There
is not a conspicuous sepulchral monument in Ireland, the traditional
history of which is not recorded in our ancient literature, and of
the heroes in whose honour they were raised. In the rest of Europe
there is not a single barrow, dolmen, or cist of which the ancient
traditional history is recorded; in Ireland there is hardly one
of which it is not. And these histories are in many cases as rich
and circumstantial as that of men of the greatest eminence who have
lived in modern times. Granted that the imagination which for
centuries followed with eager interest the lives of these heroes,
beheld as gigantic what was not so, as romantic and heroic what was
neither one nor the other, still the great fact remains, that it
was beside and in connection with the mounds and cairns that this
history was elaborated, and elaborated concerning them and
concerning the heroes to whom they were sacred.
On the plain of Tara, beside the little stream Nemanna, itself
famous as that which first turned a mill-wheel in Ireland, there
lies a barrow, not itself very conspicuous in the midst of others,
all named and illustrious in the ancient literature of the country.
The ancient hero there interred is to the student of the Irish
bardic literature a figure as familiar and clearly seen as any
personage in the Biographia Britannica. We know the name he bore as
a boy and the name he bore as a man. We know the names of his
father and his grandfather, and of the father of his grandfather,
of his mother, and the father and mother of his mother, and the
pedigrees and histories of each of these.
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