THE HISTORY OF SLIGO.*

CANON O'RORKE has executed the task which he proposed to himself—that of embodying in his work the secular, religious, social, and in some measure the natural history of

Sligo—with such thoroughness, zeal, and felicity of lucid arrangement, that the reader cannot imagine there being any- thing worth knowing about Sligo which is left untold in these volumes. The author has had to undo as well as to do, to.

demolish as well as to develop, and he has a good deal to say in his interesting and instructive preface concerning his methods, beginning with the satisfactory statement that he has taken nothing at second-hand, but has gone in all cases to the sources. The following passage gives the clue to his own views, and shows at once that they are at variance with those of O'Conor and O'Donovan, two of the most eminent Irish archs3ologists :—

"It might be well for history, and particularly for Irish his- tory, if there were no such word as pre-historic.' The theory that certain things are pre-historic induces the student, instead of exhausting patiently and laboriously all the means within his reach, to class the object of his search as falling under it, when he meets with troublesome difficulties, little minding that what is pre-historic for him may be well within the province of history for a more intelligent or a more painstaking inquirer. It is the opposite presumption, namely, that all the remains of antiquity have their place in history if one could only find it out, that should hold the field. With such a rule and. stimulus for inquirers, we should probably long since have learned all about various County Sligo antiquities, which are now commonly consigned to the limbo of pre-historic times, as, for example, the circles and cromlechs of Carrowmore, the remains at Moytura, and that pre-historic relic, par excellence, the Druids' altar of Calry Deerpark."

With legends the Canon will have nothing to do ; but he is.

scrupulously observant of antiquities, although he knocks 2,401 years off the supposed age of the most famous of those

with which his History deals, placing the rude stone monu- ments of Carrowmore in the sixth century of the Christian era, instead of Anno Mundi 3330. He enumerates several instances in which the antiquities of Sligo have been pre- posterously antedated, claims to have identified many historical

places which had previously baffled inquiry—(probably because the searchers tried too far back), especially the Church of Bishop Lugid, in which the great Saint Kevin of Glendalough was ordained, and which the Saint's biographers, native and foreign, have all failed to find out—and vigorously refutes, as "grave errors," the statements of O'Conor and O'Donovan respecting the religious state of Ireland in the remote past. "I show," writes Canon O'Rorke, "that the reason on which the former forms his notions respecting Moon-worship in the

• The Hietory of Sligo : Town and County. By T. frItorke. D.D , Author of" Ballysadare and Kilvarnet." Dublin: James Duffy and Co.

country is an idle fancy, and the facts from which O'Donovan tries to deduce the practice of Druidical worship among our ancestors, so late as the sixth century, are misunderstood by him, though if rightly understood, they lead to no such con- elnsion." He sweeps away the notion of science, arts, and arms having flourished in Ireland in pre-Christian times, maintaining, with Sir James Ferguson, and Father Innes in his Critical Essay on the Ancient Inhabitants of the Northern Parts of Britain or Scotland, that Ireland was in those days utterly unlettered and barbarous, and adding : "If the opinions of the learned progress for some time farther in the s2me direction, before long all or nearly all the existing antiquities of the country will be brought within the Christian era."

If the unlearned reviewer may express an opinion upon the difference of doctors, ours is, that in his profoundly interesting first volume, Canon O'Rorke fully justifies his position ; dis- poses of the shadowy city of Nagnata ; identifies the field of the Battle of Sligo ; proves that not the town but the river of Sligo is meant ; connects the Carrowlnore circular stones and cromlechs with that event; and shows that the so-called Druids' altars are rude monuments to the memory of the slain, erected by their comrades (who remained for many nights and days upon the field of battle), the most important of the fallen being no doubt commemorated by the biggest "altar."

The whole district above-mentioned abounded in the Ox stone. Here is the concise record of the battle, given in the Annals of the Four Masters :—" The Battle of Sligerich [Sligo], by Fergus and Domhnall, the two sons of Muircheartach Mac Earca*; by Ainmire, son of Sedna, and Ainnidh, son of Duach, against Eoghan Bel, King of Connaught. They routed the forces before them, and Eoghan Bel was slain, of which was said :—

" The battle of the IIi-Fiachrach was fought With fury of edged weapons against Bel, The kine of the country roared with the javelins. The battle was spread out at Crinder. The Sligeach bore to the great sea

Tho blood of men with their flesh.

They carried many trophies across Eabha, Together with the head of Eoghan Bel."

All the forces of 'Ulster and Connaught were arrayed against each other in this great battle. Canon O'Rorke observes From the line, The kine of the country roared with the javelins,' we learn the curious fact that the stratagem of the insurgents of 1798, of driving cattle before them at the Battle of New Ross, to receive-the first onset of the battle, was made use of 1,300 years earlier by the Connaught men in the Battle of Sligo." The chapters of Canon O'Rorke's History that deal with the antiquities of the county, its ancient history, its former people, its raths, cairns, giants' graves, fortresses, old castles, and religious houses, are full of interest.. While he is never tedious, the writer is singularly exact and minute in the details of his subject, and his abandonment of the mythical chronology, which has no doubt discouraged many by its vague- ness and the difficulty of realising the supposed periods in even the approximate degree which is necessary for the creation -of interest, adds very considerably to the charm of the work.

Between the date of the Battle of Sligo and the thirteenth century there is not much to tell, nor does it appear that a town existed of any importance until the latter period. But then the Canon takes up the tale again, and gives us charming chapters about the Fitzgeralds. What a fine fellow was Maurice Fitzgerald, Sir Bernard Burke's "Patriarch of the house of Kildare," and the real founder of the town of Sligo, which was plundered and burned by his foe O'Donnell, who slew great numbers of the English there." These two chieftains deserve to find a chronicler like Sir Walter Scott; there is hardly a stranger page in history than that which

tells the earthly end of each. After them come the O'Conors, and Canon O'Rorke gives a most stirring account of that powerful race, of whom Murtough was the first styled Lord of Carbury in the Annals of Sligo, a title which they carried until 1636, when Teige, the chief of that day, took the title of

the O'Conor Sligo. This epoch is so romantic, that to pass on to the wretched record of religious persecution and shocking cruelty, to the narrative of the deeds of the monster Sir Frederick Hamilton and the " Tituladoes," to the Cromwellian period—a terrible time, though Cromwell never set foot in Sligo or any other county of Connaught—and to the "great exodus" from Sligo, is more than sobering to the spirits of

• The renowned "Hector of the O'Neills."

the reader. One of the most important chapters in the book is that on "Sligo in the Seventeenth Century;" it is not only full of local interest and information of every kind, but it is a striking picture of the period and the people throughout the whole of Ireland. The famous abbey, or rather convent, of Sligo (for "convent," the author tells us, is the correct desig- nation of a Dominican monastery), partly built by Maurice Fitzgerald, burned in 1414, rebuilt, and maintained until the dark days of the great exodus, but then abandoned, and now a venerable ruin, forms the subject of a most interesting chapter, which is succeeded by a 'history of the Borough of Sligo, with some curious remarks upon the various Corpora- tion seals.

Of the towns and villages, the buildings and the ruins, the natural features of the county, the rivers, lakes, hills, mountains, and islands ; of the industries of the past, the customs of the people, their religious observances, their morals and manners, their education and characteristics, the author writes with freshness of perception, familiarity of knowledge, and fullness of sympathy which must needs force the reader to feel interest in the book, although the name of the great Irish county had been to him heretofore merely a geographical expression. Henceforth he may know it "like his hand," for Canon O'Rorke posts him up to the latest date, from the earliest, and for topographical information the History is actually a guide-book. With all parts of his subject the Canon is equally at home, and his style is so happy, because it is so spontaneous and simple, that he makes every part of it equally attractive.