Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 29, 1918.djvu/242

232 and Longford, two large stones are shown as the place where the pig was killed. The people say that the French troops passed through this district in 1798, and followed the Valley of the Black Pig all the way to Ballinamuck, where they were defeated. Rev. Canon Naylor, in identifying the course of the Black Pig's Valley at the Bundoran end, says, "The Moy (Magh), a plain near Belleek, is known traditionally as the Plain of the Black Pig,—here they say it was actually killed." Mr. Kane calculates that the total length of the earthworks, exclusive of river and lake connections, must have been about 130 miles.

Of the legends, ancient and modern, connected with the Dyke, the earliest seems to be that found in The Tale of the Fate of the Children of Tuireann, one of the three Sorrowful Tales of Erin, where Cian, Father of Lugh, changes himself into a Druidical pig and begins rooting up the earth to save himself from the three sons of Tuireann, who are bent on his destruction. Two of the sons of Tuireann, however, are struck with a Druidical wand, and become two slender fleet hounds, and they pursue the man-pig till he reaches a grove of trees, where the third brother flings a spear at him and kills him. The main portion of the story is taken up with the terrible "eric" laid upon the murderers by Lugh and the almost insurmountable difficulties they meet with in obeying his demands.

Later versions vary the legend by making the ancient