Pollnagollum

Caves, fallen angels, and the ring of invisibility

It’s no exaggeration to say that the Neale has a deep well of stories that have not stopped giving for thousands of years.

The Browne family of Sussex settled in the Neale in the 1500s, married with local families and built up a small estate. That estate became home to Colonel John Browne, who would later move to Westport to build the first Westport House. In the Neale of the turbulent days of the early 1700s, Colonel John Browne is mentioned in accounts of travellers from England travelling through and mapping the area. One visitor to the area recalled Browne showing him a deep well in Killower. Browne told the visitor that he had once lowered a small raft with six lighted candles into the river twenty metres below the surface, and released it. The raft was captured shortly afterwards in Pollnagollum in the woodlands of Cong, a few kilometres to the south.  

In 1837, another English mapmaker and writer came to Ireland. In his topography of Ireland in 1837, Samuel Lewis said of Mayo - not incorrectly - that ‘No rivers of any importance rise in the county or pass through it’. He noted the few rivers that rise and run a few miles only to sink underground and re-emerge for a short run to a lake. It’s now known that there are great aquifers under Mayo, a county of underground rivers and caves. Some of these are visible from ground level, such as Pollnagollum, in the Cong woods. (Pollnagollum, in Irish poll na gcolm) means hole or cave of the pigeon, for the pigeons that nested around it.) 

Pollnagollum in Cong woods

At the Pollangollum of Cong, the visitor moves carefully down steep steps cut into the stone that opens out twenty metres below into a cave with a river, the spot where Browne’s candles arrived from Killower. Like all of the caves in this region, this one is connected to the legends of the Tuatha de Danann, the legendary people of light who vanished to the otherworld under a cloak of invisibility. 

But Pollnagollum at Cong has another particular story attached to it, that some will recognise as similar to the story of Finn McCool and the salmon of knowledge, a story of the immortals.

Photos by Rónán Lynch

The short version tells of a man who drowned in the lake, and his wife who disappeared soon after him, said to have been taken by the fairies. A local villain fishing in the cave pulled up a white trout, and took it home to cook it but whatever way he turned the fish in the pan, the flesh would not cook. Frustrated, the villain eventually tried to cut into the fish to eat it anyway, when it leapt out of the pan and transformed into the missing woman, bleeding from the arm where he had cut her. She begged him to return her to the river where she lived now for eternity. He agrees, and when she turns back to a fish, the villain picks her up and returns her to the pool. He renounces his past and becomes a hermit.

These and many other stories celebrating the otherworld and its mysteries were gathered and published to a wide audience by the writers of the Gaelic Revival of the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century. Their patrons, the Irish gentry, had long moved in secret societies, and Yeats and other Irish writers such as Bram Stoker moved into occult circles in the UK. Societies such as the Order of the Golden Dawn admitted them along with other writers, among them CS Lewis and JRR Tolkein. Tolkein and Lewis were also professors at Oxford University, close to the heart of English secret societies. The land around the Neale was still yielding up its secrets two hundred years after Colonel John Browne showed the underground rivers to the English visitor.

During the 1930s, JRR Tolkein conjured up a world he called Middle Earth, which he published as The Hobbit. Under Tolkein’s Middle Earth, a fallen hobbit dwells on an island in an underground lake, living on cave fish, and guarding the ring of invisibility that he has stolen. The creature evoked the despairing unfinished being in Jewish folklore known as the golem. Tolkien, a professor of languages who knew well the legends of the Tuatha de Danann, gave his creation the name Gollum.