There is a wave-motion in history - the past compressed into movements and migration - that brings a queasy sense of flux, as if tides were constantly washing us about like grains of sand. Prehistoric settlers undoubtedly drifted up along the west coast from southern regions, like spores in the Gulf Stream, to seed the west coast of Ireland. But they settled long and deep to clear the Stone Age farms they walled and cultivated - and gradually exhausted.' More than likely, the people dwindled towards extinction as the wet turf rose around them - our version of the Deluge.
In early Christian Ireland, too, the average person stayed at home. The king, the chieftain, the tribe offered security in return for allegiance. Whoever slipped outside the realm of that security fell into the cracks between the kingships, dropped off the edge of the world, risked being taken as an enemy or a slave.
There were exceptions. D∅bheargaigh were groups of tribeless outlaws who preyed on early Irish society, moving in the shadows and the margins - the forests and the hills.
A fian, on the other hand, was a band of young hunters and warriors who lived outside the structures of tribal society without degenerating into brigands, though the boundary must have blurred quite easily. Even at a distance of some 1,500 years and more, it's obvious that the fian would have drawn its members from the wealthier elite. The classic youth cult of the fian was ideal for the disaffected - younger sons crowded out of inheritance, or holding out for patrimony. Not quite mercenaries, these bands (fianna collectively) were available as military support. A form of organised delinquency in early Irish culture, they revelled in the standard obsessions - drunkenness, brawling, lechery. They may well have included raiding-parties such as the band led by Niall of the Nine Hostages to harass Britain and capture slaves.
Later, in the popular imagination, they acquired chivalric behaviour and rhetoric, and became the mythic Fionn MacCumhail and the Fianna. Their tradition is a rhapsody of pagan landscape and uninhibited journeying. Although sanitised in Acallamh na Sean≤rach - The Colloquy of the Ancients - by a synthesis with Christianity, the bravura freedom of the Fianna remains unquenchable.
Models of social responsibility on the other hand, the βesdβna, were the professional classes, including poets and master-builders, who also travelled freely and frequently. Clerics and church dignitaries joined this tradition later. The constant circulation of intelligence and craft seems to have yielded a remarkable uniformity of language and rhetoric throughout the country. The earliest manuscripts apparently show little or no regional difference. The mobility of the βesdβna may well be the reason why early Ireland had such an astonishing degree of cultural coherence in the absence of any political unity.
Before the time of Brian Boru, who was spuriously reputed to have made travel in Ireland safe in the 10th century, there was already a tangle of roads in the country - from the five main highways to the timbered trackway in the bog known as a tochar. Roads of all kinds were the subject of detailed legislation recorded in early texts. The highway (sl∅) had to allow the passing of two chariots, each drawn by a pair of horses. Local people were obliged to keep the route clear of water, weeds and obstructions. They were required to dig out the ditches on both sides, fill in holes, cut back bushes.
B≤thar, the modern word for any kind of road, originally meant a cow-track, as the first syllable suggests. It was a low-grade track, but the law required that it should be at least as wide as two cows - one head-on, the other sideways, each accompanied by her calves. This allowed space for passing without trampling the calves.
The five great highways are well established in legend, whether or not they were as clearly defined in fact. They may have been more notional than national routes.
They were: Sl∅ Mh≤r from Dublin to Galway along the Esker Riada; Sl∅ Dhβla, running south; Sl∅ Mhidluachra, north to Emhain Macha and the Antrim coast; Sl∅ Asail, north-westwards from Tara; Sl∅ Chualann, from Tara to Dublin and the south-east.
Despite the occasional landmark journey, travel was hazardous, with many areas impassable due to bogs. There were well-known points where the bog narrowed or strips of dry land intervened. On par with mountain passes, these crossings survive in modern place-names, such as Tyrellspass in Co Westmeath.
Occasionally a bog would transform itself when a midwinter frost seized the ooze and made it hard and hollow as a wooden floor. A frozen bog was an altered element, spellbound: the laws of nature were suspended.
In the winter of 1601, Red Hugh O'Donnell's forces were confronted by an English army in Co Tipperary as they marched south to Kinsale. O'Donnell's men tramped 40 miles non-stop under cover of darkness across the frozen bogs of the Slieve Felim mountains to escape. A seasoned opponent on the English side, Sir George Carew described this without a grudge as "the greatest night-march in military history". Not only were the iron frosts of a mini-ice age on their side, but O'Donnell's men were bred for distance.
Reading between the lines of Beatha Aodh Rua U∅ Dhomhnaill (the Life of Red Hugh), written about 1616, it is possible to compute the miles they covered on frequent raids from the north into Connacht and south as far as Clare. They travelled, ravaged and returned in a single surge, covering from 30 to 40 miles a day. The suggested daily limit for modern infantry is 15 miles. He was to become the last romantic hero in the mould of myth with a Christmas escape from Dublin Castle via sewer and moat, and a legendary traverse of the Wicklow Mountains in the extremes of an almost Arctic winter. A victim of his own legend, he was doomed to live out the destiny of the failed hero.
His life as written by a contemporary annalist, Lughaidh ╙ ClΘirigh - one of a family of historians to the O'Donnell clan - reads as a series of journeys that volleyed fiercely across the Gaelic landscape and out beyond the edge. He was that part of the Gaelic spirit, maddened by the threat of extinction, which hurtled towards foregone conclusion.
After the shifts and convulsions of the Nine Years' War and the catastrophe of Kinsale, 1601, the country was cupped like a cold hand against further spillage. Another extraordinary journey carved its lifeline in this terrain. D≤nal Cam ╙ S·illeabhβn BΘara of west Cork, the last of the southern chieftains, was still on his feet after Kinsale. His castle at Dunboy in ruins, the English deftly captured his herds - 2000 cattle, 4000 sheep - leaving the clan to virtual starvation.
He gathered his kinsmen and his soldiers and fled northwards over the mountains on New Year's Eve 1602, breaking out of west Cork via the Pass of Keimaneigh and Gougane Barra, with little but enemies in his path.
Two weeks later, after a flight of biblical proportions, his 1,000 followers reduced to 35 (one woman among them), O'Sullivan reached the Leitrim home of an ally, O'Rourke of Breifne, only to find the Gaelic cause completely collapsed.
Fewer than 30 years after the savagery and suffering of O'Sullivan's march, a series of profound journeys by a single-minded man would calmly lay out the threads of Irish history and learning for future generations to weave or tangle again at will.
M∅cheβl ╙ ClΘirigh, first of the Four Masters, a lay-Franciscan brother from Donegal, visited at source all the great manuscripts that were held in store by remnants of the bardic and monastic traditions throughout this island.
In a time of great transition, he travelled intricate distances, setting out each spring from Drowes in Donegal, hurrying from vellum to vellum, summing up in his tireless travels the endurance of knowledge. A scholar and scribe, he collected first the material for biographies of the Irish saints, and later, all the dense information - historical, genealogical - that he and others would edit into the great Annals of the Four Masters, an encyclopaedia of the past from the coming to Ireland of Cessair, grandaughter of Noah, 40 days before the flood.
There is no record that M∅cheβl ╙ ClΘirigh ever crossed the tracks of Seathr·n CΘitinn -Geoffrey Keating, historian, poet, priest - who was simultaneously combing the country and its manuscripts for a history of his own. Keating's ancestors were Normans who had settled in Ireland centuries before. This impure lineage made him an object of suspicion and resistance in the west and north-west during his researches - 400 years was insufficient quarantine, even for a priest and poet.
There is a legend that Keating was on the run in the Glen of Aherlow because he had insulted a famous beauty, Elinor Laffan, in a sermon. Her husband was Squire Moclar, but she was the protegΘe - if not the lover - of Donough O'Brien, fourth earl of Thomond and Lord President of the Province. When Donough O'Brien died in 1624, Seathr·n CΘitinn was free to come out of hiding and begin his journey in search of manuscripts.
Unlike CΘitinn, his fellow-historian, M∅cheβl ╙ ClΘirigh, had no foreign blood in his veins. He was of faultless pedigree: his people were hereditary scribes and bards to the O'Donnells - Red Hugh's family. Lughaidh ╙ ClΘirigh, author of the life of Red Hugh, was a cousin of his, and was himself one of the Four Masters. They were the fruit of 1,000 years and more of the βesdβna, the ancient elite.
But it is notable that, even in the 17th century, these native Irish scribes composed their work in the formal language of bardic tradition, inaccessible to those outside their rank. Seathr·n CΘitinn, the Norman blow-in, composed a clear, fluent Irish prose that gave new life to the culture he mourned. His work, Foras Feasa ar ╔irinn, was ceaselessly transcribed and read and became the basis of the modern language - although it was not formally published for 200 years. Keating's history may have been the last great European text to function powerfully in manuscript form, independent of the printing-press.
Despite the energy of their efforts in the early 17th century, M∅cheβl ╙ ClΘirigh and Seathr·n CΘitinn both believed they were composing the obituary of Gaelic culture, salvaging its saints and heroes, its verities and pieties, at the direction of Europe and monasteries that harboured monks in exile. Those monasteries - Louvain for example - were in some ways like the exiled court of the Dalai Lama in Darjeeling today, holding up a distant mirror to a spiritual homeland. Whatever about reflecting the present, such a mirror flashes a powerful signal to posterity.
The historians went about their exhaustive journeys, the details mappable in the case of ╙ ClΘirigh, since the order and location of the manuscripts he consulted is known. He circled and criss-crossed the country on rocky roads and muddy tracks, from monastery to private library to poet's house to record and venerate the past. What he and Seathr·n CΘitinn salvaged, without knowing it, was the future.
There is a powerful energy in those studied journeys, as opposed to the wilful rampage of Red Hugh O'Donnell, which is a great deal more than individual anger or inspiration.
It is a tribal urgency, a spasm of preservation that invests a sage in times of crisis with a sense of quest. Too late for help or justice, there is only memory and meaning left to be secured. A surgical task for poet and historian. In that journey into the severed past and out again with a cargo of identity lies the strength of the future - the intelligence to survive.
Demot Somers is a writer, broadcaster and mountaineer.