A Study Of Our Local Portal Tomb 🌀

What I’m drawing today

Can we talk for a minute about how badass Mess Búachalla really is?

I mean, having been of royal birth but disowned, dispossessed and fostered in a very poor family, having experienced hard toil to its fullest, then raped either by some shady Tuatha Dé Danann guy with a penchant for glamouring himself into a bird or by her own biological father even (depends on the text), with an unwanted pregnancy forced upon her, and still she takes back what's hers, becomes the Queen Mother of the whole island of Ireland, and yes, the shapeshifting prick gets what he deserves (hence the bloodied feathers I put under her foot in this one).

Brave little flowers on campus on Imbolc day.

The Wren Prince II - Riding the Salmon of Knowledge

The Wren Prince VI - The Battle of Birds

Little lives (gone)

Co. Galway

A sacrificial boar in Tír na nÓg does not want to be sacrificed for Christmas

Bodb Derg son of Dagda, High King over the Tuatha Dé Danann.

Tonaroasty (Tóin an Róistigh, something along the lines of 'The bottom end of de Roche lands') is a medieval ghost village in Co. Galway I accidentally came across when out to shoot a stone circle on a barrow (I did take photos of it too). Judging from the onomastics (and from the satellite photos clearly showing rectangular foundations and what seems to be a cross-shaped church) it was an Anglo-Norman settlement, so built no later than 12th c. This also gives us a clue about how and why it ended. When the Black Death reached Ireland, the Gaels were in a more advantageous position than the Normans as they lived in less crowded conditions and did not have any religious prejudice about cats (hence, less rats and less fleas carrying plague). The Norman settlers were traditionally living in a more compact way, were in frequent contact with people from crowded castles, and the relationship between cats and folk Christianity soon turned to be rocky at best (to put it very mildly). Therefore, the plague was feasting on them at will, and it was one of the factors that contributed to the subsequent Gaelicisation of the surviving Anglo-Norman nobility. The plague hypothesis also explains quite neatly why the site has not been used for settlement again ever since.