Carthend

Pagan Life and Beliefs

The pagan Celts of Ireland lived in a world of fear, from which the loving God was far removed, and in which they were at the mercy of monstrous spirits and arbitrary, insubstantial reality. They were people bound by unreasoned custom and superstition, for they thought that the world was full of hidden "traps" that were triggered by the violation of taboos. The power of the kings was rivaled or even eclipsed by that of the priests, who were called druids. The druids officially ranked next to the kings in social standing, but they usually exercised paramount sway, for no undertaking of any moment was begun without their advice. They were skilled in astronomy and healing; they practiced sorcery in the seclusion of oak groves, where their doings were hidden from the common people; and, through the power that they exercised over the whole society, they imposed upon the common people.

The pagans adored a divine being (though not necessarily always and everywhere the same one) to whom they offered sacrifices and from whom they sought all blessings, temporal and eternal. Crom Cruach, the "prince" of all idols in Ireland, stood on Magh Slecht, the "plain of prostration" near the Gothard River, now in the barony of Tullyhaw, County Cavan. This "plain" was a limestone ridge some 400 by 85 yards in extent. From the base of its eastern escarpment issues a strong, clear, and rapid spring, as if a river-god dwelt within his rocky halls beneath the ridge and poured forth this perennial fountain. The pagan kings and nobility offered firstlings of animals and other sacrifices to the idol. One source says that it was embossed with silver and gold and had twelve bronze statues ranged around it.

The pagan Irish theology embraced belief in the immortality of the soul, the transmigration of the soul, and a heaven and a hell.

Their heaven had perennial spring, immortal youth, and unending sunshine. Gentle breezes fanned it; pleasant rivers watered it; trees alive with celestial music and bowed with flowers and fruit sheltered it. There the wicked ceased to trouble and the weary found rest; the inhabitants, strangers to anything that could give pain, enjoyed an unending scene of calm festivity and gladness.

Their hell was a dark and dismal region where no ray of light ever penetrated. It was infested with every animal of vile and venomous kind. Serpents hissed and stung; lions roared; wolves devoured. The cold was so intense that the bodies of the wicked, of a gross nature on account of their crimes, might have frozen to death, had death been possible for them.¹

The pagan Irish year was punctuated by four great feasts. The year began on November 1 with the feast of Samhain. At this juncture of the old and new years, it was said the otherworld became visible and spirits roamed the world of men. (This was the origin of the celebration of Halloween.) Livestock was rounded up and sorted for slaughter or breeding at this time. Imbolc or Oímelc was celebrated on February 1, the time of the lactation of ewes. Its place in the Irish year was later taken by the feast of St. Brigid of Kildare. Beltaine was held on May 1, when the Mordháil or great assembly was held at Uisneach in today's County Meath, at which goods, wares, and jewels were exchanged. Sacrifices to the god Bel were associated with it and the druids lit two fires between which cattle were driven to protect them from disease. All fires were extinguished and new fire was brought to each hearth from the Bel-fire. This was also the time of the annual beginning of pasturing in the open. The fifteen-day festival of Lughnasad, honoring the god Lug, began on August 1 and was connected with the harvest.

Establishment of Tir-Keeran

In the generations following the three Collas, the claimed high-kingship of Ireland stayed it the family of Muiredach Tireach, passing to his grandson Niall Noighiallach around the year 400.

It was perhaps in the 420s that three sons of Néill Noighiallach named Conall, Eoghan, and Enda conquered from the Cruithne or Bolgraidhe (i.e. the western Fir-Bolg, and perhaps their Ulaid overlords) the far northwest of Ireland, the lands surrounding the Foyle and extending east to the Bann. There they set up the Kingdom of Ailech, named for its chief fortress, which is located on a hilltop between the Foyle and the Swilly. The fortress has battered stone walls, guard-chambers, and terracing on the inside of the walls, with steps to give access to this terracing and to the wall-top.

The sons and grandsons of Colla Uais apparently assisted the sons of Niall in this conquest and moved north with them. Colla's son Erc in one record is called "ri sliab a tuaid," king of the northern mountain.² His son Carthend was given land on the east side of the Foyle, the valley of the River Faughan, then called Dulo Ocheni but later named Tir-Keeran (Carthend's land) after him, and still today bearing that name as a barony. To the east, the Ciannachta (a Leinster tribe that also assisted the Uí Niall) settled in the valley of the River Roe, called Glen Given. The coast eastward from Ard-Eolairg (Magilligan) remained in possession of poor Cruithne or Picts; they had a fortress (Dun Cruithne) in Ard-Eolairg. Carthend's nephew Dochartach and his brothers were given lands southeast of Ailech at Ard-Sratha; their descendants were the Ui Fiacarh Ard-Sratha. Far to the east, on the west side of the Bann Valley were settled Carthend's cousins, grandsons of Fiachra Tort, whose descendants were the Fir Lí and Uí Tuirtri (from whom descended the ÓFlynns of County Antrim, along with the ÓFlanagans). Each of these territories was a tuath with its own minor king.

Of Carthend himself we know only that, born into a pagan world, he subscribed to its marriage practices; he had six sons by one or more wives and another six by bondswomen.

The Conversion of the Irish

According to the oldest traditions, it was in 432 that Patrick, the Christian former captive of an Irish chieftain, came to Ireland to bring the Faith to the people he had learned to love. The piety of Patrick no doubt impressed the Irish, for he always traveled on foot, slept on the bare ground, and recited the Psalter and a number of hymns and prayers each day. Patrick worked among the Irish of Ulster. A biography written some three or four centuries after his death claims that he came into northwest Ulster about the year 441 and evangelized the sons of Niall Noighiallach, then crossed the Foyle into Tir-Keeran, then visited the rest of the northern Airghialla. This story reflects the Irish political geography of its own time, not Patrick's. What has become clear after decades of study and debate is that Patrick was the missionary especially of the Ulaid. He founded his episcopal see at Armagh, perhaps in the 440s, while the nearby site named Emain Macha was still the symbolic center of the Ulaid, where their annual assembly or óenach was held. It was after Armagh was founded and probably in the 460s that the Airghialla, under the leadership of the Uí Niall of Meath, defeated the Ulaid once again and drove them across Glen Righe. St. Patrick withdrew with the Ulaid to Saul in County Down and Armagh was placed under the control of Sechnall, the missionary bishop of Meath. Armagh was thirteen years in his hands before Patrick was able to reclaim it.

It is not clear when or by whom the northern Airghialla were evangelized, but that it was by St. Patrick as claimed by his early biographers is not impossible. The old chronology of his life is not accepted by some today, for if it be correct he must have been nearly 95 years old at the time of his death on March 17, 493. As Warren H. Carroll has pointed out, however, he would only have been "somewhat younger than St. John the Evangelist, Bishop St. Simeon of Jerusalem, St. Anthony of the desert, Bishop Ossius of Cordoba, and Bishop Acacius of Beroea when they died, to mention only some particularly well-known and well-attested instances of longevity in this period."³

St. Patrick supposedly founded seven churches in Tir-Keeran, seemingly corresponding to the seven parishes of the historical period. One of his lives names them: Domnach Dola, Domnach Senliss, Domnach Dari, Domnach Senchue, Domnach Min-cluane, Domnach Cati, and Both-Domnach. (The word Domnach indicates a stone church, and often one supposedly founded by the Apostle himself.) The first of these was near the Foyle. The last, Both-Domnach, may have been not in the valley, but across the Sperrin Mountains in County Tyrone, at the place now called Badoney in the territory of the Ui Fiachra Ard-Sratha.

There is some evidence that Ireland did not embrace Christianity as completely as Patrick's biographers claimed; paganism persisted in some areas during his life and for many decades, at least, after his death.

By any measure, however, the conversion of the Irish to Christianity was remarkable. "We cannot but admire the omnipotence of God, and the power of His grace, in the rapid conversion of this idolatrous nation. So sudden a change can only be attributed to Him Who has the power of softening the most callous hearts; for it can be said with truth, that no other nation in the Christian world received with so much joy the knowledge of the kingdom of God, and the faith in Jesus Christ. Nothing can be found to equal the zeal with which the new converts lent their aid to St. Patrick, in breaking down their idols, demolishing their temples, and building churches. We may likewise add, that no other nation has preserved its faith with more fortitude and courage, during a persecution of two centuries."⁴

Ireland "was not compelled to the Christian culture, as were the German barbarians of the Continent, by arms. No Charlemagne with his Gallic armies forced it tardily to accept baptism. It was not savage like the Germanies; it was therefore under no necessity to go to school. It was not a morass of shifting tribes; it was a nation. But in a most exceptional fashion, though already possessed, and perhaps because so possessed, of a high pagan culture of its own, it accepted within the lifetime of a man, and by spiritual influences alone, the whole spirit of the Creed. The civilization of the Roman West was accepted by Ireland, not as a command nor as an influence, but as a discovery."⁵

NOTES

1. M'Kenna, Diocese of Clogher, I/237-238; O'Malley, 223; Healy, The Life and Writings of St. Patrick, pp 184-185
2. Book of Leinster 333.c.15; see O'Brien, 415
3. Carroll, Warren, The Building of Christendom; Front Royal: Christendom College Press, 1987; p. 124
4. MacGeoghegan, 1844 transl., p. 147
5. Hilaire Belloc, Europe and the Faith; New York: The Paulist Press, 1920

Saint Patrick brought Christianity to the peoples who lived in the extreme north-west of Ireland in the fifth century. Patrick gives us no information that can link him with any specific place within what is now the diocese of Derry or, indeed, within Ireland. All Patrick tells us about his mission field is that he directed his steps to "the most remote places, beyond which no man dwells".

The earliest surviving written identification of Patrick with places in Ireland is to be found in Bishop Tírechán's Brief Account. This document was penned some two centuries after the Saint's mission. When dealing with the area now known as the diocese of Derry, Tírechán has his hero found the church of Donaghmore in the Finn Valley. He has the saint proceed to Glentogher in Inishowen and thence into the Faughan Valley where he is said to have established seven churches. The Brief Account then has Patrick visit Ardstraw and consecrate Mac Erca as bishop there before founding the church of Tamlaghtard at Magilligan. From Tamlaghtard Patrick is said to have gone to work in the territory immediately west of the Lower Bann before crossing the river to evangelise the area around Coleraine.

Having won over the local king Patrick seems often to have placed a bishop over the tuath or small kingdom. But Patrick's imposition of a diocesan structure on his mission territory was foreign to his converts. In the sixth century the church became monastic in character. Great monasteries with networks of daughter houses under them mirrored the secular world where over-kings dominated groups of tuatha. Gradually the Irish church became monastic with abbots rather than bishops as the chief churchmen. In the north-west of Ireland the main monastic founders in the sixth century were: Saint Eugene of Ardstraw, now the principal patron of the diocese of Derry, Saint Columba of Derry, Saint Lurach of Maghera, Saint Comgall of Bangor and Camus-juxta-Bann and Saint Canice of Drumachose. The monasteries were centres of learning.

A number of medieval treasures associated with people and places in the present diocese are considered parts of the artistic heritage of Ireland. Chief among these are: the psalter known as the Cathach, the oldest surviving Irish manuscript, now in the Royal Irish Academy, and the shrine, now in the National Museum of Ireland, made in the eleventh century to enclose it; the famous book-reliquary, associated with the parish of Clonmany, known as the Miosach of Columba; the Crosses at Fahan, Carndonagh, Carrowmore, Cloncha and Cooley, all on Inishowen; Saint Mura's Bell, now in the Wallace Collection in London; Saint Patrick's Bell and the shrine which housed it, both in the National Museum; handbells linked to the parishes of Culdaff, Drumragh, Termonamongan, Badoney Lower, Donagh, Cappagh, and Clooney; the Fahan Christmatory, a tiny bronze vase for holy oil, dating from around 1100 and now in the National Museum of Ireland; the Mortuary House at Banagher; and the Maghera Lintel.

History of Saint Patrick's Old Church, Claudy: Cumber Upper and Learmount was the original name of the parish - the addition Claudy (a stony beach) is only a few centuries old. Archbishop Colton journeying throughout the diocese in 1397 came across a new parish Church on the old site in the townland of Cumber, near where Glenrandal and the Faughan rivers meet. Today the ruins of a church stand on the site where Dr Colton beheld one. The ancient tradition is that Saint Patrick built seven churches along the Faughan and one of these he erected at Cumber. Further down the Faughan there was another church. Poston's house in Kilcatten now stands on the site of this church.