For centuries Ireland's landscape has been the setting for epic journeys, writes Dermot Somers
This tiny island is threaded with unforgettable journeys. Footfalls and hoofprints echo throughout myth and history. Cross-country cattle-raids, missionary travels, military expeditions, fugitive flights - they range from coast to coast, over the plains, the rivers and the mountains. Many are so clearly recorded in tradition that we know the exact location today of their campsites, their skirmishes, their betrayals. From the Cattle-Raid of Cooley to the March of O'Sullivan Beare, the great journeys can be followed accurately on a modern map.
Some, involving great hardship, took place in winter and earned a special resonance in folk-memory. During the long nights and short days, it was easier in ways to shake off pursuit. The escape of O'Neill and O'Donnell from Dublin Castle in the 1590s took advantage of darkness for this reason, but the winter weather in the Wicklow mountains resulted in frostbite and an icy death.
Brian Boru, on the other hand, was a master of the military journey, the hard road, the sudden arrival, the savage punch and the safe retreat. Leavened with strategy, it made him king of Munster first, then king of Ireland - self-appointed. He had once thrown 300 boats onto Lough Ree on the Shannon to intimidate Connacht and Meath. The tactic, and the boats, were copied from the Vikings, house-trained by then and settled in trading-posts around the coast.
Ulster rejected his control, the tribes of the north butchering each other for supremacy. In the year 1006, aged 65, Brian set out to march them into submission. That triumphant summer journey would come to be known as a circuit of Ireland.
Brian sailed up the Shannon from Kincora, met his allies at Athlone. They had gathered from all corners of the south with their professional soldiers and their farmer militias, fretting about the crops and cattle left at home. That journey was the closest they would ever come to a summer holiday. The Ulstermen were in a kingship crisis: there was no resistance. They stood back and let Brian Boru - a southern upstart with a forged pedigree - patrol their territory, collect a string of royal hostages and make himself de facto king of Ireland.
The Annals of the Four Masters convey the jaunty tone of the journey, even in translation. Brian takes flight like a boy careering along, arms outstretched: "Into the country of Cairpre, and beyond Sligech, and keeping his left hand to the sea and his right hand to the land and to Beinn Gulban, over Dubh and over Drobhaois and into Magh-n-Eine." North to Sligo, in other words; under the prow of Benbulben, over the rivers Duff and Drowes, across the Erne at Ballyshannon, through the Barnesmore Gap in the Blue Stacks, across the Foyle at Strabane and into Tyrone. The victory march rolled on through Antrim and Down, lifting hostages from the major tribes of the Ulaid as far south as the Mournes. At the end of the long summer, Brian and his army sauntered out through the Gap of the North, a narrow pass midway between Newry and Dundalk in today's landscape. It marks the border now between the Republic and Northern Ireland. A thousand years ago, it was the eastern portal of the Ulster province. The marching season was over.
OF COURSE, BRIAN Boru had his squad of engineers - his bridge-builders and heavy diggers to smooth his passage. In the folklore that surrounds his name, he is said to have been a great road-builder. The success of his reign is symbolised by the myth of a young woman who walked alone, unmolested, from Tory in the northwest to Glandore in the far south, carrying a gold ring mounted on a rod. Another story explains that the sigh of a cow as she settles in a field is a lament for the lost days of Brian Boru. We know today that it's a belch of methane, Ireland's contribution to global warming.
Late in the 16th century, however, Ireland suffered a series of severe winters, sometimes described as a mini ice age. This coincided with the Nine Years' War, a period of rebellion and reprisal.
Crops were uncertain in times of war and the hard-pressed Irish relied on their cattle, a mobile source of sustenance.
In December 1602, Sir Charles Wilmot captured the herds of O'Sullivan Beare near Glengarriff and the rebel chieftain became virtually destitute overnight. Wilmot took 2,000 cattle and 4,000 sheep in a raid that lasted six hours.
O'Sullivan's men, in desperation, gave chase right up to the enemy camp. Wilmot burned and pillaged west Cork and O'Sullivan took to the road with 1000 followers, of whom 400 were fighting men. Thirteen of these were cavalry, the rest footsoldiers. There were 600 noncombatants.
O'Sullivan's plan was to travel north in midwinter, the full length of the hungry country, to join forces with Hugh O'Neill in Ulster, believed to be in rebellion still. Was it a march, a retreat, or a flight? It was, at different times, all three. The soldiers were guerillas, the civilians were fugitives. They were reduced to refugees, and finally to a handful of survivors. Reeling from battle to battle, beset by starvation, attacked by their own countrymen, they crossed the River Shannon near Portumna in boats made from the hides of their horses.
Heavily outnumbered, O'Sullivan fought a battle in east Galway, which was won against all odds when the enemy leaders were singled out and beheaded. It snowed as the starving convoy stumbled north through Connacht, their numbers decreasing all the way. The snow gave way to heavy rain and they straggled west through the Curlew Mountains, to avoid an English garrison at Boyle. By then, O'Sullivan's objective was the home of O'Rourke of Breifne in Co Leitrim, also in rebellion. Thirty-four men, including O'Sullivan Beare, reached Leitrim Castle after two harrowing weeks on the march. One woman, unidentified, brought the number to 35.
Within days, O'Sullivan Beare was on the move again, attempting to join O'Neill, 100 miles and many flooded rivers away. Two months later, O'Neill had surrendered. O'Sullivan Beare escaped to Spain, where he was proclaimed Count of Birhaven, to the chagrin of the English court. Years later, he was stabbed to death, an innocent bystander at a duel fought by his nephew.
Francisco de Cuéllar, a Spaniard washed ashore in Sligo with the wreckage of the Armada, also experienced hardship at the hands of English and native Irish alike. In an account of his extraordinary journey, he was to describe the Irish, with varying degrees of affection, as salbajes, or savages.
A captain, already stripped of his own command, he was fleeing south through heavy gales when the Lavia and two sister ships were wrecked with severe loss of life off Streedagh Strand in Co Sligo, September 1588. Badly injured, de Cuéllar floundered ashore to be met by bands of plunderers, Irish and English, robbing the castaways.
Through a mixture of guile and luck, de Cuéllar escaped from the coast, where soldiers were already hanging survivors. He was a resilient character with a strong sense of survival and a persistent streak of humour. Trailing an injured leg, he had been robbed, stabbed, and stripped of all his clothes. His religious effects had been taken by an Irish girl - hermossísima por todo estremo, beautiful in the extreme. She claimed to be a Christian, which, de Cuéllar noted, "she was - as much as Mohammed". As he wandered inland, he wore an outfit composed of ferns and straw matting. He was heading for sanctuary with the Leitrim rebel O'Rourke of Breifne, el senor de Ruerge, whose son would shelter O'Sullivan Beare a generation later.
DE CUÉLLAR WAS to spend seven gruelling months in Ireland, trekking through Ulster from Donegal to north Antrim, constantly dodging capture, helped and hindered by local chieftains in his attempts to reach Scotland, where King James was repatriating shipwrecked Spaniards. In the course of his documented travels, he defended a castle on Lough Melvin against an English army. The defence consisted of nine Spaniards and a few boatloads of stones - presumably for throwing. Fortunately, winter intervened and sent the attackers packing. MacClancy, owner of the castle, offered his sister to de Cuéllar, who took to the road at once in a less than tactful response. It was clear where his preference lay. He had earlier described MacClancy's wife as extremely beautiful.
De Cuéllar detailed his dramatic travels in Ireland in a letter to an unidentified patron in Spain. The letter was dispatched in northern Europe in 1589. It lay ignored in naval archives in Madrid, while de Cuéllar himself disappeared from history for hundreds of years.
The great journeys of Ireland range from the Táin to the travels of Michael O'Clery, chief of the Four Masters. Moulded by telling and retelling, they reflect not only the imagination and endurance of the people, but a narrative sense of the landscape itself, which was so intimately familiar to its inhabitants as to have been an underlying character in myth and history, as complex and moody as a dynasty of kings and as interfering as the weather.
Endurance: Heroic Journeys in Ireland, by Dermot Somers, is published by The O'Brien Press, €17.95