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42 Stephen Dunford: The Journey of The IrIsh
mouth of the river at Drogheda was called Inbhear Colpa, which literally means ‘the harbour of a leg-calf.’ According to the late scholar, Dáithí O Hógáin, this account incorporates an archaic idea concerning the craft of seers and poets i.e. the light of inspiration which blinds. The Boyne has the mythic quality appropriate to rivers, an idea which must have grown out of the belief that the mother-goddess works through rivers and that she brings her fertility into the world through union with the father-deity in the sky.
In other words, the river Boyne would originally have been the wisdom-giving cow. This imagery is probably of ancient Indo-European derivation, as it is paralleled from a very earlier source at the other end of that linguistic world-Sanskrit literature, which symbolized sacred rivers as milk flowing from a mystical cow. In early Irish literature, it is said that if a person drinks water from the river Boyne in June he will become a poet, and as everybody knows it was by the Boyne that Fionn Mac Cumhaill is said to have acquired his wisdom from the famed ‘Salmon of Knowledge.’
Carved head of the River Boyne by Edward Smyth
Viewing with some trepidation the conquest of Northern Leinster by Connacht, the Kings of Ulster began to prepare against an attack on their territory by their powerful and ambitious neighbours. Accordingly, they built a line of defence extending from Donegal
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