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[38] This famous cemetery of the kings of pagan Ireland lies on
the north bank of the Boyne and consists of a number of
sepulchral mounds, sometimes of great extent, containing, in
their interior, stone walled chambers decorated with symbolic
and ornamental carvings. The chief of these mounds, now known
as Newgrange, has been explored and described by Mr George
Coffey in his valuable work NEWGRANGE, published by the Royal
Irish Academy. _Brugh_=mansion.
So spake Cormac, and he died, and there was a very great mourning for
him in the land. But when the time came for his burial, the princes
and lords of the Gael vowed that he should lie in Brugh with Art, his
father, and Conn of the Hundred Battles, and many another king, in the
great stone chambers of the royal dead. For Ross-na-ree, they said, is
but a green hill of no note; and Cormac's expectation of the message
of the new God they took to be but the wanderings of a dying man.
Now Brugh-na-Boyna lay at the farther side of the Boyne from Sletty,
and near by was a shallow ford where the river could be crossed. But
when the funeral train came down to the ford, bearing aloft the body
of the King, lo! the river had risen as though a tempest had burst
upon it at its far-off sources in the hills, and between them and the
farther bank was now a broad and foaming flood, and the stakes that
marked the ford were washed clean away.
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