J<::>URNAL OF THE COUNTY DONEGAL HISTORICAL SOCIETY clhore {])welfers and clandhiif clettlernents of .@ountJ) Q)onega/ BY J. C. T. !Mac DONAGH. Mrs. Brunicardi in her Essay Shore Dwellers of Ant:ieut Ireland (1) has ·published a very useful map of Ireland on which is marked the sites of known and partly explored middens a·ssociated with primitive dwelling places along the Irish coast. ThiJ:'- teen of the fifty-six sites recorded are in County Donegal ·and •Whilst some of these have disappeared again into the sand dunes I hope to ·place on record ·some new sites which have recently been uncovered or are in the process of losing their sandy covering. The Es·say, in so far as it relates to County Donegal, appears to be based on :W. J. Knowle:s's report to the Royal lris•h Acade;.qiy (2) and on Sir B. C. A. Windle's explorations o·f 1911 (3) Mac Gill's paper ( 4) wa·s my first introduction to this interesting stu.dy and the Dooey site. which he brought to my notice, has been examined regularly by me during the p81st four years. Dooey's chief attraction, the grave mound, hos suffered from mu~h erosion during these years and hundreds of human bones have appeared and disintegrated quickly with ex1posure. It is now obvious that the slender monolith (fourteen feet by three by three). brought from the other side of the Gweebara River, was erected as a pillar stone over a communal grave and 'that the smaller stones rwhiich continue to fall into eroded pits were used as packing to prevent the monolith from sinking into the sand built cairn. Beyond finding that flagstones were set horizontally and that small iTre.gul-ar g.ranite pillar stones were set vertically it is impossible to say if there is any intema.l structural evidence in the mound a·s bones, stones 252. a:J.d sand are now mixed in confudon. Two yea·rs ago Dr. Kerrigan and I visited Dooey and took a casual selection of the bones These were sent to Dr. Wamsley of Queen's Unive·nity, Belfast, and his report is now with the National Museum in Dublin. Our selection, taken at random, was found to rep-resent age groups from children to elderly adults (5). That this ma~s inhumation was a hurried affair is revealed in the manner in which the corpses were dumped and piledback to back heads to headsthe feet of one corpse across the chest of another-no two skeletons in ·a similar position. The hurried burial of such a large number of persons, of various age groups, is suggestive of a massacre or a plague ann from the evidence associated with the mound I am convinced that this burial gave rise to a commemorative "pattern" which was celebrated over a long span of years· and that the memory of this ,;pattern" ha5 only recently faded fr6m the folk-lo··e of the district. Very Reverend John Canon Cunningham, P.P., of Glenties, told me that he remembered when Stuckan Hill was a gentle grassy mound surmou>nte~ <by a solitary piUar stone which resemlbled the shaft of a large crorn. From the Stone's arp'IJ€a-:- ance. and a faint echo of tradition he formed the opinion that the monolith was the remains of a Market Cross. Mr. John Boyle of Dooey told me that, in th.e olden times. whenever children were troublesome local ;parents threatened to "take them to th:e Fair of Stuckan;" by which it was inferred that they would be sold to the fairies at the annual
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