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The Iron Age Boat at Caumatruish
The Iron Age Boat at Caumatruish - Bernard O’Donoghue
A farmer, Thade Mullane, in the 1970s, dredged up a log boat dated by archaeologists to about the third century A.D., preserved intact by the bog water at the edge of a small lake on his farm, below Claragh Mountain, near Millstreet in County Cork, where I come from.
The Iron Age Boat at Caumatruish
If you doubt, you can put your fingers
in the holes where the oar-pegs went.
If you doubt still, look past its deep mooring
to the mountains that enfold the corrie’s
waterfall of lace through which, they say,
you can see out but not in.
If you doubt that, hear the falcon
crying down from Gneeves Bog
cut from the mountain-top. And if you doubt
after all these witnesses, no boat
dredged back from the dead
could make you believe.
from Selected Poems (Faber, 2008), © Bernard O’Donoghue 2008, used by permission of the author and the publisher.