Chapter 3 THE NORTH-WEST counties Roscommon -- Leitrim -- Cavan -- Fermanagh -- west Tyrone -- Donegal -- Derry ROSCOMMON Rathcrogan West of Edgeworthstown (which has now reverted to its old name of Mostrim) on the N5 Longford-Castlebar road [1] , is Rathcrogan , Co.Roscommon. As Cruachan this was the site of the royal palace of Queen Maeve , and here were sown the seeds of the Táin, the 'Cattle Raid of Cooley ' [2] . Maeve ( Medb ), Queen of Connacht, and her consort, Ailill, are in bed in their palace on one of the mounds still to be seen at Rathcrogan, and he, with mixed humour and malice, muses: 'You are better off today than when I married you.' Maeve is indignant, and responds with an account of her genealogy, her battle- prowess, and the number of soldiers of her own that she had before she married Ailill. Then she seems to change tack, admitting that she had 'a strange bride-gift such as no woman before had asked of the men of Ireland, that is, a man without meanness, jealousy, or fear': Ailill had brought with him those gifts, he was just such a man, equal to herself in generosity and grace. One can almost see Ailill, pleased, relaxing and lowering his guard. However, Maeve continues; she had brought with her 'the breadth of your face in red gold, the weight of your left arm in bronze. So, whoever imposes shame or annoyance or trouble on you, you have no claim for compensation or honour-price other than what comes to me -- for you are a man dependant on a woman.' Ailill replies loftily that his two brothers were kings, one of Temair (Tara), the other of Leinster, and he had only decided to marry Maeve, and thus become a king himself, 'because I heard of no province in Ireland ruled by a woman save this province alone.' Scholars have suggested that this is the mythological representation of an historical shift from matriarchy to political patriarchy, as well as from goddess to god. It may be so, but in this story Maeve is by far the more forceful of the two. She calls for their possessions to be brought in, their pots and pans and tubs, his and hers, so that their quantities can be compared. At this point the story remains on the level of a domestic tiff, but it soon becomes epic; their herds of cattle are counted, their troops of horses, their jewels. It is no use, their possessions are equal -- except for one thing. There is a famous bull, which in fact belongs to Maeve, but which has attached itself to Ailill's herd, 'thinking it unworthy to be classed as "woman's property" '. That would seem to clinch it, but Maeve is not done yet. She knows of an even better bull, in Ulster, so she sends her men there to buy it in exchange for land. But these emissaries are heard boasting about the superiority of Connachtmen, so the Ulstermen refuse to part with the bull. Maeve invades Ulster in order to get it, and the 'Cattle Raid of Cooley' begins. Maeve is opposed by the Ulster hero Cuchulainn, who defends the territory single-handed, because the rest of the men of Ulster are under a spell. The Cattle Raid, therefore, started at Rathcrogan/Cruachan. In his retelling of the old stories, James Stephens gives Maeve's court the atmosphere of a regal houseparty, with magic added. He is in no doubt about the fierceness of Maeve, and her royal courtesy. She implores a visitor from the Otherworld to have one for the road -- ' "But you do not drink!" she cried to Nera' - - but no, Nera has to be back before the door in the hillside closes. 'If you must return, you must return', replies Maeve, and she and her retinue accompany him to the door in the hillside as though seeing him off at the station, and in some equally magical way Stephens makes it all seem perfectly likely [3] . In the early seventeenth century, when it was feared that Irish historical records would be destroyed by the English, four scholars were deputed to travel the country collating all the various annals that had been put together over the centuries. The result of this, the Annals of the Four Masters [4] , contains many references to Cruachan, all bloody, severed heads delivered there, and so on. A late one tells that in 1546, in response to an insurrection, 'The Lord Justice, Anthony St Leger, plundered and burned the country as far as Cruachan.' The last mention is in 1594, but its days as a royal enclave were long gone. Lady Gregory 's Cuchulain has a description of Cruachan in its heyday, the partitions 'made of red yew with carvings on it', the house itself made of oak, and the roof was covered with oak shingles; sixteen windows with glass there were, and shutters of bronze on them, and a bar of bronze across every shutter. There was a raised place in the middle of the house for Ailell and Maeve, with silver fronts and strips of bronze around it, and a silver rod beside it, the way Ailell and Maeve could strike the middle beam and check their people... The mounds that remain cover an area of ten miles. They are farmed now, and fenced, and it is difficult to tell which is which. In one field, surrounded by a crumbling wall, is the limestone fissure, the cave that was thought to be the entrance to the Otherworld, where live the Shí ( Sidhe ), and which can be entered at Samhain ["Savin"] ( Halloween). Frenchpark The Four Masters were retrieving what records they could in the 1630s. In 1854, westwards along the road from Rathcrogan, was born probably the most influential retriever of all, Douglas Hyde (1860-1949), son of the rector of Tibohine, near Frenchpark . A sickly child, Hyde was educated at home, where he taught himself Irish. He was one of the founders of the Gaelic League [5] , the aims of which were to revive the Irish language and create a modern literature in Irish. An a-political man, he wanted to replace political Fenianism with a cultural nationalism. His famous lecture, 'The Necessity for De-Anglicising Ireland', was delivered in 1892: ... not a protest against imitation of what is best in the English people, for that would be absurd, but rather to show the folly of neglecting what is Irish, and hastening to adopt, pell- mell and indiscriminately, everything that is English, simply because it is English... It has always been very curious to me how Irish sentiment sticks in this halfway-house -- how it continues apparently to hate the English, and at the same time continues to imitate them... Hyde published the first book of folk-tales printed in Irish in 1889, and his Love Songs of Connaught (1893) were an instant success and deserved to be. The poet Austin Clarke (1896-1974) gives a glimpse of the man ( Casadh an tSugain was Hyde's play in Irish, translated by Lady Gregory as The Twisting of the Rope ): [6] As an undergraduate I escaped at one step from the snobbery of school life and discovered the Love Songs of Connaught , those poems and translations which had started our Literary Revival... When the future President of Eire enacted Casadh an tSugain for us, he took the parts of all the characters, jumping up and down from the rostrum in his excitement, and, as he unwound an imaginary straw rope at the end of the play, found himself outside the lecture room. On the morning of our first term, he spoke of the aims and ideals of the language revival: we were all equal, all united in the Gaelic movement. There was no vulgar competition, no showing-off, no twopence-halfpenny looking down on twopence. Those plain words changed me in a few seconds. The hands of our lost despised centuries were laid on me. Hyde's translations could be wonderfully musical. In `Ringleted youth of my love', a girl neglected by her lover is speaking: I thought, O my love! you were so -- As the moon is, or sun on a fountain, And I thought after that you were snow, The cold snow on top of the mountain; And I thought after that you were more Like God's lamp shining to find me, Or the bright star of knowledge before, And the star of knowledge behind me. In the Love Songs he tells the reader how he found the texts, who gave them or sang them to him, and the stories he was told about them. He does this in both Irish and English and, it is said, his translation of his own Irish keeps so closely to the rhythm and cadence of the Irish, that the English sounds like a fresh language. Indeed, though Hyde's intention was to revive Irish, his English gave the idea to Yeats and to others that Irish matters could be written of in a special kind of English. Lough Key Hyde translates the famous Connaught song, ` Una Bhán ' ["Oona Bawn"] [7] and tells the story of it. Tomás Costello, 'in the time of Charles II -- I think' (Hyde is always engagingly honest) fell in love with Una MacDermott, and the girl's father forbade him access to her. Because of this Una falls ill, too ill to send for Tomás. He does not know this and vows never to speak a word to Una or one of MacDermott's people unless he should be called back before he went across the ford of the little river, the Donogue, near Lough Key (Lough Cé) ["Kay"].