The First Battle of Mag Tuired (Cath Maige Tuired Conga)

Key takeaways: the First Battle of Mag Tuired is how the Tuatha Dé Danann won Ireland from the Fir Bolg; it was fought over four days on the monument-strewn plain near Cong, between Lough Corrib and Lough Mask; Sreng’s blow that severed King Nuada’s arm triggered the kingship crisis that leads to the Second Battle; and it must not be confused with that Second Battle, a separate tale fought near Lough Arrow in Sligo against a different enemy.

The reign of Eochaid mac Eirc

The Fir Bolg held Ireland in peace, and the peace ended with a dream.

For a generation before the coming of the Tuatha Dé Danann (Fraser’s text gives thirty years; the Lebor Gabála tradition thirty-seven), the Fir Bolg, descendants of the people of Nemed who had returned from servitude in Greece, held Ireland in peace. Their king was Eochaid mac Eirc, and tradition holds his reign exceptional: no rain fell but only gentle dew, the fields bore fruit, and no injustice was done. Then a dream troubled Eochaid’s sleep, and his druids read it plainly: a strong enemy was coming, and Ireland would not be the same.

The coming of the Tuatha Dé

Messengers confirmed the omen. A new people had settled at Magh Réin, the Red Hills of Rian in Brefne, in the east of Connacht in Fraser’s text, arriving, it was said, not by sea but through air and high mist from the northern islands. They were the Tuatha Dé Danann, the tribe of the goddess Danu, under their king Nuada. From four cities of learning, great Falias, shining Gorias, Finias, and rich Murias, they had carried four treasures: the Lia Fáil (the Stone of Destiny, which roared under a rightful king), the Sword of Gorias (none who faced it escaped), the Spear of Finias (irresistible in battle), and the Cauldron of Murias (that left no company unsatisfied).

The Lebor Gabála gives a different landing. In Macalister’s edition, three hundred ships reached the Connacht coast at Corcu Belgatan (later Connemara), and the Tuatha Dé burned their vessels on the beach so they could not retreat; the mist and smoke the Fir Bolg saw on the hills was the smoke of the burning fleet. Fraser’s text also records the ship-burning (“they all arrived in Ireland, and immediately broke and burnt all their ships and boats”), but lands the fleet at Tracht Mugha in Ulster, not on the Connacht coast. Both versions are preserved in the Irish learned record.

The parley of the champions

Eochaid sent his greatest champion, Sreng mac Sengainn, west to treat with the strangers. Sreng carried a red-brown shield, two thick-handled Craisech spears, wide-edged, bladed but without points, shattering in impact, a sword, and an iron club. The Tuatha Dé sent their own champion, Bres mac Elathan.

The two men advanced on each other with shields raised until, hearing each other speak Irish, they relaxed. Each marvelled at the other’s weapons: Sreng’s Craisech spears broke shields, crushed bone, and left wounds that never healed; Bres’s spears were thin, hard-pointed, venomous in a different way. They exchanged one of each, so each side could study what it faced. Bres delivered Nuada’s offer: cede half of Ireland in peace, or face battle. The two warriors parted as personal friends, whatever the kings might decide.

Sreng returned to Teamhair and counselled Eochaid to accept: the newcomers had better weapons, and division was wiser than destruction. Eochaid’s council refused: “We will not give up half the country. If we do, they will soon take the whole.”

The hurling before the battle

The Tuatha Dé withdrew to the plain of Magh Nia, building walls and ditches with the mountain Belgata at their rear. The three battle-goddesses, Badb, Macha, and the Morrígu, cast three days of druidic mist, darkness, and fire over the Fir Bolg at Teamhair, until their druids Cesarn, Gnáthach, and Ingnáthach broke the spell. Both sides agreed to a delay of a quarter of a year to sharpen weapons and fashion new spears in each other’s style.

Fraser’s text alone preserves a strange prelude: before the main battle, twenty-seven hurlers of the Tuatha Dé met twenty-seven of the Fir Bolg in a pre-battle game. The Tuatha Dé side was defeated and every man killed. The episode is absent from the Lebor Gabála account, but the field where the players fell entered landscape tradition near Cong as the Field of the Hurlers, recorded in Sir William Wilde’s fieldwork.

On Midsummer day the battle was called. The Fir Bolg drew up eleven battalions. The Tuatha Dé sent poets once more with Nuada’s offer of half the island; the Fir Bolg refused again. Both sides agreed to fight each day with equal numbers, a chivalric rule that suited the Tuatha Dé, since the Fir Bolg were the more numerous.

Four days at Cong

The battle of Magh Tuired Conga was fought on the plain between Lough Corrib and Lough Mask, near the later village of Cong. It lasted four days. Each evening the physicians of both sides, Dián Cécht chief among them for the Tuatha Dé, prepared healing baths steeped with curative herbs, so that the living could fight again the next morning.

Named Tuatha Dé champions who fell include Edleo mac Alla, Ernmas, Fiachra, and Turill Bicreo; the sole manuscript is fragmentary at several points, and Fraser marks lacunae in the champion-lists throughout his edition. On the Fir Bolg side, a nameless champion died defending Eochaid from ambush at the healing well early on the second morning; tradition calls him the Unknown Champion, and a cairn was raised over him. After the first day’s fighting, every Fir Bolg warrior carried a stone in one hand and the head of a slain enemy in the other, and together they built the first monument: the great cairn at Ballymagibbon, two miles from Cong, measuring 129 yards in circumference and about sixty feet high, as Wilde recorded. Four further cairns stood in a line across the battlefield stretching five miles to the north-west.

On the third day Sreng came to the fore, driving into the Tuatha Dé ranks; on the fourth and final day he reached Nuada. They exchanged nine great blows each in single combat. Then one swing of the Craisech, the very weapon whose twin Sreng had shown Bres at their first meeting, came down on Nuada’s right shoulder.

The king’s arm fell to the ground, and his kingship fell with it.

Nuada was pulled back and survived, but was maimed. A monument was raised where his blood fell, Cró-Ghaile in Wilde’s account.

The death of Eochaid

Later on that fourth day the Tuatha Dé gained the upper hand and drove the Fir Bolg back. A burning thirst came upon King Eochaid; Gregory attributes this to druidic enchantment, while the Lebor Gabála simply says the king left the field and was pursued. Eochaid withdrew with a guard of three fifties of his men, seeking water. Three fifties of the Tuatha Dé followed until they reached the strand called Tráigh Eothaile. King Eochaid fell there, by the hand, in the Lebor Gabála, of the three sons of Nemed, and many of the pursuers fell with him. He had ruled an Ireland of gentle dew; he died looking for water.

The location of Tráigh Eothaile is disputed. Macalister’s Lebor Gabála says the slaughter ran “westward to the strand of Eochaill.” James Fergusson (Rude Stone Monuments, 1872) placed it near Ballysadare, County Sligo, citing a promontory cairn. Wilde, walking the Cong battlefield with O’Donovan’s manuscript translation in hand, placed Eochaid’s death in the Killower area near Cong, “the great cairn of Killower, erected to commemorate the fate of Eochy Mac Ere.” The Mayo tradition, grounded in the Connacht scribal record of the Ó Cuirnín family and Wilde’s fieldwork, places the death and monument at Cong. Eochaid was buried at the strand under a great cairn, and the Clogh-Fadha-Neal, the Long Stone of The Neale at the road junction north of Cong, is identified in Wilde’s account with the place where the king stood or fell.

Connacht for the Fir Bolg

With only three hundred Fir Bolg remaining of the original eleven battalions, Sreng at their head, Nuada offered them peace and their choice of one province of Ireland. Sreng chose Connacht. He and his people settled there, and the province remained theirs and their children’s. Some of the Fir Bolg fled further, to Arran, Islay, Man, and Rathlin. The Ulster Cycle tradition traces their descendants: Ferdiad, who fought Cú Chulainn at the ford, and Erc mac Cairbre, who dealt Cú Chulainn his death-blow, are both traced through Sreng’s Connacht line.

The kingship passes to Bres

The victory cost the Tuatha Dé their king. The law of the Tuatha Dé held that no man with a bodily blemish might reign, and Nuada, his arm gone, was set aside. In the wider tradition Dían Cécht fashioned him an arm of silver with movement in every joint, and Nuada became Nuada Airgetlám, “of the silver hand.” Fraser’s First Battle text itself is sparer: it records only that Bres was made king, “was High-king for seven years,” and that Nuada later resumed the kingship “his missing hand having been replaced.” The silver-arm episode, the blemish law, and the story of Dían Cécht’s son Miach restoring the flesh arm belong to the Lebor Gabála and the Second Battle tradition, as Lady Gregory’s synthesis presents them.

With Nuada set aside, the Tuatha Dé elected Bres mac Elathan as king, the same champion who had parleyed with Sreng before the battle. His Fomorian father Elatha was king among the Fomoire; the election was intended to bind the Fomoire as allies. In the dominant tradition Bres proved a catastrophe: mean, taxing, stripping the gods of their dignity, his hall without music or fire-warmth or hospitality. The poet Cairbre visited and received three dry cakes in a cold dark room; leaving, he composed the first satire ever spoken in Ireland, and from that hour Bres’s luck failed. When the Tuatha Dé demanded his abdication, Bres went to the Fomoire and began assembling forces for revenge, setting in motion the Second Battle of Mag Tuired, fought not at Cong but near Lough Arrow, County Sligo, against the Fomoire under Balor of the Evil Eye. That is a separate text and a separate entry. Fraser’s own text ends differently again: in it Bres simply “died after taking a drink while hunting in Sliab Gam” after seven years as High-king.

The battlefield today

The plain of Magh Tuired Conga, bounded to the west and south by Lough Corrib and stretching north-east toward Knockma, is one of the densest concentrations of prehistoric monuments in the west of Ireland. Sir William Wilde, working from O’Donovan’s manuscript translation and recording his findings in Lough Corrib, its Shores and Islands (1867), walked the battlefield systematically and was the first scholar to match topographic traditions to the medieval text. He recorded the Ballymagibbon cairn; four further cairns in line across the battlefield; the Field of the Hurlers; the Long Stone of The Neale; the Long Stone of Cong (then broken); stone circles already drawn by Edward Lhuyd in 1699; and the Killower cairn associated with Eochaid. Wilde warned expressly that “by many writers, ancient and modern, these two battles and battle-fields have been mixed up.” Modern archaeology confirms the monuments span the Neolithic through Iron Age and are not the product of one event, but the density of the record made this plain the natural setting for the medieval narrative, and the Ó Cuirnín scribal family, with its ties to the Abbey of Cong, was almost certainly responsible for anchoring the story here. The cairns still stand on the plain between the lakes, and the Long Stone still marks the road north of Cong.

For clarity: the Second Battle of Mag Tuired (Cath Maige Tuired, sometimes Cath Tánaiste Maige Tuired) survives in London, British Library Harleian MS 5280 and is set near Lough Arrow, County Sligo. Its enemies are the Fomoire; its hero is Lugh. It is treated in a separate entry.