Corleck Head

The Corleck Head is a 1st or 2nd century AD three-faced Irish stone idol discovered in Drumeague in County Cavan c. 1855. Its dating to the Iron Age is based on its iconography, which is similar to that of contemporary northern European Celtic art artefacts. Most archaeologists believe that it probably depicts a Celtic god and was intended to be placed on top of a larger shrine.

The Corleck Head
Two of the head's three faces
Material	Limestone
Size	Height: 33 cm (13 in) Width (max): 22.5 cm (8.9 in)
Created	1st or 2nd century AD
Discovered	c. 1855 Corleck Hill, County Cavan, Ireland 53.9725°N 6.9981°W / 53.9725; -6.9981
Present location	National Museum of Ireland, Dublin

The head is carved from a single block of limestone into three simply described faces. They each have similar features, including protruding eyes, thin and narrow mouths and enigmatic expressions. The head's dating and cultural significance are difficult to establish. The faces may depict all-knowing, all-seeing gods representing the unity of the past, present and future. The head is assumed to have been intended for ceremonial used on the nearby Corleck Hill, a major religious centre during the late Iron Age and a site for celebration of the Lughnasadh, a pre-Christian harvest festival.

Most archaeologists assume the head was buried in the Early Middle Ages, perhaps c. 900–1200 AD, due to its paganism and association with human sacrifice. When unearthed, the sculpture was regarded as an insignificant local curiosity and for decades was placed on a farm gatepost. Its age was realised in 1937 by the local historian Thomas J. Barron and the Austrian archaeologist Adolf Mahr, director of the National Museum of Ireland (NMI). Since Mahr's acquisition, the head has been on permanent display at the NMI.

Discovery

The Corleck Head was unearthed around 1855 by the farmer James Longmore while looking for stones to build a farmhouse.^[1][2] While the exact find spot is unknown,^[3] archaeologists believe it was most likely found in the townland of Drumeague on a low hill near Corleck Hill. The hill was the site of both a wedge tomb and a large c. 2500 BC passage grave that was gradually dismantled between 1832 and 1900 to make way for farming land.^[4][5][6]

Speculative drawing showing the Corraghy heads to the left and right with the Corleck Head above and centre.

The head was discovered nearby to the Corraghy Heads^[a]—a stylistically very different janiform sculpture with a ram's head on one side and a human head on the other.^[6] Archaeologists assume the Corleck and Corraghy Heads were intended as elements of a larger shrine on Corleck Hill.^[8] They were probably buried around the same time, perhaps c. 900–1200 AD, to hide them from Christian iconoclasts who sought to suppress the memory of older pagan idols, and especially, in the words of the archaeologist Anne Ross, the suggestion of "surrogate sacrificial heads".^[7][9][10]

The local folklorist and historian Thomas J. Barron recognised the Corleck Head's age after seeing it in 1934 while a researcher for the Irish Folklore Commission. He established that after Longmore sold the lease on the farm to Thomas Hall in 1865, Hall's son, Sam, placed the Corleck head on a gatepost. Emily Bryce, a relative of the Halls, remembered childhood visits to the farm and throwing stones at the head, having no idea of its age.^[11] Around this time Sam Hall inadvertently destroyed a large part of the Corraghy Heads while trying to separate its heads.^[10] Barron contacted the National Museum of Ireland (NMI) in 1937 after which its director Adolf Mahr arranged their permanent loan to the museum for study.^[4][12] Mahr presented and described the head in a lecture to the Prehistoric Society that year. He secured funding to acquire it for the museum where it is on permanent display, while study of the head and similar stone idols preoccupied Barron until his death in 1992.^[13][14]

Corleck Hill's Irish name is Sliabh na Trí nDée (the "Hill of the Three Gods").^[15] The literary evidence indicates that the hill was a significant druidic (the priestly caste in ancient Celtic cultures) site of worship during the Iron Age,^[16][17] and was traditionally known as once being "the pulse of Ireland".^[16][15] From the early Christian period, it became a major site for the Lughnasadh, an ancient harvest festival celebrating the Celtic god Lugh, a warrior king and master craftsman of the Tuatha Dé Danann—one of the foundational Irish tribes in Irish mythology.^[b][19] Corleck is one of six areas in the northern province of Ulster where clusters of apparently related stone idols have been found.^[c][20] Other ancient objects found near Corleck include the 1st century BC wooden Ralaghan Idol (also brought to attention by Barron),^[d][21][22] a small contemporary spherical stone head from the nearby townlands of Corravilla, and the Corraghy Heads.^[23][24]

Description

Face with a small hole at the centre of its mouth.

Narrow face with heavy eyebrows.

The Corleck Head is formed from a round piece of local limestone carved into a three faced tricephalic skull.^[25][26][27] It is a relatively large example of the type, being 33 cm (13 in) high and 22.5 cm (8.9 in) wide at its widest point.^[4] The head cuts off just below the chin.^[28] The faces are in low relief and could be male or female,^[29][30] but are similar in form and their enigmatic expressions. Each has basic and simply described features, yet appear to convey slightly different moods.^[31] They all have a broad and flat wedge-shaped nose and a thin, narrow, slit mouth. The protruding eyes are wide yet closely set and seem to stare at the viewer; they lack beards and do not have ears.^[26][32] One has heavy eyebrows, and another has a small hole at the centre of its mouth, a feature of unknown significance found on several contemporary Irish stone heads and examples from England, Wales and Bohemia.^[33][34]

Archaeologists assume the Corleck Head was intended as a prominent element of a larger structure containing other stone or wooden sculptures.^[28] It has a hole on its base indicating that it may have been intended to be placed on top of a pedestal, likely on a tenon (a joint connecting two pieces of material).^[23]

The Corleck Head is widely considered the finest of the Celtic stone idols, largely due to its contrasting simplicity of design and complexity of expression.^[3][31] In 1962 the archaeologist Thomas Paterson wrote that only the triple-head idol found in Cortynan, County Armagh, shares features drawn from such bare outlines. According to Paterson, the Corleck Head indicates a degree of sophistication of craft absent in other contemporary Irish examples.^[24] In 1972 the archaeologist Etienn Rynne described the Corleck Head as "unlike all others in its elegance and economy of line".^[23]

Composite view of the three faces showing them as they would appear if the viewer walked from left to right around the head.

Dating

Although most of the idols are thought to originate from between 300 BC and 100 AD, dating stone sculpture is difficult given that techniques such as radiocarbon dating cannot be used.^[35][36][37] Since the majority were discovered on early Christian church grounds, presumably having been relocated from their original pagan ritual sites, they lack the provenance to conclusively link them to pagan worship.^[35]

Stone heads are thus dated on stylistic grounds to works whose dating has been established, in particular to contemporary iconography in Romano-British (between 43 and 410 AD) and Gallo-Roman art (1st century BC to the 5th century AD).^[31][38] Ross has observed that the Corleck Head's style corresponds closely to other representations of the head from the late La Tène period.^[39]

The Iron Age dating has been challenged by some archaeologists, including the archaeologist Ian Armit who notes that there was a folk art revival of stone head carvings in the 17th- and 18th-centuries.^[40] Although most of the Ulster heads are believed to be pre-Christian, other examples in Ireland and Britain have since been identified as from the Middle Ages or early modern period.^[41][42]

Function

Main article: Celtic stone idols

The Tandragee Idol, c. 1000 BC. St Patrick's Cathedral, Armagh^[22]

The Corleck Head is one of the earliest known figurative sculptures discovered in Ireland, with the exception of the more primitive looking Tandragee Idol c. 1000 – c. 400 BC from nearby County Armagh,^[41] and the Ralaghan Idol found less than five miles east of Corleck Hill.^[23] Archaeological evidence suggests a complex and prosperous Iron Age society that assimilated many external cultural influences:^[38] the early forms of Celtic religion are generally thought to have been introduced to Ireland around 400 BC.^[9][43]

Many surviving prehistoric representational Irish sculptures are of human heads, sometimes with multiple faces.^[44] Most originate from Ulster, with the majority consisting of heads carved in the round (free-standing without a side attached to a flat background), with relatively shallow carving to depict the faces.^[39][45]

The Janus Boa Island figure, c. 400–800 AD^[46]

The hole on the Corleck Idol's base indicates that it was periodically attached to a larger structure, perhaps a pillar comparable to the now-lost 1.8-metre (6 ft) wooden structure found in the 1790s in a bog near Aghadowey, County Londonderry, which was originally capped with a figure with four heads.^[e][47] Stone idols were typically used as part of larger worship sites; and many of the surviving Irish examples were unearthed near sacred wells, rivers or trees, usually on sites later adapted by early Christians for churches and monasteries.^[38][48]

The number three seems to have been especially significant to the Celts.^[49] Three-headed figures are a common feature of Celtic art, and according to Ross had a religious significance "fundamental to early Celtic thought and outlook".^[50] It is assumed from surviving artefacts that multi-headed (as with the 1st century Boa Island Janus figure and the Corraghy Heads) and multi-faced idols such as the Corleck Head were a common part of their iconography. The faces are assumed to represent all-knowing and all-seeing gods, symbolising the unity of the past, present and future.^[51] These may have been the Irish mythological gods Conn,^[f] the Dagda and Ogma, whom archaeologists assume were venerated at Corleck Hill.^[15] In addition, a small number of other contemporary Irish and British anthropomorphic examples have two or three faces with similar expressions.^[20][52] These include a three-faced stone bust from Woodlands, County Donegal, and two carved triple heads from Greetland in West Yorkshire, England.^[4][53]

The modern consensus is that Irish Celts venerated the head as a symbol of divinity and "the seat of the soul".^[54][55][56] According to the archaeologist Miranda Aldhouse-Green, the Corleck Head may have been used "to gain knowledge of places or events far away in time and space".^[28]

Notes

1. So named because the human Corraghy head was discovered in 1969 by Barron embedded in the wall of a farmyard barn in the nearby Corraghy townland.^[7]
2. The Lughnasadh was one of the quarterly Gaelic calendar festivals, the others being the Samhain (beginning of winter), Imbolc (spring) and Bealtaine (summer).^[18]
3. The others are Cathedral Hill in Armagh town, the Newtownhamilton and Tynan areas in County Armagh, the southernmost part of Lough Erne in County Fermanagh and the Raphoe region in north-west County Donegal.^[20]
4. The townland of Ralaghan is about 7 km (4.3 mi) south-east of Corleck Hill.^[3] Barron recalled being approached in a bog by a man holding a large stick-like object which turned out to be the Ralaghan Idol. The man told him that he intended to throw it back into the bog and that "we're getting dozens of these carved sticks and putting them back. You see, you can't take what's been offered ... the other day one of us got a beautiful bowl, bronze or gold ... carved and decorated all over." When Barron asked him where the bowl was now, the man said that they had thrown it back "at once", fearing bad luck to have kept it.^[21]
5. The Aghadowey pillar was carved from a tree trunk and had four heads, each with hair, that is today known only from a very simple 19th-century drawing annotated as a "Heathen image found in the bog of Ballybritoan Parish Aghadowey".^[47]
6. The son of Ler from the legend of the Children of Lir.^[15]