An Irishman’s Diary on an ancient prophecy and recent floods

Televised images of residents and shop-owners battling the rising floodwaters on the main street of Athleague, Co Roscommon, reminded me of a prophecy I first heard many years ago from other children. My people had very recently moved to the Athleague area from southwest Roscommon. Our new residence was the Glebe, built in the 1830s by the Church of Ireland. The townland, officially known as Glebe, was formerly known as Gort na Sagart .

Going towards the village, I had to cross the bridge over the Suck and there I met a number of other children. They wanted to show the newcomer the great millwheel as it turned and powered the four- storey corn-mill. Looking eastwards from the bridge we saw that the weir and sluice gates held back some of the river water that then provided the power to drive all the machinery in the mill. Having done its work, the water rushed into the millrace and passed in a westward direction under the bridge. We crossed the narrow limestone road to view its progress. Securing toeholds in the ancient stonework, we dragged ourselves up on to the parapet and far below we saw the splashing and tumbling water as it rushed to rejoin the main stream.

“We catch eels there,” said one boy. “You’ll get an eel hook in Keane’s for a halfpenny and I’ll give you some perch line. And look! Look at that big rock in the river.”

Then he pointed due west in the direction of what I already knew was Mount Mary, more correctly Sliabh Muire, a prominent hill about five miles from us and across the border with Co Galway.

“Fionn Mac Cumhaill threw that rock from the top of Mount Mary and it landed here in the river.”

While I was marvelling at Fionn Mac Cumhaill’s ability to throw a large rock such a distance, I heard another boy say, “If that rock ever gets covered by the water, Athleague will be drowned”.

A prophecy

The boys were recounting a very old prophecy. When John O’Donovan visited Athleague on behalf of the Ordnance Survey in the summer of 1837, he recorded the tradition. Athleague at that time was Irish- speaking and it was in Irish he recorded the verse. By my time, three or four generations later, native Roscommon Irish remained on the lips of only one neighbour. A small number of people living around Sliabh Muire also still spoke the same dialect of Irish.

O’Donovan noted the prophecy as follows: “The Suck overflows its banks in this parish, and there is a prophecy that it will yet drown Athleague which will happen as soon as the waters cover the Liag Fionn which stands in the ford. The words of the prophesy are: ‘Baithidhear Áth Liag, Doitidhear Loch Glinne. Beidh Glinsce ina Fhásach’s Cluain Alas gan duine’.”

O’Donovan said he did not know who composed the prophecy.

Had he asked his friend and benefactor, Denis Kelly, the detested landlord of 14,000 acres with whom he was staying at Kelly’s Castle, it is probable that we would now know more about the origins of the verse and the significance of the references to Loch Glinne, Glinsce and Cluain Allais, all of which lie further north in the catchment area of the Suck. Kelly, for all his proselytising, was a learned and accepted authority on the language and traditions of the area.

Liag Fionn, of course, is the rock that Fionn Mac Cumhaill flung from the top of Sliabh Muire – quite a feat in those pre-steroids days! Athleague is Áth Liag and the name may be in some way related to Liag Fionn, although it seems to refer to a plurality of flagstones.

During my years in Athleague, I crossed that bridge many times and despite witnessing every year the truth of O’Donovan’s 1837 report that “the River Suck overflows its banks in this parish”, I never saw the river covering the Liag Fionn and certainly never saw extensive, impassible floods on the main street of Athleague.

Now that the Athleague part of the prophecy has come at least partially true for a second time, we should rejoice that Loch Glinne, Glinsce and Cluain Allais have been spared the dire fate reserved for them in the prophesy.