Corleck Head

The Corleck Head was unearthed around 1855 by the farmer James Longmore while looking for stones to build a farmhouse.^[1][2] Longmore found the head in the townland of Drumeague (Irish: Droim Éag, meaning 'ridge of death'),^[3] site of an ancient wedge tomb. This is near Corleck Hill, where there was a passage tomb, stone circle and earthworks.^[4] These were destroyed between 1832 and 1900 to make way for farming land.^[5]

The head was discovered near 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.^[7] 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.^[6]

The 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.^[8] Around this time Sam Hall inadvertently destroyed a large part of the Corraghy Heads while trying to separate its heads.^[9] Barron contacted the National Museum of Ireland (NMI) in 1937 after which its director Adolf Mahr arranged their loan to the museum for study.^[5][10] Mahr presented and described the head in a lecture to the Royal Society of Antiquaries of Ireland that year.^[11] Study of the head and similar stone idols was to preoccupy Barron until his death in 1992.^[12]

Corleck is one of six areas in the northern province of Ulster where clusters of apparently related stone idols have been found.^[b][13] Other ancient objects found near Corleck include the 1st-century BC wooden Ralaghan Idol (also brought to attention by Barron),^[c][15][16] a small contemporary spherical stone head from the nearby townlands of Corravilla, and the Corraghy Heads.^[17][18]

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.^[19][20][21] 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.^[5] The head cuts off just below the chin.^[22] The faces are in low relief and could be male or female,^[23][24] but are similar in form and in their enigmatic expressions. Each has basic and simply described features, yet appear to convey slightly different moods.^[25] 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.^[20][26] 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.^[27][28]

Archaeologists assume the Corleck Head was intended as a prominent element of a larger structure containing other stone or wooden sculptures.^[22] 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 protruding joint connecting two pieces of material).^[17]

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.^[14][25] 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.^[18] In 1972 the archaeologist Etienn Rynne described the Corleck Head as "unlike all others in its elegance and economy of line".^[17]

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.^[29][30][31] 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.^[29]

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).^[25][32] Ross has observed that the Corleck Head's style corresponds closely to other representations of the head from the late La Tène period.^[33]

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.^[34] 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.^[35][36]

The Corleck Head is one of the earliest known figurative sculptures discovered in Ireland, with the possible exception of the more primitive-looking Tandragee Idol from nearby County Armagh,^[35] and the wooden Ralaghan Idol found less than five miles east of Corleck Hill.^[17] Archaeological evidence suggests a complex and prosperous Iron Age society that assimilated many outside cultural influences:^[32] the early forms of Celtic religion are generally thought to have been introduced to Ireland around the 5th century BC.^[37][38]

The modern consensus is that Irish Celts venerated the head as a symbol of divinity and, according to Ross, "the seat of the soul".^[39][40][41] Most surviving prehistoric representational Irish sculptures are of human heads, sometimes with multiple faces.^[42] Most originate from Ulster and are of heads carved in the round (free-standing without a side attached to a flat background), with shallow carving to depict the faces.^[24][29] The number three also seems to have been especially significant to the Celts.^[43] Three-headed figures are a common feature of Celtic art, and according to Ross had a pagan religious significance "fundamental to early Celtic thought and outlook".^[44] A small number of other contemporary Irish and British anthropomorphic examples have two or three faces with similar expressions.^[13][45] These include a three-faced stone bust from Woodlands, County Donegal, and two carved triple heads from Greetland in West Yorkshire, England.^[5][46]

Such stone idols were typically associated with ritual sites, and many of the surviving Irish examples were unearthed near sacred wells, rivers or trees, usually on sites later adapted by early Christians.^[32][47] Another example is the 1st-century Boa Island Janus figure, found in an early Christian graveyard but widely believed to be pre-Christian.^[48]

Archaeologists assume the Corleck and Corraghy Heads represent pagan gods and were part of a shrine on Corleck Hill.^[49] 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 four-headed figure.^[d][50]

The Corleck area seems to have been an important pagan cult centre during the Iron Age,^[51] likely associated with the druids (the priestly caste in ancient Celtic cultures).^[52] MacKillop says that the area was once known as "the pulse of Ireland".^[53] According to Barron, an Irish mythological name for the region in which Corleck Hill stands was Sliabh na Trí nDée (the "highland of the three gods").^[52] MacKillop later wrote that it was a name for the hill itself.^[53] Barron proposed that the three-faces on the Corleck Head represent the "three gods of craftsmanship" (Trí Dé Dána) mentioned in Irish mythology, and that the head as a whole represents the Dagda, the chief god.^[52] James MacKillop suggested that the three gods referred to in the placename were the Dagda, Conn,^[e] and Ogma.^[53]

Until the 19th century, Corleck Hill was a major site for Lughnasadh, a harvest festival of ancient origin named after the Celtic god Lugh, a warrior king and master craftsman of the Tuatha Dé Danann – a divine race in Irish mythology.^[f][55] In her study on Lughnasadh, folklorist Máire MacNeill highlights several Irish legends about severed heads. One is a tale about Coirpre Crom, who was killed and his head placed on a flagstone at the beginning of harvest. Saint Ciarán of Clonmacnoise recovers the head, banishes a demon from it, and brings Coirpre back to life. Another legend says that Crom Dubh, a figure associated with Lughnasadh, was buried for three days with only his head above ground.^[9] MacNeill believes that the Corleck Head represents Crom Dubh. She suggests there was a custom of taking a stone head from a sanctuary and setting it up on the hill during the Lughnasadh harvest festival.^[56] MacNeill writes, "The head looking in different directions may be ... looking propitiously on the ripening corn-plots".^[56] Archaeologist Anne Ross suggests that such stone heads were "surrogate sacrificial heads".^[9]

Folklorist Dáithí Ó hÓgáin suggests that the three faces on the Corleck Head and similar heads represent an all-knowing and all-seeing god,^[57] or that they symbolise the unity of the past, present and future.^[58] According to the archaeologist Miranda Aldhouse-Green, the Corleck Head may have been used as a "seeing stone" to "gain knowledge of places or events far away in time and space".^[22]