Garman Garbh of Loch Garman

Loch Garman — the Irish name for Wexford and its harbour — carries one of the eponymous origin-legends gathered in the medieval Dindshenchas, the great Irish lore of place-names. In the tale a magical well or spring on the plain beside the River Slaney must be kept covered, for if it is neglected it will overflow and drown the land. When it is left open — in some tellings by a careless woman, in others amid the distraction of a great assembly — the waters burst forth across the plain and drown a man named Garman, and the new lake is named Loch Garman after him.

A second strand of the tradition makes Garman a thief, Garman Glas, who steals the queen's golden diadem during the Beltane gathering and is pursued and drowned in the rising waters as his punishment. Either way the legend belongs to the distinctively Irish genre of the dindshenchas, in which the landscape itself is read as a memorial — every lough, hill and ford carrying the name and the fate of someone out of the mythic past. In Garman, the very harbour of Wexford remembers a drowning.