Ciaran’s Peculier [sic] Blog

One day in late summer St Patrick was summoned to Ardee to sort out a row about the disappearance of church funds. He set out on foot carrying his trusty staff as a walking aid. His way went through Moybolgue in the rolling borderlands of east Cavan. The day was blistering, with a sun that beat down on the saint from an azure blue sky. There wasn’t a breath of wind. Patrick was thirsty and foot-sore and what’s more he was “out of his head with the hunger”. As he walked along he saw before him in the distance a beautiful girl with long golden tresses cascading over her shoulders and down her back. She had eyes as blue as the sky and teeth whiter than marble. She was riding a lovely white horse which was being led along the pot-holed road by a handsome young groom. St Patrick was a saint but he was also a man. He thought the heat had got to him and that he was seeing mirages.  The girl, horse and groom were riding along a hedge of wild bilberries, so close that the girl put out her hand to pick some fruit. Patrick watched avidly as her delicate mouth opened to receive the berries. As she bit into them the air was rent by the loudest clap of thunder St Patrick had ever heard. The sun darkened and clouds of acrid, foul-smelling smoke swirled around. The young girl was nowhere to be seen. She had been replaced by a giant hag with horrible, slime-green eyes shooting forth tongues of fire. With each breath this creature pulsated violently, spewing forth a suffocating poisonous mist. It opened its mouth to reveal a deep chasm, guarded by two horrible fangs which fell upon the horse and groom devouring both and digesting them with a stomach-churning belch. Not far off there was a funeral cortege. The mourners carried a   black-draped coffin. On seeing the hag they dropped the coffin and ran off, but they were not swift enough for the hag who seemed to swoop down upon them, issuing a cackle before consuming them. At this the hag spied St Patrick. Its appetite was not yet sated and it moved towards him, with the obvious intention of adding him to the bill of far. He crouched down behind some stones and held the staff he walked with away from his body. He waited until he could feel the hag’s malodorous breath upon him and taking precise aim propelled the staff through the air towards the hag’s forehead. As it landed between its eyes it exuded an ear-splitting screech of agony, followed by an ever louder exposition, accompanied by fire and multi-coloured sparks. The hag separated into four large pieces which flew through the air. As each one landed the earth was shaken as if by an earthquake. The air then suddenly cleared, the smoke disappeared and the sun-blessed day of late summer reappeared. St Patrick was in no doubt that he had been saved from the hag’s fury through Divine intervention, so he built a small wooden church at the site. In the later Middle Ages this was replaced by a stone building whose ruins still stand today.

Locals still point out the places where the hag’s miserable body fell to earth. These are usually large stones, sometimes relics of the last Ice Age. Opinion is divided though about their exact identity, though everyone agrees that the final quarter of the hag crashed into a lake causing a minor flood, though once again not everyone agrees about exactly which lake was the recipient. Locals also point to another stone with two distinct hollows. This they say was the stone upon which the saint knelt.

This story is interesting because it portrays Patrick as an athletic, action-man saint with his sleeves rolled up fighting the forces of evil. It is interesting that he is portrayed as using his staff like a javelin or a spear. Lugh Lamhfhada (the well-hung), the ancient Celtic God of nearly everything, was also supposed to be a good man with a spear. His was called Gae Assail and came from Persia. An early Irish text relates that Lugh’s spear flashed like lightning and brought instant death to whoever it struck. It would then return to Lugh’s hands if he pronounced the word ibhar (yew) before throwing it. Also the action is set in late summer, near to Lugh’s feast of Lughnasa, maybe in the month of the year called Lughnasa in Irish, though known as August in English.

 In the fifteen hundred odd years since these events Moybolgue has enjoyed a reputation as a quiet and safe place. A legend was long believed that the spot had not seen the last of the hag, and that it would return after thirty-three generations. Now let’s just say an average generation is a little over fifty years, and that the events described in the legend happened around say 450 AD … I’ll let my readers do the math.

© Ciaran Parker