 should have actually looked over my shoulder, sorry. So yeah it's based on a couple of projects. One is my doctoral research over the course of the nice short nine years with James Barrett and Cambridge and it's also combined with my new project on a prosopography of the North of Ireland. So seeing as there were so many people today talking about Scotland I decided to stay on the Irish side of the North channel just in case there were a lot more people in the room that know more than I do. And as it turns out there are. Okay so look I'm keeping people from their coffee so I'll just fly through some of this stuff. What I would say is the textual narrative that we have is extremely problematic. Very. Things like the Dahl Reata, the Dahl Feetak which we associate with the power of the Dahl Narda on either side of the North channel are all at the very earliest 7th century inventions. So and even the Dahl Feetak they usually get left off that list. But the reality is you've got something a bit more like the Kenal Dibban, the Kenal Ghamran, the Kenal Kogel, the Kenal Nyaktach, the Krytna Elnya, the Ichelbad Elnya or the Ichelbad Tsargodad and the Ichakobo and they all emerge as the dominant groups around this time probably 56th century. But what I'm going to try and argue today is that there might have been other groups who were obscured by this rise because when you get yourself into a position of power you pay a genealogist to justify you being there and go well look this fellow's the great great grandson of Adam of course it is or sometimes hers. So before I go once and isn't talking about kingdoms I'll do this very briefly. What I would say is to be a kingdom you have to have a king. Okay first off now that might sometimes be a regularly rather than a Rex because this is one of the problems with the Irish reed it's not directly semantically equivalent to king it's more different grades of sort of kingship and things like that. I've got another paper that argues all it is it's complex but not that complex but just know that between any languages anyone who speaks two languages knows there are very few hundred percent correlations. So what I would argue would have to have a concentration of people to have a kingdom and you have to have a you have to have a concentration of resources ideological economic political and military resources that's from man 1986 tilly 92 and Robert Elias back in 1939. Did that go on? No. Well I think you probably used up all my batteries. It's working now of course as soon as I said something it flew on four slides. So look the textual narrative as I already said is very very complicated and for those of you familiar with Irish text basically just like we're trying to do today there were scholars in the 10th century that said all of this is really messy let's make it a bit more rational a bit more normal. If one of you had fallen I would have gotten out of it. A bit more rational yeah a bit more normalized so what they did was try and force everything into what was what they decided was to receive wisdom. Now that could be for political reasons but sometimes just for scholarly reasons and what I would argue is that there are some texts that were very very very very influential in this respect. So the Vita tripartita which unlike Paddy I would see is about 930 dating to the reign of or the absi of Yosuf of Armah who is a member of the the Canal Lorne from from Westland Scotland and I think that all that suffered the Dalry it and there is there to impress him. But there's a lot of other stuff in there and a lot of it got overwritten a lot of it got written into sets of annals that were being transcribed so you got a lot of late stuff and started in and pretending to be early stuff. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to try and look at some of the other stuff that's in there to see how we get on. So just before I go on here's some settlements so basically I'll just run around the map so up here you have the Krypton area possibly the Dalry is up here they're around but I don't think very early and you have the qued right here and this great big patch and no surprise that they're pretty much the second most powerful dynasty all the way through. You have the Dal Fiatok here the Iyaka Garja here possibly another branch of the Dal Fiatok here the Barca here you've got the Iyaka Kobo here and yeah that'll do that's too much information as it is. But you can see there are clusters of settlements yeah so each one of these is based on something with clusters of settlements so I kind of put superimposed the more high status settlements and you'd see that there is some kind of correlation either with the center of one of these areas or with its edges because you think about a warrior aristocracy. So then over here I've got the more iron edge and 300 to 600 300 to 700 stuff and again you get clusters here but you've also got some stuff that's hard to explain down here and of course there's the Krytna Nylja who were I would imagine a returning Federati from the Roman Empire and I think that that's what's lying behind the ladder the stuff that's going on just at the dawn of textual recording in Ireland. So just keep those in mind if you can and here's some stuff about settlement and here's a cumulative curve of all the different farms of enclosed settlement from the kingdom of Olid that's according to value of one to anything that would fall within a certain range and here's the diagrams on which they were based but what I would like you to pay attention to is this chrono here because you will need that in a minute and also the iron edge dates from Neolithic enclosures that were reoccupied in the iron edge and there's done several confactions when you've only got two little dots. What can you do? But yeah you can see a lot of the stuff is later but occasionally there's some stuff that pushes earlier. So a bit problematic. How long have I got? About nine minutes. Oh yeah Grant it's always better to just check these things you know sometimes someone turns on and is already waving the stop saying that you're... So the first group I want to talk about are the Korko Oche. Anyone ever heard of them? Yeah well. So the Korko Oche are later on they're they're bashed into the Ijakko Kain who are a very very problematic group but were probably very important but later on the Kwedelbad when they got people to rewrite their genealogies had them descended from their progenitors second family. So he had one family with a very high status queen then a second family with a lower status queen and they're from the second family and the Donardia all descended back from the first family the Laharna, the Ijakkovo. So this is all these various peoples were put together they're probably never related but it's a great way to stop killing each other going ah close stop but yeah another thing that happened today the Korko Oche so first of all they're subverted into this genealogy probably quite late actually I'm not quite sure that these genealogies are all that early but by the 11th century anyways they're being treated as a very very minor branch of one of the more dominant dynasties but you also get the law 10 synchronisms and genealogies traced back to Duftak de Alchanga who was a bit of a mixture of Loki and the Ajax who came home and killed Ali's family in Greek mythology. I can never remember whether that's Telemony and Ajax or the other one so and he did all of that so yeah you've got this classical influence that's always a play with all this mythology because it's all quite late but basically he's the biggest asshole in the Rurecht which is the main saga cycle in Ireland he is but Bricus he's still at least got some redeeming features but this guy is just a horrible human being so to have him as your progenitor when there's a lot more up for grabs seen as it's all imaginary that's already saying something but the same family are blamed for the big lake if you're familiar with Ireland there's a big massive lake up in the north and that's Loch Neah or Loch Nectar in in Irish and they're blamed for leaving a well uncapped out of their stupidity and flooding and killing thousands of people who were living on the plane that got flooded by the lake so again that's not quite a nice thing to be saying about these people um but another thing is remember I said there about the second family um so this second family a brother and a sister got drunk and uh had some incestuous sex and a baby came in and um where it happened was at Rath Mesk so they either the drunken gift if it depends on how you see Rath or Rath as either gift or enclosure but it's probably enclosure drunken enclosure enclosure of drunkenness in the middle of a plane called Mahra Mesk so the plane of the drunkenness and um this is where they get the name then because Ohia is the sister according to this um mythological genealogy and the product of that was a guy called Fergus Foga now this guy is the big loser in Northern Irish mythological politics because he basically lost what is probably complete nonsense anyways that's all it's went any further west than the ban um but he's supposed to have been the one who lost Alun Bakker and Evan Ford he's supposed to be the one that lost the over kingship with the north of Ireland to the three colors and various other members of the conupta so again not exactly painting someone in um in a good light now why would you do that why would you have your genealogy do that because your position might still be insecure but also are we looking at one powerful group from the late iron age um early medieval periods that later more powerful groups try to write out of history by denigrating them as much as possible all through resources now this is quite out there in the ether I know but let's let's have a look at some of the settlement so rat mesk is somewhere there we haven't actually identified it yet but it is somewhere in the vicinity of Trummary which is in the middle of the parish of of Mahara mesk which we know from the 1306 taxation um but near which you've got this uh pair of conjoined rats um and a top in him called listen listen to Vilja which would be the enclosure of the Vilja which is probably a yew tree often can be just a very very impressive tree but it's sometimes already my god so anyway um you do have that right there at the core um one of the things is one of the reasons I went through so much somebody paints to try and show you where the big densities of rats were this is not there so this predates it but there's still some other stuff you've got some good ecclesiastic sites in the vicinity well then you get down to Dromor which is more the core of the echa coba up here is well actually all the way up there but that's the start of it it's where the ekhedelbad were were powerful but of course they do have this association at Loch Nye so have to be pushed down here and then the story written and maybe did they have to hold it is or is there something else going on I mean this is the lagoon valley and you've got some roman stuff over about here as well um it's I don't know I think it's something that we we should think about but I'll move on to a very quick second study so the borne riga so for those of you familiar with the patrician hagiographies the two early ones here are kind of miracle both mentioned that um that patrick was the property of a guy called milchew and that he had various visions and and things like that either on scurry or on sleeve mesh both of which are adjacent to one another um but then there's some other stuff that's saying that milchew had a palace that you could see from sleeve mesh so again the borne riga pop up maybe is the maco boin for the south or the dal boon but I think they're the dal boon yeah but they might be two different groups but we'll have a look and see what we can find now one of the reasons that I wanted to talk about these is the biggest find of uh of latin objects in ireland in one group comes from a lake up here okay listen a crawl that's what that is so we said there's scary where he's supposed to have division sleeve mesh is is here on the mountain you got a trivalet rat there which might be early you've got a remember that t-shin chrono that I was showing you uh well there you go um you've also got craigie warn which has got early evidence uh you've got cullibacchi which is a problematic um size but it's mentioned in some of the patrician stuff some of the later stuff but it's also got in max town tamland adjacent it's got a share of eware so you have to start wondering but I mean you've got as you can see there um you've got hill forts you've got everton ronder but you've also got the modern town of balimena here where the two rivers meet which I left out of the map but again are we looking at a core territory now from my from a dissertation when I mapped the uh the tuha which we're already mentioned um all the two three the two are joined here in this area so I'm thinking that the tuha my postage that these kinds of peoples are buried by the tuha system where everything was redrawn maybe five six seven centuries um because I mean I I don't know I think so many high status sites all in one place in a fairly good bit of farmland there's a reason why balimena town is there today um you know and you do have some uh plain place names which is usually uh designate in the core of the territory there was another one I was going to talk about that was in marco very very very um tentative but basically the grecaga um where the people from which the patron saint of the island man came and where he's supposed to have come from he was supposed to be up in the aekak up on a hill being a pyrus which is usually how these things describe somebody who is a farmer king who is now not a king so out of grecaga the original group in in southern uh quip before the aekak koabo came along and I mean just before I run run away um so there's drum war break which has associations with the very very very earliest stuff that we know about the oled that does not appear in the annals so carol is probably associated with here we have no idea how old how long the aekak koabo were called as such or if they were oled or crittin originally um but look you've got you've got listening aids here you've got this complex of rats all around here and you've also got yeah as I said drum war break you've got um this site tavlocht here which is associated with british saint somewhere ever you've got lach brickland which is supposed to be the capital of the aekak koabo but I can never find anything associated with it other than people from the oled the guy who got killed there by vikings was actually a member of the oled so look either these people are the original original original oled or a branch of the oled or again it's another kingdom that got subsumed in and I mean again the two are boundary this is right in the middle of it you know it's hard to tell anyway look I'll leave it at that there's some other groups that we could talk about the next time but just to know that there are loads of them thanks