Stone Circles and a Magic lake

This is going to be a long one, folks. I’m excited and am on a roll. Sorry if you learn more about Neolithic spiritual practices and the Celtic solar year than you want to. Consider it your punishment for …….whatever. You know what you did. And you could always just dip into it for tidbits.

Monday 7/26: Today we drove about 1 hour and 50 minutes (which in the States is not much, but here seems far, even to those who live here) west to County Limerick to a wonderful place, Lough (Lock) Gur. We went there once before, a few winters ago, in the first week of January, when Nature couldn’t decide if it was raining or sleeting, but whichever, it was doing it hard. Anna, Nick, and Eric were with us for those 12 days, and we visited Lough Gur on our last day in Ireland, as it is close to Limerick city, which is where Shannon airport is. Lough Gur is a whole landscape complex, made up of a number of small hills, a beautiful lake, and more Neolithic, Iron Age, Bronze Age and early Celtic burial chambers, settlements, forts, and henges than you can imagine in one place. Grange Stone Circle, located near one end of the lake, is the largest in Ireland, and is gorgeous. It is large and complete, with 113 (!) large stones marking the perfect circle, which has a diameter of 46 meters (multiply by three and add some, for feet). At the eastern end is a beautifully stone-delineated processional entrance way, which frames the Summer Solstice sunrise perfectly. Just to one side of this entrance are two large stones together forming a V-shape, and in that V rises the Beltane (May Day) sunrise; to the other side of the entrance are two more V-forming stones, which frame the Lughnasa/Lammas (August 1) sunrise. Directly opposite from these two Vs are another two, which respectively frame the Imbolc (February 1-2) sunset and the Samhain (pronounced Sawhen or Souwhen, (all Hallows Eve, or Halloween Eve, November 1) with the ou being sounded as in the word sour) sunset. If you think about it, these 4 days are at four poles of the year, each 3 months from the last: Samhain was the first day of the Celtic New Year, with an extra day—October 31—thrown into the year (the Celts divided their year into 13 equal lunar months of 28 days each, but needed one extra day to bring it into alignment with the actual solar year of 365 days; lots of civilizations have used certain days or groups of days as if they were in-between days, out-of-the-normal days, such as the 12 Days following Christmas in medieval Europe, when the Yule celebrations were governed by the Lord of Misrule, and the barriers, or veils, between the worlds were thin or gone. For the northern Europeans, Yule was that time; for the Celts in Ireland and Great Britain, it was All Hallows Eve, Samhain, the day when the spirit and/or fairy world mixed with the human world, and so normal life had to cease, special care needed to be taken, and certain kinds of knowledge could be gained). 3 months after Samhain came Imbolc (which became Candlemas in the Christian calendar), the beginning of Spring in the British Isles, and the feast of new lambs, of Brigid, of growing light and green things. Again, 3 months later came May Day, Beltane, which was about the summer beginning, and was focused on fertility and the promise of abundance. And in another 3 months was Lammas, Lughnasa, basically the feast of the harvest, of the first loaves. All of these are called Fire Feasts, and also the “cross-quarter days.” They are, of course, exactly in-between the four other major Fire Feasts of the Summer and Winter Solstices and the Spring and Fall Equinoxes. While all 8 of these are based on the solar calendar and marked the solar year, for some reason the Celtic people paid greater attention to the cross-quarter days than the Solstices and Equinoxes.

So, with that bit of background behind us, there is one more important bit of context. The Neolithic people of the British Isles (basically what Neolithic means is early farming people, who lived in the Late Stone Age) were joined somewhere about 4-5000 years ago by a culture called the Beaker People, because of a specific kind of pottery they made. These people knew how to do something magical and powerful: they knew how to take tin and mix it, at VERY high temperatures, with copper, and make bronze, which is a tough, strong metal. You can make it into tools, but you can especially make it into weapons, which changes life tremendously. This new blended culture pretty much immediately began building large stone henges (circles) all over the British Isles and northern France (one is Stonehenge, and another is Avebury, which I talked about earlier). They were ritual places, and most seem to have something to do with the 8 solar calendar feasts, and, most importantly, they involved a HUGE amount of labor, in terms of man-hours. Some of the stones are so large that archeologists have trouble imagining how these people managed to perform this labor. And the large circles required commitment over long periods of time (decades, at least). I like to imagine a new hierarchy, not based on hunting or farming skills, but on knowledge of the sky and of the seasons and of metallurgy, with a priestly caste living off the labor of the many, who believe fervently in the magical power of their leaders and of the ritual places they are building.

So I get an image of a group of priests/priestesses sitting around on this exact spot, in what will become the center of this large Grange henge, and waiting while the sun rises and sets each day. They would need to do this over many years, to make sure that the sun rose and set in the exact same spot from year to year. Other people would have had to wait on them. These religious leaders from time to time would set a peg in the ground and say, “ This is it!!! Two stones have to go right here, to make a V, for the sun to rise within!!” They would have had to have had an exact picture of the circle as they wanted it to be, before a single stone was moved there. And they would have had to be absolutely certain of their calculations. How many grassy picnics did they have on that spot, right in the exact center of the circle they wanted to build? And for how long was the circle used in a ritual way? I can see a priestess on the early morning of the Summer Solstice, with the entire circle filled with waiting people; she waits until the exact moment the sun is rising through the processional entrance way, and she herself enters, with the Solstice sun behind her, flaming her hair. If she did it just right, the hundreds of people within the circle would be powerfully moved and awed. IN this photo, you are looking INTO the circle through the processional entrance.

Now, who the heck knows what she did next? And why did they build a second, and third, henge, just 150 feet or so, from the large one? What, where they practice henges? Were they like the little kids’ table at family parties: the kids had their own ceremonies nearby, because they didn’t fit in the large one? Or because the grown-ups didn’t want the kids overhearing/seeing what was going on in the large one? Who knows? But they left behind multiple henges in one grouping, and then more scattered around the low hillsides all around the lake.

This was the center of the religion of Aine (pronounced Anya), a derivative of Anu and Danu, the Great Goddess of the Celtic people who came from Central Europe (the river Danube is named for her). She became, over time, the Fairy Queen, who gave meadowsweet its scent, the Ban Sidhe (banshee), the mermaid who lives in the lake and keeps the fabric of time and of human existence, and, later, the Christian Saint Ide. Aine, as the ancestor of the local tribes, was an important component of the inauguration of the local chieftain kings, and they were inaugurated on her hill, Knockainie (now pronounce Nock Ainie, instead of Nock Anya), which also has at least three cairns on its top. Annual rituals occurred there every year up through the late 1800s on the eve of the Summer Solstice, when processions of the entire parish would culminate in a bonfire on the top of the hill, and young men would carry flaming brands through the fields from the top, to fertilize them and bring good luck.

At the lake itself, which is a wonderfully peaceful place, there are three hills of importance. On one, there is visible evidence (which you can visit) of ancient homes, animal containments, and fields. On another, Knockfennel (the top of from which you can see all the way to the hills of Clare, four mountain ranges, and the mouth of the Shannon out past Limerick. You can also see the Paps of Dana, according to the web pages about it, and ,my guess is that this is not accidental) , there are Iron Age stone forts and “castle” ruins, along with yet another stone circle (we felt like the first people to visit that one in ages). And on Knockadoon are more settlements (at least 17 houses), with a crannog (a human-made island—for defensive purposes) at its base, with evidence of human settlement there for thousands of years. The lake itself has yielded an enormous assortment of bronze axes and spear-heads, along with a beautiful, decorated, round bronze shield. It is a place one can spend hours upon hours exploring, which we did. We visited at least one passage grave and two ring forts on top of another hill overlooking the lake.

A special note deserves to be made of the local farmer, Timothey Casey, whose legal address is Great Stone Circle, Holycross, Bruff, County Limerick, Ireland (ours here is Derry Cottage, Dromore, Aglish, Clonmel, County Waterford, Ireland. The way it works is that each of the place names is a sorting postal station: Derrry Cottage, or Great Stone Circle, are the exact places, and Dromore and Holycross are the most local post offices. One step up are Aglish and Bruff, which are slightly larger towns. In our case, there is one more regional post office: Clonmel, which is a small city. Then come the counties, then the country). Tim owns the property that the large henge and the smaller ones near it are on. He maintains them on his own, because he is obviously so proud of them he can’t contain it. He has a limp and a couple of other physical problems. So he stands at the entrance to the henge and asks for 2 euros each, with a cut rate for large groups. Some folks grumble, but I think it’s worth it for the welcome one can get. Tim met us when we were there in January a few years ago, and was just as welcoming then as he is now. If he feels you are friendly and nice, he gives you extras, such as more information, a post card he made of the summer solstice sun rising through the processional stones, and scenes from a book that show the circle and his children within it. Tim was so interested in our visit that he waited around for us to be finished so he could talk with us again and say goodbye.

What was remarkable is that he asked where we were from, and told us that the very last people admitted to the henge were also from Western Massachusetts! It gets even better: one of them lives in Wendell, which is right up the mountain behind us!!! We joke that Wendell is where Montague Center (that’s us) hippies go when Montague Center isn’t hippy enough for them (in case you’re unaware, Montague Center is major hippy-ville. That’s why we like living there).

As we spoke with the 3 women from Wendell and Springfield, I commented that I always mispronounce Wendell (stress on the last syllable) because that’s how they pronounce it in North Carolina. It turned out that, while 2 of them live in Springfield MA, one of them had recently moved from Chapel Hill!! She knew where Garner is! And she had interviewed for an administrative job at UMass and we had a fun discussion about that administration, while standing outside a magical 4-5000 year old henge in western Ireland. Weird world, isn’t it?

So anyway, it was a wonderful day. WE stood inside 3 stone circles, a half dozen stone ring forts, and a number of 4-5000 year old human homes. WE also visited one burial chamber and climbed and walked on three hills that were considered sacred, powerful, and magical. We met a lovely man who tends the henge and 3 women from our neighborhood back home (we also met a couple of people from the Arizona branch of the Society for Creative Anachronism). By the time we got home we were absolutely exhausted, but it was worth it to see this place without sleet. :)

To see more on Lough Gur and the stone cirlce, visit this web site:

http://www.nd.edu/~ikuijt/Ireland/Sites/cnoetzel/index.htm