Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 24, 1913.djvu/121

 CoUcctauca. 105

An old tale of the same neighbourhood related that Finn threw a "finger stone" of a ton weight across the Siiannon from Knock- anure in Kerry to Carrigaholt in Clare. A similar story was told to me in 1S69 by an old man, Shaneen O Halloran, a retainer of the Stacpooles of Edenvale. A giant named Hughey in the days of Finn threw an enormous boulder from either Mount Callan or Loughnaminna Hill at a hostile giant whom it just missed, breaking into two. The pieces stand at the northern end of the Edenvale ridge, opposite the Kennels. The "Irish militia" {i.e. Finn's troops) made the huge, mysterious, many-gated stone fort on the summit of the Turlough Hill, south from Corcomroe Abbey ; so I was told by an old herdsman who crossed the ridge while I was plotting the fort in 1905. Other rock memorials of Finn I have already mentioned, ^^ and the Dindsenchas gives a similar legend of another rock, the Clock nan artn, " on which the F'ianne ground their weapons yearly." The tale previously narrated about the Tuam an goskaigh stone -'^ may belong to the Finn period, as it is placed in a Glasgeivnagh locality. The same nameless "champion" is commemorated in Barnagoskaigh ; he was defeated and slain at Doonaunmore fort because he had lost his " druid's staft"."

The sentence in certain c(^iies of The Battle of Mag/i Rath, which states that Chonan maol, the Tliersites of Finn's court, was, while worshipping the sun, slain and buried on Mount Callan, is undoubtedly a forgery of the late eighteenth century. It is by no means so certain that the ogham stone, so long read, " Beneath this stone lies Conan the fierce and swift-footed," is also forged. ^^ The name on the stone is very doubtful, and possibly Collas, and the epitaph probably a late scholastic freak. It played a great part in Irish archaeology by reviving an interest in oghamic script, but all legends connecting it with the band of Finn are

^^ Vol. xxiii., p. 90.

'-Vol. xxiii., p. 92.

tions of the Royal Irish Academy, vol. i.), surpass those of Oldbuck and Pickwick. I have told the story in The fournal of the Limerick Field Club, vol. ii, p. 250.
 * 'The five readings extracted by Theophilus O'Flanagan in 1788 ( Transac-