Eightercua

On the Iveragh Peninsula near Waterville, four standing stones — the tallest over 2.7 metres — run in a line across a low horseshoe-shaped mound, aligned toward the mountain of Cnoc Bhólais across Ballinskelligs Bay. The alignment dates from the Bronze Age, around 1700 BC, and sits on what was likely once a ritual enclosure.

Tradition gives the stones a much later story, drawn from the Lebor Gabála Érenn (Book of Invasions). When the Milesians — the legendary ancestors of the Gaels — sailed to Ireland to take it from the Tuatha Dé Danann, the poet and judge Amergin brought his wife Scéine with him. She died at sea within sight of land, and the grieving Amergin vowed to name their landing place after her; the bay nearby is still known as Inbhear Scéine, the 'Bay of Scéine'. Local tradition holds that the four stones of Eightercua were raised over her grave.

Amergin himself is said to have been the first of the Milesians to set foot on Irish soil, where he chanted the 'Song of Amergin' — a strange, riddling poem of self-identification with the land ('I am the wind on the sea... I am a hawk on a cliff...') preserved as one of the oldest pieces of verse in the Irish tradition. Eightercua thus stands at the symbolic threshold of the Gaelic foundation myth: the spot where myth says the old Ireland of the Tuatha Dé Danann gave way to the new, at the cost of the first Milesian death.