Carn Amhalghaidh

Mullach Cairn — Inauguration Mound of the O’Dubhda — Tír Amhalghaidh, near Killala, Co. Mayo

For centuries before the first tower-house rose over the Moy, the chiefs of the O’Dubhda were made king here — on a grassy mound at Croghan, a short walk above Killala Bay. Carn Amhalghaidh, “the Cairn of Amhalghaidh”, was the pre-Norman inauguration site of the Uí Fhiachrach, the dynasty from which the O’Dubhda emerged as the ruling family of north Connacht. The cairn itself was levelled in the early twentieth century and little remains on the surface, but the records, the surviving arc of its enclosure, and the landscape still tell the story.

I. A sacred site, older than the clan

Carn Amhalghaidh is almost certainly older than the ancestry it claims. Archaeologists identify it as a likely Bronze Age burial mound, modified in the early medieval period for royal assembly. A short distance downhill to the south-west lies a group of burial mounds and a megalithic tomb — a wider prehistoric landscape of which this cairn was a part.

The earliest written reference appears in the Vita Tripartita, the ninth-century life of St Patrick. Patrick enters Tír Amhalghaidh and goes to “the Forrach of the sons of Amalgaid”, where the seven sons of Amalgaid, together with Énna and the king of Uí Fhiachrach, were converted to Christianity. The term forrach, Charles Doherty has argued, can denote a pagan sanctuary. If Forrach mac nAmalgodo is the same site as Carn Amhalghaidh — as the geography of the Patrician text strongly suggests — the cairn was already a ceremonial place of the pre-Christian Uí Fhiachrach.

The earliest occurrence of the place-name itself is in a document of Pope Innocent III, dated 1198, which lists “Carn Amalgaid” among the comharba (mensal) lands of the diocese of Killala. The diocese, formed in 1111, corresponded in extent with the territory of Uí Fhiachrach.

II. The Cairn of Amhalghaidh

The medieval origin-tale names the mound for Amhalghaidh, son of Fiachra Ealgach, a remote ancestor of the Uí Fhiachrach. The twelfth-century Metrical Dindshenchas — the Irish “lore of place” — says Amalgaid “first trenched that cairn in order to behold his long ships, and to have a place of assembly to dwell in”, and that he was himself buried in it. A later passage in the Book of Lecan, compiled 1390–1418 at the MacFirbis scholarly castle at Lecan, sets out what the cairn meant to the dynasty:

“It was Amalgaid, the son of Fiachra Ealgach, that raised Carn Amhalgaidh to serve as a place of fairs and great meetings; and it was in it Amalgaid himself was interred, and from him the carn was called Carn Amhalgaidh, so that it is on that Carn every man of the race of Fiachra Ealgach, that assumes the chieftainship, is inaugurated.”

A later and more severe recension, inserted into the Book of Lecan by a second scribe, made the claim absolute:

“Every king of the race of Fiachra that shall not be thus nominated, he shall have shortness of life, and his race or generations shall not be illustrious, and he shall never see the kingdom of God.”

The passage those scribes attached to the cairn — the Uí Fhiachrach inauguration tract — is the single most important medieval document on the making of an O’Dubhda chief.

III. Two mounds, one lordship

The tract also records something unusual. The O’Dubhda, it states, had not one but two inauguration sites, on either side of the River Moy, which divided Uí Fhiachrach Muaidhe into eastern and western halves:

“Should Ó Dubhda happen to be in Tír Amhalghaidh he may repair to Carn Amhalghaidh to be nominated, so as that all the chiefs are about him; but should he happen to be at Carn Inghine Briain it is not necessary for him to go over [the Moy] to have the title given to him, and it is not necessary for him to come across [to Carn Inghine Briain] from Carn Amhalghaidh.”

Carn Amhalghaidh stood west of the Moy; Carn Inghine Briain (“the Cairn of Brian’s daughter”) lay east of it, in Tír Fiachrach. The scholarly consensus — articulated by Elizabeth FitzPatrick in her landmark study Royal Inauguration in Gaelic Ireland c.1100–1600 — is that Carn Amhalghaidh is the older, pre-Norman site, and that the eastern sister-site was only adopted, or perhaps fabricated as a tradition, after the O’Dubhda reconquest of Tír Fiachrach in the later fourteenth century. The sister site has its own page: see Carn Inghine Briain (Coggins’ Hill).

IV. What survived, and what was lost

In the 1830s the antiquarian Caesar Otway walked up to the cairn and left an eyewitness account:

“We then walked westwards towards a rath that stood crowning with its lofty mound a considerable eminence. I was pleased to observe that it was dissimilar to most I have seen, for the circular mound was not, as is usual, entirely composed of earth, but was strengthened within by a stone wall … From this rath there is an extensive view both seaward and inland.”

John O’Donovan, walking the ground a short time later as part of the Ordnance Survey, recorded the cairn’s dimensions — an enclosure with an internal diameter of c. 24 m and an overall external diameter of c. 74 m — and noted “round stones of very great size placed circularly” on the inner face. It was O’Donovan who identified the cairn as “Mullaghorn Fort” (Mullach Cairn — “the mound on the summit”) in the townland of Croghan.

By the time Hubert Knox visited around 1911, the cairn was “almost quite levelled.” The great stones lining the enclosure had been tipped into a nearby quarry, which had in turn undermined part of the ringwork. What we inherit today is the western scarp of the enclosure — a silent arc of disturbed ground, the rest of which was ploughed out. The site is recorded in the Record of Monuments and Places, Co. Mayo as MA015-044.

V. The end of the tradition

The O’Dubhda inauguration tradition did not quietly fade. It was formally ended by law. In the 1585 Composition of Connacht, Lord Deputy John Perrott met the surviving Gaelic lords of the province at Sligo. The resulting “Indenture of Sligo”, signed among others by O’Dubhda of Tír Fiachrach, required that:

“… the names, Stiles and titles of Captinshipes and all other Irish authorities and Iurisdicions heretofore used by the said chiefteines and gentlemen together with all election and customary division of landes occassioning greate strife and contencion amonst them, shall from henceforth be utterly obolished, extincted, renownsed and put back within the said County of Sligo for ever.”

With that signature, the making of an O’Dubhda chief on the cairn at Croghan became a matter of history.

VI. Visiting today

The site of Carn Amhalghaidh lies in the townland of Croghan, a short distance north-east of Killala, on the east-facing slope above the road to Ross. There is no formal signage and no public interpretation. The field is private farmland; the surviving curve of the enclosure can be seen from the road but should not be entered without permission. The view — westward over the Moy to Tír Amhalghaidh, and seaward to Killala Bay — is almost exactly as Otway described it in the 1830s.

Sources

• Elizabeth FitzPatrick, Royal Inauguration in Gaelic Ireland c.1100–1600: A Cultural Landscape Study (Four Courts Press, 2004), §2.3 “The Invention of Tradition”, pp. 68–76.
• John O’Donovan (ed. and trans.), The Genealogies, Tribes and Customs of Hy-Fiachrach (Irish Archaeological Society, Dublin, 1844), esp. pp. 100–1, 442–4.
• Kathleen Mulchrone (ed.), The Book of Lecan (Facsimile Edition, Irish Manuscripts Commission, 1937), fos. 72 col. c, 73 col. b.
• Edward Gwynn (ed. and trans.), The Metrical Dindshenchas, vol. III (Dublin, 1913), pp. 422–3.
• Caesar Otway, Sketches in Erris and Tyrawley (Dublin, 1841), p. 189.
• Hubert T. Knox, “The Croghans”, c. 1911, p. 95.
• Kathleen Mulchrone (ed.), Bethu Phátraic: The Tripartite Life of Patrick (Dublin, 1939), p. 134, lines 1541–8.
• Ludwig Bieler (ed. and trans.), The Patrician Texts in the Book of Armagh (Dublin, 1979), pp. 135, 158–9.
• Charles Doherty, “The Monastic Town in Early Medieval Ireland” (1985).
• Martin Freeman (ed.), The Compossicion Booke of Conought (Dublin: Stationery Office, 1936), p. 132.
• Record of Monuments and Places, County Mayo, MA015-044.