These are evidently the very words of one who fought in the battle.  Nor need this in any way surprise us, for we have far older Chronicles set down year by year in unbroken record.  The matter is easy to prove.  The Chronicles of Ulster record eclipses of the sun and moon as early as 495,—­two years after Saint Patrick’s death.  It was, of course, the habit of astronomers to reckon eclipses backwards, and of annalists to avail themselves of these reckonings.  The Venerable Bede, for example, has thus inserted eclipses in his history.  The result is that the Venerable Bede has the dates several days wrong, while the Chronicles of Ulster, where direct observation took the place of faulty reckoning, has them right, to the day and hour.  It is only in quite modern times that we have reached sufficiently accurate knowledge of the moon’s movements to vindicate the old Ulster Annalists, who began their work not less than a hundred and fifty years before the battle we have just recorded.

Nor should we exaggerate the condition of the time, thinking of it as altogether given over to ravaging and devastation.  Even though there were two or three expeditions and battles every year, these would only affect a small part of the whole country.  Over all the rest, the tending of cattle in the glades of the forest, the sowing and reaping of wheat and oats, the gathering of fruit and nuts, continued in quiet contentment and peace.  The young men practiced the arts of war and exercised themselves in warlike games.  The poets sang to them, the heralds recounted the great doings of old, how Cuculain kept the ford, how Concobar thirsted in his heart for Deirdre, how the son of Cumal went to war, how golden-tongued Ossin was ensnared by the spirits.  The gentle life of tillage and the keeping of cattle could never engage the whole mental force of so vigorous a race.  What wonder, then, that, when a chieftain had some real or imagined wrong to avenge, or some adventure to propose,—­what wonder that bold spirits were ever ready to accompany him, leaving the women to their distaffs and the tending of children and the grinding of corn?  Mounting their horses, they rode forth through the woods, under the huge arms of the oak-trees; along the banks of swift-gliding rivers, through passes of the lowering hills.  While still in familiar territory, the time of the march was passed in song and story.  Then came increased precaution, and gradually heightened pulses marked the stages of the way.  The rival chieftain, warned by his scouts and outlying tribesmen, got word of their approach, and hastily replenishing his granaries and driving the cattle into the great circle of his embankments, prepared to meet the coming foe.  Swords, spears, bows, arrows were the arms of both sides.  Though leather tunics were common, coats of mail came only at a later date.  The attackers under cover of the night sped across the open ground before the fort, and tried to storm the fortress,