Rhiannon

Between the Ickleton-way and White-horse-hill, under the Horse, stands a large Barrow, which the common people living hereabouts, call DRAGON-HILL, and they have a tradition, that “Here St George killed the Dragon.” The Horse too is brought into the Legend, as belonging to that Saint, who is usually pictured on Horse-back. They shew besides a bare place on the top of it, which is a plain of about forty or fifty yards over, where the turf, I don’t know by what means, can gain no footing; which they imagine proceeds “from the venemous blood that issued from the Dragon’s wound.”

Francis Wise: ‘A letter to Dr Mead concerning some antiquities in Berkshire’ (1738).

Historic England’s record says that the round barrow here is a respectable 3m high. It’s on a prominent hill and there’s a photo on the ‘Earthworks’ blog that makes it look mysterious with its cap of trees. The area sounds like it’s full of weirdness (as you can read). But regarding the barrow itself, to quote the blog...

Local children often call this ‘the witches hill’.

Various signs of veneration can often still be found on Hagworm hill. A clay figure of a Mother Goddess, obviously made fairly recently, and coloured rags tied in the thorn tree on the summit of the hill. Painted egg shells, and a small stick carved with runes. All these and others have been noticed left on the hill by people who still regard this as a sacred place.

I was also told by a local man that as a child he and his friends believed it was a flying saucer that had crashed many years before and become grown over with trees, and that the aliens still lived inside, though his parents told him this was not true, as it was fairies that lived inside the hill. Each generation has its own little green men.

The Earthworks blog is full of interesting landscapey fortean things.

The OED says a hagworm is “A northern name for the adder or viper; but in some districts applied to the common snake, and in others to the blindworm” (the latter being the slowworm).

In a field belonging to Patrick McKenna, Corlealackagh, Castleblayney, there is a mound, or raised ground, containing huge boulders of stone, and here and there is an odd hawthorn bush, evidently of a very good age. The place is known as the “Giant’s Grave” and is marked on the Sapper’s map as such. The oldest man in the district never heard it called by any other name but he says that the position of the stones and boulders have been changed.

A number of men from the Archaeological Society Co Louth came to visit the place about fifteen years ago and locals helped them to dig down into the earth to see what they might find buried there. They misplaced the stones from their original position and left them scattered about. A few years later a gentleman called Rev. Fr. Rapmund[?] who was interested in such places secured a number of volunteer workers and undertook the task of digging down deep in the earth at this spot.

They laboured for days and only succeeded in unearthing flat stone slabs one after another till they had 13 unearthed. They again continued their work in the hope of reaching the body of the Giant which was perhaps cremated but no such treasure was ever found. The Rev. gentleman asked his volunteer band to replace the stone slabs just as they had found them, which they did. When the portion of the large stone boulders that was under the earth was uncovered it was discovered that there were strokes of different lengths on one of these boulders, and experts said that it was something in the Ogham language. The strokes or marks were copied to be translated into English but we cannot find any person to translate the message written in Ogham.

From year to year I pay a visit to the Giant’s Grave, and I tell the children what I know about it and we have taken “snaps” of it. It is never ploughed or tilled by the man who owns the farm containing it, as there are several lone blackthorn bushes around it, and there is a belief in this district that any one who interferes or cuts down a lone bush will be afflicted for life, by having a “hump” grown on his back overnight.
Were it not for this belief, the farmer says he’d have used the stones for building purposes ere this.

From the Schools’ Collection of the 1930s, now being digitised at Duchas.ie.

Just beyond the church [in Hill Deverill], and approached by a rough lane and a bridge over the stream, stands the remains of the Ludlow manor house – a very picturesque old stone house, with mullioned and transomed windows, standing neglected and dilapidated in the reedy marsh meadows. It is a Tudor building, with alterations of the eighteenth century. The Cokers, to whom it passed from the Ludlows, lived here until 1736.

A strange memory of the last of this family survives in the valley, “Old” Coker, as he is called – the adjective has the country significance of something at once fearful and familiar, as when we say Old Nick, or Old Harry. Villagers tell how he “walks” about the countryside; lovers in the moonlight would come upon him sitting on stiles; he is heard at midnight whipping his hounds round “Guns’ Church,” a barrow on the hill above, and galloping down to his house, with chains rattling and horn screaming on the wind. In the house itself his malevolent influence would pluck the bed-clothes off the sleeper, and play many pranks. He is said to haunt even the church itself.

From Ella Noyes’s “Salisbury Plain” (1913).

Another story about the Bulford stone in the river:

In the bed of the river, just above Bulford, a great Sarsen stone lies, like those of which Stonehenge is built; how it came there is not known. The traditional explanation is that the Devil, having, by Merlin’s command, bought the stones from an old wife in Ireland, bound them in a withy and flew hither with them, and as he was crossing the river at this point the withy slackened and one of the stones dropped out. There is another stone of the same kind in an upland field to the west.

From ‘Salisbury Plain‘ by Ella Noyes, 1913.

These legends [told of Killeen Cormac ] look like an interpretation from one more ancient concerning the hounds of Cuglos (son of Donndesa, King of Leinster), who was master of the hounds to Ederscoel, the great king of Erin. [...]

His dogs hunted a wild boar from Tara to the Hill of Urske, where they left the marks of their paws on the stones of a druidical circle crowning its summit. The same traces are to be found on some rocks at Manger, near Rathbran.

While pursuing their game up the hill over Beallach Dubhthaire, the ancient name of Baltinglass, Cuglos with his dogs, blinded by the mist and fog, chased their game into a cave on the summit of the mountain, and being there lost, his memory was perpetuated by giving his name to the scene of his untimely fate.

From ‘The Inscribed Stones of Killeen Cormac’ by J.F.S., in The Irish Ecclesiastical Record v4, no9, 1868.

It has been suggested that Killeen Cormac was in the pre-Christian period used as a place of pagan sepulchre. Its very peculiar construction and the indications of a sepulchral chamber within the moat, with passages to the terraces such are to be found in similar structures at New Grange on the Boyne, and in other localities, give an air of certainty to the suggestion, which is well sustained by the appearance of a stone on the south side of the mound about three feet high, fixed in the wall of the middle terrace.

It seems to be one of the jambs of a door to the entrance leading from the central cave. The side of this stone is grooved, the opposite jamb was likely hollowed in the same manner to receive a thinner flag to close the exterior entrance.

Killeen Cormac has the reputation of being full of rats, as well as of being the oldest cemetery in the whole country. These animals are up to this time the only explorers of the subterranean galleries under the mound, since they were closed up to preserve the remains of some pagan hero of the earliest dawn of history.

The most recent fact connected with this cemetery is, that about the year 1830 a stone wall was built around its area, some trees were then planted which add a phase of beauty peculiarly their own, while their shadows give a dim religious light in harmony with the venerable relics of antiquity of which they are the guardians.

Within the enclosure, and on the sides of the ruined terraces, are some inscribed pillar stones, with Latin and Ogham inscriptions, and some very curious incised figures, the description of which is reserved for notice at the close of this paper.

At the side of the mound, some paces from the entrance, is one pillar stone, now about three feet above the surface, on the top of which is an indentation resembling the trace of a hound’s paw, as if impressed on a soft surface. Excavations made around it did not reveal any features worth describing.

A very curious legend, founded indeed on historical facts, is told concerning this stone, with a view, perhaps, to account for the name Cormac being affixed to the locality. The tradition of the neighbourhood says that the pillar stone marks the grave of a Cormac, king of Munster. It states that he was carried to this cemetery for sepulture by a team of bullocks, which were allowed to follow their own instincts, a mode of settling disputes regarding sepulture not uncommon among the ancient Irish. [This tradition...] avers that he was carried from a long distance through Ballynure from Timolin, in the county of Kildare, and when the team reached that part of Ballymore now known as “the Doon” the exhausted bullocks, in the eagerness of their thirst, pawed the earth, and that a stream of water issued forth. Another version states that the teamster stuck his goad into the ground, whereupon gushed up a bubbling fountain, which is still to be found near the roadside, and is used as a watering-place for the kine pasturing on the fertile heights at the Doon of Ballynure.

The bullocks having satisfied their thirst, journeyed on till they came to the elevation now called Bullock Hill, beside the Griese, opposite to Killeen Cormac. Here they halted, and refused to proceed farther, from which it appeared that Killeen was to be the last resting place of the king. The bullocks having done their part, returned homewards across the marsh, and were engulphed in the waters of the Griese.

[...] Another version of this legend, but more confused, places a  hound on the team, which, when it stopped at Bullock Hill, jumped over to the cemetery, and left the impression of its paw on the pillar stone, thus marking the grave of Cormac; while another story represents this hound as jumping from the summit of Knockadhow, still more remote from the cemetery.

From ‘The Inscribed Stones of Killeen Cormac’ by J.F.S., in The Irish Ecclesiastical Record v4, no9, 1868. Comes with illustrations of the stones.

There is a fort in Dromin in the land of Michael Seannel and it is a very eerie place. Many strange stories are told about it. One night a man by the name of Cronin was coming home from town and as he drew near the fort field he heard an awful noise. As he was passing the gate a big man asked him to play a football match with them and he said he could. The side that the man played with won the game and when it was over the man went home. When he reached home he went to bed.

When the people of the house got up next morning, Cronin was very bad and he was all black from head to foot. The people of the house sent for the doctor and the doctor said that there was nothing to be done for him but to send for the priest, and the priest came and he was anointed. About an hour or two later the man died because people say that he got a fairy stroke.

There is another story told about that place. One night a man was standing beside the wall and as he was just in the act of coming home he heard all the talk going down the field. The man says the people did not come up the road or down the road or go in the gate, but the talk was going down the field at the same time and Seannel’s dog was barking.

More fairy weirdness from the Schools Collection of the 1930s, online at duchas.ie.

I mind seeing the finest crop of potatoes in the parish growing in that field beside Bough Fort. One day, six of us started to dig the potatoes. We had a good lot dug at dinner-time, more than they’d dig now.

We went over to the ditch to eat our dinners when, all of a sudden, what did we see but six women, wearing cloaks and hoods, coming out of the fort. They came, and started picking the potatoes into their aprons.

I can tell you we were well frightened, because something told us they were the daoine maithe you know. We let them alone, and they stayed picking for about ten minutes or so. They never looked towards us, but when they were finished, back with them again, and out of our sight.

We were too frightened to move for a bit, but when we went back to our work what did we find, that there was not a single potato missing. It is said, that it is not right to touch a stick or a stone in these old forts.

From the Schools Collection of the 1930s, being digitised at Duchas.ie.

According to the information via the Historic Environment Viewer, the rath “is enclosed by a substantial earthen bank and a wide, shallow, partly waterlogged fosse” – I guess the ditch of the story. The “daoine maithe” are the Good People, the fairies.

Not far from the Rock of Thorm there is a hill called Slieve Muc. There is a great crack in the hill. My grandmother told me that there was a great pig roaming around Slieve Muc so Finn and the Fianna went to kill it. When they found the pig they surrounded it. Finn, the leader, approached it with his sword in his hand. The pig, upon seeing Finn, attacked him. Finn fought for some time and wounded the pig. Then when the pig was tired, Finn, raising his sword above his head, put all his strength to one mighty stroke. The sword descended with such force that it severed the pig’s head from its body and also made a great hole in the hill. It was from this episode that the hill got the Irish name of Slieve na Muc.

From the Schools Collection of the 1930s, now being digitised at Duchas.ie

Archaeologist Tom talking to Mick Aston on the Time Team episode about Mine Howe:

- So what do the local people think of this area then, Tom?

- Well I think it’s always been considered as somewhere a bit special, a bit unusual.You’ve got [Mine Howe] here, this thing with this ditch around it which might pre-date it, you’ve got a medieval chapel over there, and you’ve got the burial ground as well and it’s still in use. But people used to say that there were always things here, you know there were always stories related to this mound.

- What do you mean, things here?

- Well, they, um... back in the old days people believed in trows, which is the Orkney word for fairies...

- Fairies! (snort)

- Yeah they used to have a few ale houses on the way over to Durness and people used to have to stop and get tanked up before they could go past this place at night...

- Yeah? (incredulously)

- ... because they thought there was trows around.

- Because there were spirits about.

- mm and then when they got to Dingieshowe in Durness they would have to have a few more to go past that as well, because it was also believed to be an abode of trows. And there was actually a story about a fiddler that went into the mound of Dingieshowe and played for a night for a trow, and when he came out he discovered he’d been away for fourteen years! Everything had changed – apart from him, he was exactly the same.

- Is it not more to do with the local whiskey than anything else?

- Erm a bit of that probably as well the home brew, it certainly heightened the attention/tension.

In this district there is a large stone on the top of Ward’s hill. It is said that when the Giants were in Ireland one of them was standing at Tara and threw the stone from there so it landed on the top of Ward’s hill. This stone is on the hill ever since and the track of the Giant’s five fingers is on the stone. Some people say that the Giant was at the races in Mullacurry and threw the stone from there. The fairies were supposed to dwell under the big stone.

A story from the Schools Collection at Duchas. ie. Perhaps that’s the stone in Ryaner’s photo.