VI.—PATRICK AT COLERAINE

This Camus, or, more correctly, Camas, ‘the bend of the stream,’ was about a mile south of the modern town of Coleraine, but it marks the ford or ferry called the Fearsad Camsa, which was the usual place of passage in ancient times. It was commanded on the right bank by the great fort known as Dun-da-bheann, the Fort of the Two Peaks, one of the greatest fortresses in Ulster. It is placed in romantic legend on the same level as Emania and Cuchullin’s fortress at Castletown, near Dundalk, as one of the keys of Ulster. It was also the scene of the Mesca Ulaid, or the Intoxication of the Ultonians, a tale well known in the history of the Cuchullin Cycle. This brings us now to the verge of the great Dalriadan Kingdom, which requires a special chapter.

The history of what was once the County Coleraine, and is now the County Derry, before St. Patrick crossed the Foyle, is almost a blank. The original kingdom of Ulster extended from the Drowes, near Bundoran, to the Boyne, at Drogheda, and ‘it enjoyed a succession of thirty-one kings, from Cimbaoth, son of Fintan, B.C. 305, to Fergus Fogha, who fell at the battle of Achadh Lethderg in 332.’ During this period Emania, near Armagh, was the seat of the royalty, that is, for 630 years. The power of this line of kings was broken in 332, and thenceforward they were driven to the eastern counties of Down and Antrim by the Collas.

But the Collas themselves and their offspring soon met with a similar fate. When Niall of the Nine Hostages came to the throne in 379 he was a very powerful monarch, and had a number of brave and warlike sons. They at once set out to carve territories for themselves with their swords in the north-west of Ireland. They did not assail their cousins in Connaught, who really belonged to the elder line of Eochy Moyvane; but they turned their arms against the north-west, where the Collas were weakest, for they had not yet time to consolidate their authority in those wild districts. So Cairbre took the country which still bears his name in the north of Sligo. Conall Gulban, the bravest of them all, got Tirhugh, as far as Barnesmore. Enda got the territory south and east of the Swilly; and Eoghan won all the country on either side of the Foyle, towards Derry, and moreover the peninsula of Inishowen, which still bears his name.

Thus it came to pass that Eoghan and his sons and brothers confined the Ulster-men to the south-west of Tyrone and the County of Armagh, or, to mark it more accurately, to the territories included in the diocese of Clogher and Armagh, but exclusive of the Maguire country in Fermanagh.

In the time of St. Patrick, therefore, the County Derry belonged to the sons of Eoghan, as head lords, but the whole of the County Tyrone did not by any means form at this early date a part of their territory. The eastern half was still an independent sub-kingdom under the princes of the Colla line. The County Derry itself had at the time two or three ancient families still in possession, but subordinate to the rulers of Ailech.