[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.  Even so they made trial of the ford, and thrice the bearers waded in and thrice they were forced to turn back lest the flood should sweep them down.  At length six of the tallest and mightiest of the warriors of the High King took up the bier upon their shoulders, and strode in.  And first the watchers on the bank saw the brown water swirl about their knees, and then they sank thigh-deep, and at last it foamed against their shoulders, yet still they braced themselves against the current, moving forward very slowly as they found foothold among the slippery rocks in the river-bed.  But when they had almost reached the mid-stream it seemed as if a great surge overwhelmed them, and caught the bier from their shoulders as they plunged and clutched around it, and they must needs make back for the shore as best they could, while Boyne swept down the body of Cormac to the sea.

On the following morning, however, shepherds driving their flocks to pasture on the hillside of Ross-na-ree found cast upon the shore the body of an aged man of noble countenance, half wrapped in a silken pall; and knowing not who this might be they dug a grave in the grassy hill, and there laid the stranger, and laid the green sods over him again.

There still sleeps Cormac the King, and neither Ogham-lettered stone nor sculptured cross marks his solitary grave.  But he lies in the place where he would be, of which a poet of the Gael in our day has written:—­

  “A tranquil spot:  a hopeful sound
     Comes from the ever-youthful stream,
   And still on daisied mead and mound
     The dawn delays with tenderer beam.