(4) Where the Bodies are Buried in Armagh and How I Dealt with It: Armagh Monuments

This is the fourth of four posts: Emain Macha, the Myth of Emain Macha, Armagh Cathedrals, and Armagh Monuments.

Ballymacdermott

If you find yourself laying on your back in a court tomb, you might see this:



Or this:



I was laying inside Ballymacdermott court tomb, south of Armagh town. What on earth am I doing in a tomb? What do I imagine I’ll learn?  

An hour ago I was contemplating the arches of gothic cathedrals. After a moment of disorientation, the similarities became obvious. Just because archeologists found bones here doesn’t make it a tomb any more than the Patrick Cathedrals are tombs. 

 

I’ll call it a cairn. 

Court cairns are so named because they feature a semi-circular ring of standing stones in front a low stone mound, a cairn. Portal stones enhance the entrance to a passage of one more more chambers, and kerbstones surround the perimeter.  

Neolithic farmers built court cairns about 6000 years ago, and only in this part of Ireland. 

Often the small stones forming the mound were removed for other uses, but prohibitions preserved in folklore kept them relatively intact until men with treasure hunting on their minds arrived with the plantations.

The wikipedia article about court cairns has a more complete description and many other examples, as does this page from VoicesFromTheDawn.

These gorgeous elevations appeared in “The Excavation of a Court Cairn at Ballymacdermot, Co. Armagh” Ulster Journal of Archeology, 1964.

The outside of Ballymacdermott looks like this:



When first built, archeologists think it looked like this:

Semi-circular court, kerbstones around the perimeter, fancy doorway. 

This one has a bend in the nave, just like the medieval St. Pat’s. You might be able to see it in this video. If not, just listen to the birds. 

Perhaps this is form following function, but just like a cathedral, there’s a court yard at the front door, a vestibule, a nave, and a chapel at the far end. 

No one knows why people built them, but archeologists say the court was probably where people gathered for rituals before doing whatever they did inside, maybe interring bones in pots, maybe eating psilocybe mushrooms. Three thousand years after Gobekli Tepe, perhaps it was an elite shopping experience. We have no idea. We know they gathered, but they never lived here.

The places people gather become holy: the shrine of a saint, the house of the king, grandma’s dining room table. When we gather, we change our state of mind: we drink, we laugh, we fight, we dance, we fall in love. Even shopping in a crowded market can put you into a state.



Ballymacdermott court cairn is a holy place. I felt a compulsion to enter it and lay down, so I did. Then got worried. Am I being disrespectful? I don’t think Irish people enter these structures. As far as I know, there are no patterns at cairns. (“The pattern” is the set of prayers and circumambulations at a well or shrine.)

I don’t feel unethical visiting a cathedral as an apostate, but this was only the first stop on our sacred sites itinerary. My behavior concerned me. 

We stayed about twenty minutes, using all our senses to remember these stones and flowers. Then we drove on to the next place on the map.  

We saw this folly in the front yard of a McMansion.

Killeavy Old Churches

Killeavy Old Churches is a lovely site, shaded by a grove of beeches, where burials surround two churches built 500 years apart. One pre-dates the Normans, which means it was built by early Irish Christians practicing who knows what.

The doorway lintels of the older church resemble lintels on a court cairn.



The local architectural vernacular persists.

I said before that we don’t know much about early Christianity in Ireland, but their churches were single rooms, dark with tiny windows, and steep ceilings, like a corbeled cairn or limestone cave. People stood together in the dark, listened to consoling, familiar words and sang together. Maybe it was a place to eat the flesh of a god, or a mushroom. The sorts of things that change the state of your mind.



Sacred Ireland said this place was founded by St. Modwena, a convent where women gathered for a thousand years. In this story from Ireland’s Holy Wells, she is known as Monnina:

Eventually Monnina and her nuns settled at Killeavey, where the people were said to have been heavily addicted to a form of paganism and witchcraft that was deeply destructive to the local communities. The people were said to have tied themselves in knots over a desire for retribution, revenge and placing curses on one another; sometimes these disagreements went back generations and the people were enslaved to them. Monnina deliberately sought a quiet and deserted place, both suited to her own spirituality associated as it was with the Desert Fathers, and to provide a haven for the local people to come and seek prayer and relief from the binding and destructive paganism that held such sway in the area. Over time King Macloithe became deeply impressed by these women and their type of life, although he appears to have been very concerned that none of the women ate meat (although this could be a euphemism for something else! Early Irish texts are not quite so ‘proper’ as we would be and they are not without strange little quips and innuendo).

So they were vagitarians?

We didn’t find St. Mowena’s tomb, but we saw these thriving polypores.

Sacred Ireland says there’s a well “up the lane” but I couldn’t find it until I asked for directions to it from a local man. He pointed to the top of the hill. “See that white cross way up there?” 

You can see it too, that tiny white dot just above the center.

He instructed me to take the shortcut, across that sloping field. Obviously, I took the other way, and found myself in an ancient pilgrim’s path worn deep between stone walls, cut off from view, and relentlessly steep.

The path leveled off and I looked back at the abbey site, in that grove of trees. This was their view, those meatless women of St. Monnina.

I would like to know Winifred’s story.

The hillside near the shrine is strewn with interesting rocks,
like what’s left when a neolithic monument is completely torn apart. 

I apologize for the blurred photo.

The saint’s name is written Blathnaidh, pronounced “Blah-nee” or “Mon-ee” (“b” and “m” sound often interchangeable in Irish.) The statue isn’t her, she’s the Blessed Virgin Mary in an ethereal aspect. In the lower left corner, a devotional image called the Sacred Heart of Jesus. 

I looked around for a stone to remember this place by. (I have a huge collection and remember nothing about them.) I circumambulated the shrine, and as I came around to the front, saw this stone in the corner, as if it was adoring the virgin.

 

There’s a notion in Ireland of an Otherworld. It is not heaven or hell, nor is it a place we go to when we die. People there look like us. It is another reality, just beyond our reach. Most of the time. A right relationship to the Otherworld is required. When we act in right relation, physical and energetic aspects of the Otherworld come into our own, like the mysterious woman and her Truth and Generosity. Sometimes, like in the story of Emain Macha you must keep a secret. In other stories, like the story of Nera, you’re asked to perform a service.

The stone told me it was marking a place on the shrine where something else needed to be, so I moved it. 

I descended the pilgrim path, feeling in right relation to all worlds. Rejoining Artemis, we drove off to eat delicious sandwiches from a corner store, and then on to our next destination.

Clontygora Court Tomb

As we drove toward Clontygora court cairn, we crossed The Border several times. Mobile phone roaming of +353 in the UK is supposed to “just work” but like every seamless technology, it doesn’t. Our phones got confused and road signs lost all correspondence to frozen maps. I even lost my usually reliable sense of direction. We got there eventually.

Sacred Ireland says the local name for Clontygora is The Kings Ring. The “ring” of kerbstones have been repurposed into the field walls, like the elements of an exploded star. 

The chambers are not preserved like Ballymacdermot. You need to use your imagination. 

Cattle drive on the highway.

Say hello to pregnant jennys.

I tried, but was fuming about the rudeness of borders. It was the undownloadable cathedral app all over again. The ridiculousness of a political and technical border on this small island. How imposed and impractical. How unseen and capricious. 

How unlike the border between this world and the Otherworld.

Ballykeel Dolmen

A dolmen is what’s left of a single chambered cairn. They are found all over Europe. 

As we came upon its simple beauty, and that improbable  capstone, it was obvious that this was the original of that monstrous folly we saw earlier. 

We know that when originally built it was buried deep inside the cairn and never intended to be seen naked like this.

Sacred Ireland says the local name is The Hag’s Chair, but it doesn’t look anything like a chair. As I learned later, that’s because for generations, until it was excavated in the mid-60s, it looked like this. 

Ulster Journal of Archaeology, 1964. 

When they were finished with the dig, the archeologists reset the fallen stones.

So it's not exactly a folly like that rich man’s trophy we saw earlier, but more like a 19th century Neo-Gothic cathedral looking more medieval than its older brother.

I did not want to go inside the Hag’s chair, so I didn’t. 

Annaghmare Court Tomb

Sacred Ireland said our last stop is locally known as The Black Castle. Artemis was done for the day, but I could visit one more. I found the largest and oldest mystery. 

The Court Cairn at Annaghmare, Ulster Journal of Archaeology, 1964.

I thought I would just walk inside and lay down, but I crawled in on my hands and knees, my hips just fitting between the jambs.

 

 

While there I intended to turn my thoughts to the Otherworld, and how swapping the Otherworld for an Afterworld is a nasty swindle.

Instead I remembered we were only weeks away from the first photos from the Webb telescope. That got me thinking about what they might discover about dark matter and dark energy, and how we can’t yet detect 95% of reality. There’s a kind of matter and energy all around us that we only discovered by observing how it pushes around the dust that gives birth to stars.

Doesn’t this sound exactly like the Otherworld? Maybe folktales will help us understand and integrate the significance of dark matter and energy. 

 

 
I know that’s a conflation of cosmology and myth. I’ll stick with it, because cosmology has always been about myths. The universe is too big for us to understand with any other tools. It’s science with folktales. 

I didn’t invent this notion, I read it in a book called View from the Center of the Universe by two UCSC professors I know, Joel Primack and Nancy Abrams. (Joel was on the team who discovered the nature of dark matter.)

Without stories, we can’t understand our place in the cosmos, because it is impossible to integrate what we know about reality without analogy.

The strange fact is that in this information age, when powerful and fast-paced images are our currency of communication, most of us have no idea how to picture the universe. But every prescientific culture did, and in their own cosmos they had a central and significant place.  

Ours is probably the first major culture in human history with no shared picture of reality. …

Many of humanity’s most dangerous problems arise from our 17th century way of looking at the universe, which is at odds with the principles of science…The main threats to our survival result from the almost total disjunction between the power of our technologies and the wisdom required to use them over the long period during which their effects will last. … As a society, we have been exploiting the powers of a universe to whose existence we are blind. Now we finally have the opportunity to end this alienation: the modern science of cosmology is discovering the universal reality in which we are all immersed. … What is emerging is humanity's first picture of the universe as a whole that might actually be true. (Introduction, View from the Center of the Universe.)

There’s the story of Emain Macha again, this time as told by  archeologists of the cosmos. If you don’t know your place in the nature of reality and act in right relation to it, you will be cursed.

I crawled out of the cairn like being born.

When I began this trek I needed to find out why I put myself in a tomb, and wondered if it was even proper to be in it. I figured out that calling it a "tomb" told an old story that doesn't fit new evidence, like 17th-century physics. At Killeavy I listened to an Otherworldly request, and did the right thing moving the little statue. At Clontygora a false border made a mess of our wayfaring, and at Annaghmare I followed my rampant mind and linked new cosmology to ancient folklore.

In this 6000 year perspective, I’m sad I might die before cosmologists discover secrets of dark matter and energy. I hope they use Ireland’s Otherworld to explain it to us. 

In the meantime, I’ll lay down on the Irish soil between the stones, and listen to messages of the Otherworld without hesitation.

We took the photo for our next record cover.

This is the fourth of four posts: Emain Macha, the Myth of Emain Macha, Armagh Cathedrals, and Armagh Monuments.