Page 115 - Demo

Chapter Four 115
for more than two hundred years. (Some sources claim that Rathlin Island was the irst Irish site plundered by the Norsemen) After the raid on Lambay, the Norse forays became more frequent and one old manuscript tells that “great sea-cast loods of foreigners came into Ireland.”
Viking ships
With her many rich monasteries, her almost non-existent defences, her innumerable navigable rivers and broken coastline, unsurprisingly, Ireland soon attracted the attention of these Norsemen, and in 795 they raided the island of Reachra, now named Lambay, near Dublin; the name comes from the Norse meaning ‘lamb/ewe-island.’ The invaders plun- dered and sacked its monastery, and began a nightmare of continuous attacks which lasted for more than two hundred years. (Some sources claim that Rathlin Island was the irst Irish site plundered by the Norsemen) After the raid on Lambay, the Norse forays became more frequent and one old manuscript tells that “great sea-cast loods of foreigners came into Ireland.”
The Annals of the Four Masters describes their arrival as “Vastatio Ommum Insularum”-The Devastation of all the Islands. They came at irst in small isolated bands, and brought with them their own characteristic method of attack. Initially they conined themselves to raiding and plundering the islands and the headlands and made no attempt to found settlements. They would attack with lightning speed and make of in a similar fashion-in other words, they came simply as raiders, and plunder was their primary objective.
Ruman Mac Colmáin, the eight century poet whom we spoke of earlier wrote: “Tempest on the great sea-borders