First Home?

In Ireland, and especially in Kerry, you cannot go to one historic site without tripping over another.

We had just left the cove from which Brendan the Navigator set out on his seven year voyage of discovery in the North Atlantic when I spotted a tempting brown tourist sign on the side of Mt Brandon.  We were in the Irish-speaking  Gaeltacht area so it pointed to ‘Cathair na bhFionnurach’.  It was a lovely May evening and the possibilities too much to ignore.  

Cathari na bhFionnurach turned out to be a recently excavated ‘dun’ fort/home from the 6^th century. Its view of Smerwick Harbour to the south and the Blasket island of Tiaracht gave it strategic advantages.  Defence was an obvious consideration in its construction.

Unlike other ring forts that I have visited its stone walls are still high and seven sets of steps inside it indicate its use as a look-out post. The single building consists of two conjoined clocháns (stone beehive huts) with a fireplace and an underground storage passage (souterrain) 5.5 metres  long.

The fort is not large, it would have held perhaps twenty people with their domestic animals. Most of the finds from the excavation consisted of simple stone tools for sharpening, scraping or creating fire. Pottery found on the site included fragments imported from the eastern Mediterranean known as B Ware. This type of pottery generally dates to the 6th century so the fort/home would have stood there in Brendan’s day.

The most surprising discovery there was grape seeds. The local Corcu Duibne people of the Dingle and Iveragh peninsulas were noted for their sea-going activities (no wonder Brendan became a traveller) and traded as far as France and Spain.    

Cathair na bhFionnurach was just one of 60,000 ringforts built across Ireland between 550 – 900. There are four similar sites near it, giving the area the name ‘Ballynavenooragh’ (‘The town of Fionnúrach’). It seems four homesteads were enough to form a ‘town‘ at that time!

These self-sufficient defensive structures were built by the growing number of farmers to guard themselves not from foreign pirates but from other adventurous Irish looking for land or cattle. There were no large town or fortresses for collective protection.

This began to change when men like Brendan set up small monastic communities which evolved into large centres of learning. These attracted business as well as scholars and became the villages and towns of Ireland with names which still begin with ‘Kil-‘, meaning ‘Cell’, of the monastic kind.

However there were no religious artefacts, Christian or pre-Christian, found in ‘Cathair na bhFionnurach’.  I was not disappointed. I had not expected to find anything as substantial as the sturdy remains of a homestead which Brendan himself would have known and greeted.  But in Ireland one historic site leads to another and not far up the road I came across a place which would give me a different glimpse into Brendan’s world.

More on that another day.