The Ulster People: 2 – The Elder Faiths

Posted on July 10, 2016 by
Just as these first peoples of Pretania (the British isles) were our distant ancestors, and we must therefore share many of their physical attributes — amended of course by the various invading minorities who turned their attention to Ireland in later historical periods — so also is it quite conceivable that we have retained some residue of the personalities of these early peoples, particularly in our relationship to the land and the seasons, a matter of life-giving importance to an agricultural community. Whatever beliefs they held — what we now call the Elder Faiths — have obviously long disappeared, yet perhaps it is possible to detect faint echoes of them in long-established rural superstitions and folk memories. Estyn Evans wrote that archaeology was now tending to “confirm what recent anthropological, linguistic and ethnographic research suggests, that the roots of regional personality in north-western Europe are to be found in the cultural experience of pioneer farmers and stockmen, quickened by the absorption of Mesolithic fisherfolk… One should probably look to the primary Neolithic/megalithic culture rather than to the intervening Bronze Age as the main source of the Elder Faiths.”
Professor John Kelleher commented: “The culture that reasserted itself in the fourteenth century and continued viable… down to the early seventeenth century was but the latest stage of the culture that had existed continuously and strongly since prehistoric times… We can be sure that much of it survives in the native population, if only below the level of consciousness.”The visible reminders of Ireland’s ancient inhabitants — the dolmens, stone circles and other burial monuments — are still treated with respect by country people. Tampering with these monuments can even today, according to some, bring bad luck upon the perpetrators, and archaeologists have been refused permission to excavate some monuments because of local resistance. At the beginning of the century W.G. Wood-Martin wrote: “Facts which show the resentment formerly felt by the country people at their disturbance, are well known. It is noteworthy that these former objects of the peasants’ veneration were erected by an early wave of population. It may be suggested that their preservation by means of veneration for traditional beliefs points to the continued influence, up to a very late date, of their builders.” Ironically, this veneration can today prove itself a useful ally to our present concerns with conservation of the natural environment.

In 1989 Irish documentary-maker Eamon de Buitléar filmed the wildlife which inhabited an ancient overgrown ringfort, which for hundreds of years the local population had left untouched because of their belief that the ‘little people’ still lurked among its bushes and trees. As a result the resident animals had flourished, with little fear of man. “Animals realise these are the places to inhabit. There are cases of council workmen refusing to make a road through an area containing a ‘fairy fort’ because they have certain knowledge of men elsewhere who were cursed for interfering with such places. These beliefs guarantee conservation.” A Fairy Thorn has been preserved in the middle of what was once a row of houses beside St Aidan’s Parish Church, Blythe Street (“Blythe” means “Happy” in Ullans or Ulster Scots), in the Sandy Row, Belfast, near to the former Watson Street, where I wrote The Cruthin. . I saw it again at the funeral of Charlotte Adams, mother of the former Lord Mayor of Belfast, Bob Stoker.

There has also survived in Ireland an extensive body of customs and beliefs regarding the observance of particular times, dates and festivals — centred around the practical needs of a people whose livelihood was based upon the growing of corn and the raising of cattle, in other words a farmer’s calendar. Kevin Danaher has shown that this ‘folk calendar’ was not Celtic, and suggests: “We may conclude that the four-season calendar of modern Irish tradition is of very high antiquity, even of late neolithic or megalithic origin, and that its beginnings predate the early Celts in Ireland by at least as great a depth of time as that which separates those early Celts from us.”

Estyn Evans summarised the importance of this long period of habitation and consolidation, remarking also upon the evidence of a regional diversity: “The [archaeological] evidence… reveals one essential truth: that we are dealing not with mythical ‘lost tribes’ but with ancestral West Europeans, physically our kinsmen, who were the first Ulster farmers, pioneering in a way of life which has persisted through more than 5000 years, carrying with it attitudes of reverence for the forces of nature and leaving indelible marks on the face of the land. The landscape they helped to fashion was to be the heritage — for good or ill — of all later settlers, Celt and Christian, Norman and Planter. Already by the late Neolithic, farmers practising shifting cultivation and rearing livestock had penetrated all the major upland areas in the province and had reduced considerable stretches of forest to grassland, scrub or bog.

During the early Bronze Age it seems likely that ‘much of the remaining forest was destroyed or degraded’ by cultivators and stock-raisers who had learnt to use metal axes and whose favourite cereal was barley, a crop which has become dominant once more in recent years. No doubt many forests remained in the ill-drained lowlands, but we must not assume that they were entirely virgin. Rivers and lakes among the forests would have harboured mesolithic remnants, and the damp lowlands would anyhow have acted as divides, so that different cultural areas can be discerned. Repeatedly, Antrim and North Down — the prehistoric core-area — stand out in Bronze Age distribution maps as a distinctive region, supporting a vigorous metal industry and a far-reaching export trade despite poor mineral resources.”

To be continued

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