I can't remember the first time I heard about the great Battle of Moytura that was fought thousands of years ago between the tribes of Fir Bolgs and Tuatha Dé Dananns near Benlevi, where I currently live. Like many epic battles, that have vanished from our immediate memory, the story of this Battle, its facts and fictions, have been woven into a complex web of myths, songs, ballads, and fairytales - the stuff of imagination.

One of the first sources that I heard mentioning it was an Irish storyteller Clare Muireann Murphy at the Cape Clear Storytelling Festival. There was so much playfulness and detail in her skilful telling that I felt affected and almost transported in time. The characters were so real, the gossip so juicy.

At the time, I did not realise that the events actually took place so close to where I live near Clonbur.

Then there was another source, a book that fell into my hands by accident from a dear neighbour and a great storyteller, John Joe Conroy. It was Lough Corrib - Its Shores and Islands bySir William Wilde, the father of Oscar Wilde, written in the 1860s, that describes and identifies some of the monuments left by each army during the four day slaughter.

According to the book, the Battle between the Fir Bolgs and the Tuatha Dé Dannan took place on the shores of Lough Mask and Lough Corrib, within a collection of fields that form a triangle between the villages of Cong, Cross, Neale, and Clonbur, at the foot of Slieve Belgadain, aka Benlevi or Mt Gable.

To simplify this complex story, the Fir Bolgs, a Belgic tribe of "small, swarthy, dark race" came from the east of Ireland, and moving across the plains of Moytura met another tribe of Tuatha Dé Dananns, of "large fair, light or sandy-haired people of superior knowledge and intelligence, which obtained for them the attributes of magical skill and necromancy; they were also musical and poetic".

Benlevi was where Dananns camped and probably lived and so, according to Wilde, prior to the engagement with Fir Bolgs, they gathered their army on Benlevi with "warriors, sages, Druids, bards, poets, and physicians, &c., whose names have been all recounted, and their prowess sung in story, so that through the whole thread of Irish history they remain recorded".

Benlevi is a special place. It is a rather modest mountain if you compare it to Alps, standing at only 416 meters, but it has amazing views stretching in all directions from every one of its many summits. I remember when I climbed it for the first time, just after Ed and I moved to this part of Ireland, my heart skipped a beat and it was like

falling

in

love.

Tracks and signs on Ben Levi, Mt Gable, Clonbur

I've always felt that this mountain was of great importance, not only because it is the first proper hill on the edge of the famous Connemara Alps, or because we enjoy its delicious blackberries and elderflowers, but also because, well, the mountain itself feels like it has seen a lot. And it probably has, as it rises above the sleepy fields, and heavily grazed hillocks below - the plain that is known as Moytura and from where the Battle takes its name.

The view of Moytura Plain from Ben Levi, Mt Gable, Clonbur

The Battle of Moytura, is anglicised for the Battle of Magh Tuireadh, meaning the "plain of pillars", or plain of the 'Tuireadhs', referring to the column or battalions of warriors that marched into the battle across the plains with their spears placed "like trees of equal thickness" and their shields "over their heads", writes Wilde.

The 11th of June, in the year of the world 3303 is when the Battle commenced. According to Wilde, it lasted four days and 100,000 men were engaged in it.

"Both parties were armed with swords, spears, darts, and shields, but no mention is made of either slings or arrows; so it must have been a hand-to-hand fight. They did not, however, forget the wounded; for each sank a 'sanitise pool' or medicated bath in the rear of their lines, in which the wounded bathed."

After four days, the Dananns won and Fir Bolgs only had 3,000 men left: "both parties withdrew after the fourth day's fighting - the dispirited Firbolgs to the camp along Corrib shore, and the Danannians to their mountain fortress. Both parties interred their dead; and it is said the former "raised Dumhas [or tumuli] over their nobles; raised Leaca [or flagstones] over their heroes; Ferthas [graves] over the soldiers; and Knocs [or hillocks] over the champions"."

Many cairns, standing stones, forts, and rocks and giant boulders simply scattered in the fields can still be seen today on the Moytura plain.

When we first moved to this part of the world, over three years ago, I heard different stories. Those were not stories of battlefields and blood, but of Aran sweaters, fishing competitions, and of an American movie TheQuiet Man.

In Cong, where TheQuiet Man was filmed in 1951, you can visit a Quiet Man Museum, can have a coffee at a Quiet Man Cafe, or take a selfie at the Quiet Man Cottage, but you won't hear about the bones and blood of an army interred in the fields where sheep and cattle peacefully graze these days.

But rocks,

they tell

another story.

It took me three years to discover those other stories, to create space in my head to look at the shape of land and its contours, to find bumps and depressions to help me imagine and remember something that happened a long time ago.

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There are rich stories that are unspoken, they don't have place in our every day speech, but you can find them when you are walking.

William Wilde spent many summers roaming the Moytura plain in search of those stories, mapping ancient rocks and cairns, and collecting artefacts.

Only a short walk from Cong towards Cross settled into the landscape and signposted from the road, is the Ballymagibbon cairn.

This was erected by the Fir Bolgs to celebrate the end of the first day of the Battle: "each Fir Bolg having carried with him a stone and the head of a Danann to their king, he erected "a great cairn" to commemorate the event."

What a way to celebrate.

Wilde has a picture of the cairn in his book from the time when he visited it:

"It is 129 yards in circumference, and about 60 feet high; and its original base may still be traced by a number of upright stones. Within it there is a large cave, but it is not at present accessible."

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From the moment I spot it from the narrow boreen where we park our Honda Civic, it is like a magnet to me, I want to be by it, to touch it.

The cairn looks small, perhaps because some rocks were used to build the many dry stone walls nearby.

When we visit one summer evening, we bring Wilde's book with us. We are astonished by the sheer beauty of this pile of rocks. We reread the description of the first day of the Battle and take in the views from the cairn's impressive height. My imagination runs wild with images and words. It is getting dark and I feel the presence of something very old and sad here.

Standing on this great and ancient rocks, I feel each second of those thousands of years,

the great weight of time pressing deeply into the soil.

The burden of its untold stories,

reaching deep beneath like roots of a tree.

And while its roots spread below,

the cairn also blossoms up,

reaching and spreading into the space above itself.

Stretching into the windy, damp air

that bind its rocks with moss and lichen into something beautiful,

into something for which I don't have the words...

I walk around the cairn trying to locate the entrance among its damp rocks, but in reality I am looking for something else, for answers, for meaning, for help.

I want to understand what it knows and I want to cure my own restlessness, to be rooted like a mountain or a rock, to belong, to know what I am.

I search in the holes, look between the giant boulders, but I don't move the rocks, I don't dare to disturb this perfect design, fearing of breaking the connection between the elements and spaces, disturbing the air and the shadows within it.

The cairn is a poem in the landscape and I am walking it.

Its beauty

gives

me

goosebumps.

I feel its metaphors in every rock beneath my feet, I breathe its rhythms.

and I understand

and I know.

I will be OK.

The poetry of rocks