A banquet of ringforts - Village Magazine

November/December 2020 73

HE TITLE of the delihtful ‘The Men

Who Eat Rinforts’ ratifyinly,

replicates the headline for a typically

incisive article by Tony Lowes

published in this maazine in .

It complained that there was no leal protection

for rinforts.

Sinead Mercier grew up in AnCheathrú Rua

and got a ﬁrst-class honours law degree from

Trinity. She was the primary researcher for the

Green Party but has now resigned from the

party. She is the daughter of Paul Mercier, play

wright, of the Passion Machine.

Michael Holly is an artist and non-ﬁction ﬁlm

maker.

Ringforts are also known as fairy forts and

are the most common archaeological feature

in Ireland. They are circular mounds often sur

rounded by trees; some are natural, more were

originally stone- or wood- surrounded and were

used as forts for housing between 600 and 900

A.D. Some are much larger: Newgrange and

Tara. Strangely, some were used for burial of

the unbaptised. The fairy forts are generally

seen as the mythological underworld of ‘the

good people’ who are not ordinary fairies but

the spirit of the land, part of a belief that the

cosmos is a living organism. They look like us:

are mischievous, but are deadly if disturbed.

This sets the tone for the book. The fairy forts

are spiritual and emblematic, poetic dwellings,

a “letting things be”. They are being casually

disturbed, indeed destroyed, by the current

generation. Sadly it appears around 34% or

ring forts have been destroyed since the 1820s

and a further 10% cannot be located.

A banquet of ringforts

by Michael Smith

Michael Smith reviews ‘The Men who eat

Ringforts’ by Sinéad Mercier and Michael Holly,

featuring Eddie Lenihan

Mercier’s prose is unusually vibrant and rich,

often exhilarating: “A fairy fort cannot be

described as neutralised, abstract space. It

has a recalcitrant materiality of its own. It

exists as a clearing”.

Sinéad Mercier makes the arresting case

that Enlightenment rationality discredits all

perspectives of nature that do not “instru

mentalise towards the ends of the market or a

particular productivist deﬁnition of science”.

She denigrates modernity’s reduction of pre-

Enlightenment beliefs to mere superstition.

The book is a fabulous admixture of the po

etic and the forensic. It is lavishly footnoted,

and illustrated.

Mercier’s prose is unusually vibrant and rich,

often exhilarating: “A fairy fort cannot be de

scribed as neutralised, abstract space. It has a

recalcitrant materiality of its own. It exists as a

clearing”. There is no cliché here.

She outlines the uselessness of the National

Monuments Acts - intrinsically toothless they

were defanged by Dick Roche around the time

the large road was built near Tara. They em

brace fairy forts, in theory. Their calculated

uselessness has been laid bare from Wood

Quay through Tara, Carrickmines, Kilcullen and

Waterford: débacles all. She might also have

mentioned they were useless to prevent the

1997 destruction of ringforts of Tailteann the

site of Ireland’s ancient Games, in Meath.

The only environmental legislation with teeth

comes through the transposition of EU law. But

in any event law “refuses to venture beyond

the limited Cartesian spatiality of quantiﬁable,

ﬁxed on a map, empirical, absolute space”,

making nature interdependent with men and

giving it no value of its own. She inveighs

against nationality and “heritagisation” and

culture as resource.

Mercier dates Irish environmentalism not to

reaction against the destruction of Georgian

buildings but to Carnsore and the reaction

against nuclear which she traces through Shell

to Sea. She says Ireland has a history based on

a concept of spatial justice. I think there was

a sense of spatial justice but not in modern

times. Even ringforts were thought to be Viking

until the nineteenth century. I don’t think Carn

sore or Shell to Sea, isolated protests, reveal

deep-rooted Irish environmentalism.

Mercier makes the charitable case that the

destruction is not down to the rural public

but the system which she castigates as the

Lawscape. I do not think there is any evidence

that there is a well of Irish environmentalism

ready to be tapped. And I think it is a pity in the

end she does not identify the men eating the

ringforts.

Her solution seems to be people’s emplace

ment in land. Urbanists might prefer people’s

emplacement in cities but hers is a tenable

view, one passable as radical and even sustain

able albeit it was also De Valera’s.

A few quibbles: Cluain Meala - Clonmel - is

the meadow, not valley, of honey. She claims

the “majority of remaining ringforts largely re

main on rich pastoral and zoned development

land”. There does not appear to be survey evi

dence to this eect and it is unlikely since only

a small percentage of the island is zoned.

There are other essays, by Michael Holly. In

the ﬁrst he describes the ﬁnding of a henge near

Newgrange by a drone in 2018 made possible

because its outline was revealed by the hot

test summer on record. In another essay Holly

and folklorist Eddie Lenihan seek out damaged

ringforts in County Clare. One near Doonbeg

was cut in half as long ago as around 1840.

Typically the men visit a local house to ﬁnd out

the view on the ringfort. A man at Cooraclare

says a fairy fort was demolished and within a

week the farmer was dead. The man says his

parents told him not to play near the area.

Lenihan once told Clare FM that a damaged

fairy fort between Crusheen and Gort was caus

ing motorway accidents. The National Roads

Authority phoned in to say it was caused by “a

microclimate”.

This is a lovely book that will advance popu

lar outrage and private contemplation about

the place of the land.

ENVIRONMENT