Scurmore

A shoreline station on the east bank of the Moy — alternative candidate for Carn Inghine Briain

On the east bank of the River Moy, a short way south of Enniscrone, a row of tall standing stones rises from the pasture. In local tradition they are the Children of the Mermaid (Clann na Murdúige) — the petrified children of Tadhg Ruadh ó Dubhda and a sea-bride. The site anchors the O’Dubhda foundation-myth in the shore of their own estuary, and has long been put forward as an alternative candidate for the eastern inauguration mound of the kindred.

The scholarly weight has, in recent work, come to rest on Coggins’ Hill at Kilrusheighter, where Elizabeth FitzPatrick and Dr Marion Dowd read the two-tiered mound as Carn Inghine Briain. But Scurmore has its own strong local currency; it is attached to a specific O’Dubhda ancestor; and no reading of the Moy ritual landscape is complete without it. It is best understood not as a rival to Coggins’ Hill, but as a further station in the same ceremonial geography.

I. The Children of the Mermaid

The stones themselves are a small alignment of rough standing pillars, set in pasture on the seaward side of the townland of Scurmore. They are unexcavated, undated, and carry no inscription. Their form — tall, leaning, weather-worn — places them within the broad Bronze Age / early medieval tradition of standing-stone pairs and rows found along the Atlantic seaboard of Ireland, but any sharper dating would depend on work that has never been done.

What makes the stones distinctive is not their archaeology but their story. In the oral tradition recorded from the Moy country, the stones are children — specifically, the children of Tadhg Ruadh ó Dubhda and a sea-bride — turned to stone at the edge of their father’s inheritance.

II. Tadhg Ruadh ó Dubhda and the Sea-Bride

The Tadhg Ruadh story belongs to a widely distributed class of Irish tradition: the mermaid-bride tale, in which a coastal ruler captures a sea-woman — often by stealing her cloak or her cap — lives with her, fathers her children, and then loses her when she finds the hidden garment and returns to the sea. The children are left ashore; in some versions they are turned to stone at the shoreline.

What is distinctive about the Scurmore version is the naming. The sea-bride’s husband is not a generic coastal lord but Tadhg Ruadh ó Dubhda, a specific O’Dubhda ancestor; and the stones at Scurmore are his children, turned to stone at the Moy’s edge. The effect is to bind the O’Dubhda line directly to the Atlantic itself — a rhetorical move common to Gaelic ruling lineages whose prestige was coastal, and who wanted their origin-story to reach out to sea.

The earliest printed record of the tradition is Caesar Otway’s Sketches in Erris and Tyrawley (Dublin, 1841), who heard a version orally during his travels in the Moy country. Otway was writing at exactly the point when older oral traditions were beginning to be committed to antiquarian print, and his notice is the reason Scurmore enters the written record at all.

III. Scurmore as Alternative to Carn Inghine Briain

In antiquarian writing of the 19th and early 20th centuries, Scurmore was sometimes proposed as the site of Carn Inghine Briain — the eastern inauguration mound of the O’Dubhda of Tír Fiachrach. The argument rested on proximity and on folk memory: Scurmore is immediately on the Moy estuary, within easy reach of Enniscrone Castle, and is attached to a specific O’Dubhda foundation-myth.

FitzPatrick (2004), working from the physical form of inauguration mounds across Connacht, rejects Scurmore in favour of Coggins’ Hill at Kilrusheighter, where the two-tiered mound deliberately echoes Meadhbh’s Cairn on Knocknarea and carries the right profile for a ceremonial cairn. Scurmore, on her reading, is best understood as a shoreline station within the same ritual geography — part of a longer Moy-to-Aughris stretch of O’Dubhda sacred sites, but not the primary inauguration mound itself.

That reading does not diminish Scurmore. It is a real site in a real ceremonial landscape, it carries a distinctive O’Dubhda tradition that survives nowhere else, and it is part of the answer to the question of how the kindred understood its own relationship to the sea.

IV. Visiting and Access

The Children of the Mermaid stones sit on private farmland in the townland of Scurmore, Civil Parish of Kilglass, Barony of Tireragh, Co. Sligo. They are not signposted, are not on the National Monuments Service public-access list, and cannot be visited without the landowner’s permission. Please do not attempt to approach the stones without explicit, local consent.

Sources

• Caesar Otway, Sketches in Erris and Tyrawley (Dublin, 1841) — the earliest printed notice of the Tadhg Ruadh / Scurmore tradition.
• Elizabeth FitzPatrick, Royal Inauguration in Gaelic Ireland c.1100–1600: A Cultural Landscape Study (Four Courts / Boydell, 2004), §2.3 “The Invention of Tradition” — for the judgement against Scurmore as the primary inauguration mound, in favour of Coggins’ Hill.
• John O’Donovan, The Genealogies, Tribes and Customs of Hy-Fiachrach (Dublin, 1844) — for the O’Dubhda genealogies in which Tadhg Ruadh is named.
• Logainm (Placenames Database of Ireland) — for the townland identification: Scurmore, Civil Parish of Kilglass, Barony of Tireragh, Co. Sligo.