Treachery at Midnight
And
I took his body in my arms, and I carried him up to the top of Mount
Callan.
And I
laid him in the shallow grave that I had hollowed out of the stony
soil.
And
then I shovelled the earth over him and hid him forever. I carried
over a heavy flagstone and placed it on the mound. And with my knife I
carved these words. 'Here lies Conan, the fierce and turbulent.'
Who was Conan? Why was he called 'fierce and turbulent'? How
did he die? Who buried him?
In the Eighth Century turmoil of warring tribes, love, jealousy,
blackmail and revenge, Conan's story unfolds.
He entangles his foster brother, Columba, and the beautiful Sorcha
in a terrifying adventure that will change all their lives forever.
Cora Harrison writes:
I
first got the idea for writing this book when I was reading a book,
written about a hundred years ago, by a man who climbed Mount Callan,
a mountain between Drumshee and the sea.
On the mountaintop he found a flagstone, and engraved on it in
Ogham (the ancient symbolic language of the Celts and early Christians
in Ireland) were the words:
‘Here lies Conan the fierce and the turbulent.’
Who was Conan?
Why was he called fierce and turbulent?
How did he die?
Who buried him on top of the mountain?
All these questions simmered in my head for a few months.
Then I saw an aerial photograph of Clogher. Clogher is a small hill
rising up from flat, marshy land, about a mile from Drumshee.
On top of the hill are the ruins of a church, an old graveyard with
a wall around it, and a farm. The local people always call it ‘the
island’.
When I looked at the aerial photograph, however, it showed, beneath
the grass, the outline of an oval boundary wall around the graveyard
and the ruins of the church; and it suddenly flashed into my mind that
this might easily have been an ancient monastic settlement.
It was probably abandoned when the monastic settlement at Kilfenora
came into existence, in the tenth century.
As soon as I thought of that, the whole story of Conan and Columba
came to life in my mind. I sat down at the computer and typed: ‘I
took his body in my arms, and I carried him up to the top of Mount
Callan…’
Click here to read the first chapter of
the book
Back to Drumshee Series booklist