Peter CostelloThe World of Books
In many ways the landscape that surrounds us is a book of the past which can be closely read by those who care to. It can also be opened out through maps. Tourists, hikers, and climbers all want the most up-to-date maps that can be bought, but the explorer of the landscape, the local historian, or amateur of archaeology, find more interest in old maps.
Many will be familiar with the original and early editions of the Ordnance Survey, which are now accessible in digital form on the OSI website. But a digital map is no replacement for a printed map. Now a series of early maps of the Irish counties are being reprinted in album form, sponsored by the various counties.
These are drawn in a very different way to the early Ordnance Survey maps and they are full of interest because of that.
Looking through the volume on Meath, however, I made a strange discovery. This was a map of the county by William Larkin published in 1817, now reissued in Mapping Meath in the early 19th Century, with an atlas of William Larkin’s map of County Meath, 1812, edited by Arnold Horner (Wordwell, €12.00).
Some miles out of Oldcastle, going westward, there was clearly marked at Castlecor a small enclosure, or what I take to be an enclosure, captioned 'Jews burial ground'. This was a startling find.
Jews have been coming to Ireland for centuries. The best book on this topic is The Jews in Ireland, From Earliest Times to the Year 1910, by Louis Hyman (Irish University Press, 1972). But the Children of Israel seem always to have settled in the cities, in Dublin, Belfast, Cork and Limerick. Whatever may have been the case in earlier centuries, Jews coming to Ireland since the Middle Ages have not settled in the countryside. Rural Ireland was simply not for them.
So who and what were these Oldcastle Jews? The Map Librarian in Trinity College, where I was reading the book, could cast no light on the matter; and a Jewish scholar I talked to, who is researching Jewish burial places in Ireland, was equally mystified.
Perhaps there was some association in the mind of the map maker, or the local people in Georgian times, that this ancient burial place (if that is what it was), was connected with the legend that the ancient Irish lead into Ireland by Princess Scota were one of the Lost Tribes of Israel.
That is too complicated a matter to rehearse briefly, leading as it did to the debauching of the Hill of the Synods over a century ago by people seeking the Ark of the Covenant. Actually these evangelicals were misinformed. The British Israelites actually believed that it was not the Ark of the Covenant that was to be found at Tara, but the pot containing the title deeds to the Field of Anathoth, mentioned in Jeremiah (32: 9). The prophet was thought to have come to Ireland, and even to be buried in a stone tomb on Devinish in Lough Erne!
All of this is beyond belief. Could the Jews buried in Meath have been rather a small group involved in some way with perhaps the 18th Century wool trade, itself connected with the fabric and garment trades with which so many Jewish émigrés were connected before World War I.
This too seems unlikely. Today the mystery may well be beyond solution. The early Ordnance Survey maps, which date from the 1830s, do not mark this Jewish graveyard at all. Nor can anything similar be found on later, larger scale maps. Recent aerial photographs show only a smooth field.
Now that is not surprising: field monuments of all kinds, as archaeologists are only too well aware, vanish all the time, removed for reuse in building, for extending fields, or sometimes from sheer malice.
If any of our readers in the Oldcastle area have a solution to this mystery, they might share the secret with us.
Meanwhile Irish maps of all kinds and all ages have things to explore. It has always seemed remarkable to me that on the very earliest maps of Ireland, dating from the 15th Century, little is marked except, very surprisingly, St Patrick’s Purgatory.
This reminds us that many lost aspects of our religious history, in the way of other shrines, other places of worship, other graveyards, are still to be explored to recover in full the complete history of religion in Ireland.