. Ireland could not escape its consequences.

  19. Corleck head, first or second century AD

  Until the late-nineteenth century, Corleck Hill, in the Co. Cavan townland of Drumeague, was the site of a Lughnasa festival held on the first Sunday of August. Lughnasa was one of the great quarterly feasts of the old Irish year, and it also retained millennia-old memories of the Celtic god Lugh. The Lughnasa festival, which continues to be celebrated in Ireland to this day, ran over three days, echoing the idea of a tripartite deity. (It is now celebrated on the Sunday closest to 1 August, with the most celebrated event being the annual pilgrimage to the top of Croagh Patrick in Co. Mayo).

  This potently enigmatic stone head was found c. 1855 near Corleck Hill. Carved into a 32cm-high piece of rounded sandstone are three broadly similar faces, all with narrow mouths, bossed eyes and remote, implacable expressions. A small hole in the base of the head suggests that it was secured to some kind of pedestal. One of the mouths also has a small circular hole, a feature that links it to several carved heads from Yorkshire. This link to Roman Britain reminds us that Ireland is, at this time, on the cusp of the Roman world. Even if the Corleck Head represents a new variant in religious practice, however, it also speaks to us of an astonishin
g continuity.

  The head is often taken to represent an ‘all-knowing god’, who can see all dimensions of reality, but its three faces also link us back to much older traditions of the three-natured goddess. The ‘power of three’ is an important theme of Celtic art and is represented in the common symbol of the triskel, or triskelion: three interlocked spirals. It relates to the triple nature of the great goddess, the Morrígan: sovereignty, fertility and death; it is also common in Romano-British art, through the figures of the Matronae, the three ancestral mothers, representing strength, power and fertility. The Corleck Head, which is neither obviously male nor female, and which can be seen to unite old Irish and new Romano-British cults, touches all of these nerves.

  In the context of the Lughnasa festival, the head may represent the old god Crum Dubh, who was buried for three days with only his head above ground, so that the young Lugh could temporarily take his place. Máire MacNeill, in her classic The Festival of Lughnasa, suggests that there was a custom of bringing a stone head from a nearby sanctuary and placing it on the top of the hill for the duration of the festival. The head looking in different directions may be…looking propitiously on the ripening corn-plots.That something of this ritual survived in modern Ireland (and into Brian Friel’s play ‘Dancing at Lughnasa’) is spine-tingling but not entirely illogical. The Corleck Head may represent a late expression of pre-Christian religion, but it also points forward to a religion that was beginning to spread from the Mediterranean—the one with three persons in one God.