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The heritage of
man in Mourne
Five and a half thousand years ago the new immigrants, the first settled
communities, with cultivated cereals and domesticated animals, spread
out from their landing places on Carlingford Lough along the flanks of
the Mountains of Mourne. With stone and bone they cleared and cultivated
patches of the well-drained middle land between the swampy, densely covered
low ground and the steep, thickly-wooded mountain  wilderness,
the lair of wolf and bear, but one where deer, hare, wild pig and a rich
bird life rewarded the skilled hunter.
Cattle became the mainstay of life in Ireland, the foundation of wealth
and influence, and families spent the summer months herding them on the
upland pastures, but no permanent settlements were ever established in
the high hills. The mountain fastness was the territory of the hunter
and the woodsman, and a safe refuge for the outcast, the outlaw and those
fleeing successive invaders.
Settled and secure on the cleared land around the Mournes the later neolithic
farming tribes marked and sanctified their territory by building a great
passage-tomb for their revered ones on the highest point of its highest
mountain and two thousand years later their bronze-age descendants piled
stones over the bones of their chieften into another high cairn nearby,
on Donard’s northern brow. The ravaged remnants of these tombs,
and lesser ones on Commedagh and the hills overlooking Carlingford Lough,
Slievemartin and Knockshee, are the only testimony the high mountains
bear to 5,000 years of human life swirling around them.
When iron made men better at farming and fighting, when the new Gaelic
culture and language spread through the land and, later, the new religion
took over the ordering of their lives, men of substance around the mountain
flanks built rings of high stone to protect their people and their stock.
Encircling the mountains like a necklace these cashels in some cases grew
in importance to become feudal citadels, and even, such as Kilmeloge below
Slieve Binnian, ecclesiastical centres of influence.
In the 19th century, land hunger drove people further into the mountain
valleys to seek a living, building strong stone houses to beat the mountain
winds. Today the people have gone, only the eternal winds move through
their roofless homes and sheep graze the cultivation ridges that mark
their labours and their dreams.
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