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Under Lough Neagh : Sunken Cities of Celtic Legend (Ireland)

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Drowned Settlements of Ireland: Lough Neagh

Sunken Village - Lough Neagh

Sunken Village

Lough Neagh (Loch nEachach: the lake of Eochaidh or Eachaidh) is the largest freshwater lake in Ireland, and the United Kingdom.

Folklore has it that Lough Neagh, a 29 km long and 18 km wide lake in county Armagh, Northern Ireland, occupies the site of a drowned city and that buildings may sometimes be seen through the water.

According to an old Irish legend, Lough Neagh was formed when Ireland’s legendary giant Fionn mac Cumhaill (Finn McCool) scooped up a section of the land to throw at a fleeing Scottish rival that was fleeing Ulster by way of the Giants Causeway. He missed, and the chunk of earth landed in the Irish Sea, thus creating the Isle of Man and Lough Neagh.

Lough Neagh and the O’Neills

Lough-Neagh-Sunken-Barge

Lough Neagh Sunken Barge

The Lough is said to contain an ancient settlement of the O’Neills, somewhere beneath its waters. It is said that the spires of the town church can be seen on a clear day when the water is low. The town was reputedly built on the site of a magic, pagan well that never went dry and over which a stone had to be placed to restrain the water and to keep it from spilling over. One careless O’Neill woman distracted by a crying child, left the well uncovered and the water bubbled up and spilled over, submerging the entire settlement.

This legend was recorded as early as the 12th century by Giraldus Cambrensis – or Gerald of Wales- in his Topographia Hiberniae (Topography of Ireland), where he wrote how an extremely wicked tribe was punished for their sins by the flooding of their city:

It is reported that his lake had its origin in an extraordinary calamity. The land now covered by the lake was inhabited from the most ancient times by a tribe sunk in vice, and more specially incorrigibly addicted to the sin of carnal intercourse with beast more than any other people of Ireland.

“Now there was a common proverb, in the mouths of the tribe, that whenever the well-spring of that country was left uncovered (for out of reverence shown to it, from a barbarous superstition, the spring was kept covered and sealed), it would immediately overflow and inundate the whole province, drowning and destroying the whole population.

“It happened, however, on some occasion that a young woman, who had come to the spring to draw water, after filling her pitcher, but before she had closed the well, ran in great haste to her little boy, whom she had heard crying at a spot not far from the spring where she had left him.

Whirlpool

Whirlpool

“But the voice of the people is the voice of God; and on her way back she met such a flood of water from the spring that it swept off her and the boy, and the inundation was so violent that they both, and the whole tribe, with their cattle, were drowned in an hour in this partial and local deluge.

“The waters, having covered the whole surface of that fertile district, were converted into a permanent lake.

“A not improbable confirmation of this occurrence is found in the fact that the fishermen in that lake see distinctly under the water, in calm weather, ecclesiastical towers, which, according to the custom of the country, are slender and lofty, and moreover round; and they frequently point them out to strangers travelling through these parts, who wonder what could have caused such a catastrophe.”

Source  Chapter IX: Of a great lake which originated in a remarkable manner

The legend of the drowned city of Lough Neagh was also recalled in Thomas Moore’s Irish Melodies – Let Erin Remember in 1852:

 

 

On Lough Neagh’s bank as the fisherman strays,
When the clear cold eve’s declining,
He sees the round towers of other days
In the wave beneath him shining:
Thus shall memory often, in dreams sublime,
Catch a glimpse of the days that are over;
Thus, sighing, look through the waves of time,
For the long-faded glories they cover.

Source

There is folklore and legends of submerged towns and cities along the coasts and under the Loughs of Ireland, but history has deprived us of many of their names. In the book  Old Celtic Romances translated from Irish by P. W Joyce and published in 1920.  He generalised the sunken areas of Ireland as

Tir-fa-tonn, the land beneath the waves, an enchanted land sunk at some remote time, and still under a spell.

Source

Irish folklore regarded these mythical cities beneath the waters of Erin as home to Merrows, Silkies and ancient magic. They believed that one day in the distant future, the spell would be broken and these places of mystical beauty would rise once again into our mortal world.

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The post Under Lough Neagh : Sunken Cities of Celtic Legend (Ireland) appeared first on Celtic Myth Podshow News.


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