The shores of Eochaidh’s Lake (from which the name Lough Neagh is derived) are tranquil, edged with farmland and small fishing craft. There is often a haze on the water so that you cannot see even to the far side of the lough. At these times, the vast stretch of water (the largest in Britain and Ireland) might almost be a sea. On days like this, is hard to imagine the lake rough and tempestuous, but it has claimed the lives of many who did not respect its moods. According to a local tradition, the lough claims one victim each year. The long shoreline is flat, lacking the dramatic beauty of Lough Leane in Killarney, and without even the small hills that encircle Lough Gur in Limerick. Like Lough Gur, this lake has great treasures of myth and story attached to it – many of them associated with how it came into being.
In one version of the story of its origin, Lough Neagh was formed when the giant Fionn got himself into a rage and tore up a huge piece of earth, throwing it towards an enemy in Scotland. The resulting vast hole became filled with water and formed the lake. Other legends claim that it marks the place where the lovers Eochaidh Mac Maireadha and Eibhliu went when they fled from her husband Mairidh, Eochaidh’s father. Aonghus, the god of love and foster-father of Eibhliu, assisted the lovers by giving them a magical horse, but he told them that it must not be allowed to urinate anywhere. When the pair stopped and made their home in Ulster, however, it did so, and caused a spring to come up, which Eochaidh quickly covered. However, after a time, a woman went to the well and left the spring uncovered, so that the waters rose to drown all of the tribe, with the exception of a single girl, Lí Ban, the daughter of Eochaidh. In mythology, Eochaidh was a horse god, and the name Lough Neagh comes from the title of the descendants of Eochaidh who were the sept who lived on its banks. Other more recent folklore tells of the magical city that can be seen under the water of the lake at certain times of the day – an alternative, underwater universe, which is a mirror image of that of the living people who inhabit the banks of the lake.
Although it has been established that the area around Lough Neagh was one of the earliest inland sites of habitation in Ireland, there are relatively few ancient remains on the shores of the lake. Those antiquities that remain are for the most part from the period of Celtic Christianity rather than from earlier times. At Ardboe in Tyrone, on the southwest shore of the lough, there is one of the finest High Crosses in Ireland. Tradition has it that this Celtic church was founded by St Colman, who mixed the mortar for the building with the milk of a magic cow. This was also a traditional site of Lughnasa celebrations, where the people of the five counties surrounding the lough met at the beginning of August. In addition to saying the rosary in the ancient graveyard, it was traditional to wash feet, hands, face and head in the lough, as if its waters held a special power at this turning point of the year. Like many lakes in Ireland, these waters have been under threat in recent years from the levels of sewage and fertiliser run-off from the surrounding farmland, resulting in a build-up of phosphorus and nitrates and the growth of thick, choking algae on the surface of the lake. This is a threat not just to the wildlife but to the livelihood of the fishermen of the lakeside – Lough Neagh is famous in particular for its huge stocks of eels, which come here from the Sargasso Sea. Measures are being taken to counteract this pollution, and work is being done to preserve the area’s environment. Such measures are welcome, for the power of this place lies in the water and the surrounding vegetation, rather than in monuments made by man. Lough Neagh is a place to visit for its natural riches – its wealth of waterfowl and plant life, and its tranquil, sheltered loveliness.
LÍ BAN THE MERMAID
A fisherman sat in his boat, far out on Lough Neagh, looking into its silver water. Muirchiú was glad that he was too far away from land for anyone to see his face, for he was weeping. His beloved had left him for a soldier, whose tales of wars and great adventures had stolen her heart and turned her head. What did it matter that Muirchiú himself was a fine, strong, young man, with black curls and ruddy cheeks, and that his father’s family had fished from these shores since time before time? How could his quiet life compete with that of one who had known battle and feasting and adventures? He should have listened to his sour old uncle, Conleth, who had told him that there was no trusting women. Hadn’t one of them even been responsible for the creation of the great loch itself? The lady Neagh, in her pride and arrogance, had visited the magic fountain of her people and left the cover off, and so the waters had flowed out of it until the great lake was formed, drowning all living things under its blanket of water.
There was a pull on the net and he moved swiftly to grasp it. Perhaps, he thought, he would be lucky enough to catch an eel … He tugged and tugged but whatever was caught in the net was heavier than any fish. As he pulled, determined not to lose his catch, or his new net, he began to feel worried in case it was some kind of monster – one of the great worms that live in many of the lakes of Ireland – which would pull his boat over and into the water. The thought went through his head that it would serve his sweetheart right if he were washed up dead on the shore. She would be sorry then. As the creature thrashed around, Muirchiú seemed to catch a glimpse of a silvery tail, the flash of fin. Finally, red in the face with exertion and panting and cursing, he managed to pull the net into the boat – and there, caught in its coil, with a look of pure fury on her face, was the most beautiful woman he had ever seen. She had silver hair, the colour of the lough water at sunset, and wide aquamarine eyes under delicate black brows. Her lips were red and the curve of her neck was as sinuous and graceful as an eel. From head to waist, she was delicately formed and bare of covering as a newborn babe, but from the waist down, she had a huge fishtail of silver and gold scales, like that of a salmon but a hundred times bigger.
The waters of Lough Neagh.
‘Put me down, you great oaf,’ said the lovely creature, thrashing her tail angrily. ‘Or it will be the worse for you and your children.’
‘And your children’s children,’ she added as an afterthought.
The fisherman held fast but, with one final buck, the creature flipped itself out of his arms and lay on the bottom of the boat, panting nearly as heavily as Muirchiú himself.
Muirchiú finally found his voice: ‘What class of a creature are you?’
‘I am not,’ said the creature in her curiously accented, archaic Gaelic, ‘any class of a creature, but the Princess Lí Ban, the Beauty of Women, the fairest daughter of Eochaidh Mac Maireadha and of the royal house of Ulster.’
Muirchiú began to speak, but was interrupted by the woman’s anxious voice.
‘Oh, look – there is Dogeen. He’s coming up to look for me.’
At the side of the boat was an otter, swimming furiously around the stern, making whimpering noises that did indeed sound like the cries of a distressed dog. The fisherman reached over and pulled the little creature into the boat, where it jumped onto the mermaid’s lap and started to lick her face furiously. She tried to pet him through the coils of the net, and then said, ‘Would you let me out of this tangle of threads? It’s very uncomfortable sitting in them.’
Muirchiú considered for a moment, eyeing her shrewdly. ‘Will you promise, then, not to jump out of the boat?’
Lí Ban sighed. ‘I promise to sit here quietly for as long as the lake is calm.’
Muirchiú, like all fishermen, could tell what weather was coming by the smell of the wind and the shape of the clouds travelling across the sky. When he saw that the lake was as still as a pond and the evening sky was clear, he nodded and helped the mermaid out of the net. She settled herself down on the seat opposite him and immediately began smoothing her hair.
‘So how did you end up half-fish?’ asked Muirchiú, curiously.
Lí Ban grimaced. After three centuries, she was getting tired of telling the same story to every fool who caught her.
‘When the fountain was opened and the waters came and drowned all my people, I was in my bower, with my little lapdog,’ she began briskly. ‘The water did not come into the bower, and I found myself face to face with the god Manannán, who told me that I was under his protection. I said that if I was doomed to live underwater, I might as well be a fish, and so I found myself a salmon, and my dog an otter, and sometimes I am fully fish and sometimes fully woman, and, then again, sometimes I have the upper shape of a woman, and I have been roaming the seas and the lake of Ireland these three hundred years. And very little of interest have I seen there, and certainly no one as handsome as you.’ She smiled and Muirchiú blushed furiously.
Lí Ban gave the young man a shrewd look. ‘I have rarely been foolish enough to be caught by a human, but I thought I heard someone weeping and was curious to see what it was about, so I came too close to your net.’
Muirchiú looked sheepish. ‘That was me. Don’t mind what I was wailing about. It was only some silly girl, but you are twice as beautiful as she is.’
Lí Ban looked unimpressed. ‘Don’t start getting any ideas, now. A daughter of a king would not be interested in a fisherman, no matter how handsome,’ she said sharply. ‘Anyway, I’m too old for you, by a few hundred years at least. But I will give you a kiss.’
She leaned towards him; her lips touched his and her pale arms pulled him towards her; her long hair seemed to draw him into a net of cool softness. At first, it was like diving into deep water – he was drawn down, down into depths beyond which he had never swum. There was music down there, the deep sound of the bottom of the ocean. Then it was as if he was caught in the coils of a great eel – it was pulling him, touching him, burrowing into secret places, arousing him more and more. As his passion increased, it seemed as if the water darkened and the waves rose, and he went further and further down into the dark depths of the lake.
When he opened his eyes, he was back on land, with a crowd around him praising God that he had been saved from the water.
‘What happened to you at all?’ they asked. ‘And how did the boat manage to come back to land through such a tempest?’
‘What tempest?’ he asked, still fuddled.
‘The one that blew up in a minute and was gone just as quickly,’ replied one old man, eyeing him closely. ‘The ones they say the mermaids call up by their singing.’
But Muirchiú was not listening – realisation was dawning as he saw the empty boat, and a faint, mocking voice came into his head. Lí Ban was saying, ‘I only swore to stay while the water was calm, fisher-boy.’
Ever after, Muirchiú would tell the story of how he had almost captured the most beautiful woman in the world. Indeed, he told the story so well that his girlfriend came back to him, begging to know if her kiss was as sweet as a mermaid’s. Many years afterwards, Muirchiú heard that Lí Ban had been captured again – this time by a cleric, at Inbhar Ollarbha. The story was that a dispute had broken out between the cleric and another priest over who had the rights to the mermaid’s soul. Muirchiú laughed at this, for he would not have cared about Lí Ban’s soul if he could only have had her body. The word got around that the dispute had been settled by the appearance of two magical stags who had taken Lí Ban to a church where she was baptised and, in the way of the Sídh who have taken to Christianity, died immediately. But Muirchiú was not so sure of the truth of that part of the story, for he often thought, when out fishing on the lough, that he could hear the sweet, faint call of her voice, singing over the water, and even, sometimes, the echo of her clear and mocking laughter.