A View from Home:

Why still waters run deep at Loughmourne...

You will be forgiven if you have never heard of Loughmourne. Even though it is a legendary place.  Loughmourne lies to the north of Carrickfergus, on the inland road towards Gleno, and to the west of the village of Ballycarry.  There is no centre, no village, just a crossroads, a church nearby and the lough further along the road.

It is a rural landscape, dotted with farms and houses, the population greatly increased by livestock which graze contentedly in the fields.

The Presbyterian Church is typically Scottish in its austere design, and the other main feature is the lough after which the area takes its name.

Yet beneath the surface, Loughmourne has a considerable history attached to it.  Not only history surrounding some of those buried in the cemetery - Tommy Bryans, known as the Bard of Beltoy, and one of a lost generation of local folk poets who entertained with locally inspired verse, is among them.

The congregation of Presbyterians which used to worship at Loughmourne, long before the present church was built were Covenanters and in 1772, most of them boarded a ship bound for South Carolina.

They were part of a migration movement involving five ships, led by the Rev. William Martin, of Ballymoney, and their sons would later take part in the American Revolution.

A short distance from the main road running from the church can be seen the waters of Lough Mourne reservoir.  Taken over by the Belfast Water Commissioners to supply water to Belfast in the latter part of the 19th century, the reservoir utilised the lake which was originally there and from which the area took its name.

But the lake provided Loughmourne's enduring legendary status. For the folk stories were quite clear about how it came to be.

According to legend there had been a village there.  One day a peddlar came into the area, selling matches to make a living. No-one in Loughmourne would buy from him and he was turned away.

The peddler took this badly, and, amid mirth from locals, cursed the place, informing them that before the next morning the village  would be gone.

Hardly had he left or the derisory laughter died away, however, than the eels began to appear inside the houses.  They were quickly followed by water, which rose until the village had disappeared under the lough as it now was.

An interesting tale! But a legend that, like many others, had some basis.
In the last years of the 19th century, when the Water Commissioners were draining the lough in preparation for engineering work, the remains of five crannogs (ancient island dwellings) emerged as the water went down.

Further drought in the early 1900s afforded another view of the crannogs, four linked by a causeway to the shore and the other a distance beyond.

Excavations were carried out and much material of interest was recovered, including items of jewellery, household ware, and animal bones.  An old hollowed out canoe also emerged from the mud.

Archaeologically valuable and fascinating as the Loughmourne finds were, they also highlighted the folk legend as having some basis to it.

There never was a peddler or a curse (at least, we assume not), but there had been houses in the lake.  Houses built by ancient hands using stilts hammered into the lake bed and with foundations of stones, trees and vegetation then placed inside the area concerned to give stability.  The house was then erected on top of this foundation.

Doubtlessly, there had been other droughts in generations past when the houses had appeared like ghostly reminders of bygone civilisations.  And the story had lost nothing in the telling. Such is the legend of Loughmourne.

One of the items of jewellery recovered looks fit for a princess.  Loughmourne also had one of those.

Her name was E e-wah gang-ah moonee in the language of the Naskopie Indians, but back in Loughmourne she was just Martha Craig, an extremely intelligent and well-educated lady of science.

Born at Carneal, Martha Craig was the daughter of John Craig and Mary Nelson and she attended the universities of Paris, Madrid and Salamanca, where some of her papers can still be viewed in the libraries.

In 1904 Martha was developing the theory - later espoused by Einstein - that the earth was at the centre of a vortex.  In support of evidence she arrived in Labrador in Canada in 1904, where her aim was to travel to the wilds to see the Aurora Borealis.

At the time, recounted an article in the London Illustrated Mail in 1906, stating "few men and no woman had ever penetrated into this little known country before."

After leaving Quebec, she sailed along the coast for 500 miles to the Hudson Bay post of Mingau, where she hired two Montagnie Indians as her guides.

It was several days into the journey to the interior that they encountered a band of Naskopie Indians, who joined Martha Craig at her campfire one night.  They told Martha they would make magic for her and performed a number of tribal dances to the accompaniment of drums.

The Carneal woman said she too would perform magic and produced a gramophone, which she played to the astonishment of the party.  The London Illustrated tells us that she then placed a blank disc on the gramophone and encouraged one of the Indians to sing, then played back the recording, which caused much excitement.

Too much of a scientist to allow the Indians to believe she was a magician, Martha showed them how the gramophone worked.  Next day, some hard bartering began, the Naskopie wanting to own the instrument, which Martha Craig wanted to hold on to.

"Refusal with them was impossible.  They would give me anything they had for it.  At last they agreed to give in exchange a gold mine.  It is a country containing fair deposits of the precious metal, but although white men had searched for it in vain on many occasions, the Indians were cute enough to always lead them off the track.  It was therefore only my 'voice catcher' which gave me the knowledge which I now possess of where a gold mine is situated in Labrador," she recalled.

The Indians also honoured the Ulster-Scot explorer by making her a Naskopie Princess. The journey was full of other adventures too, one of them not so pleasant.
One evening when her guides had gone hunting Martha was camped by her fire when wolves approached the camp.  They encircled her, and the fire burned low as time went on. Martha Craig's life was in danger.

The Loughmourne woman was quick-thinking, grabbing a blazing brand from the fire and swinging it around her head then throwing it in the direction of the wolves, scattering them for a long enough time to allow her to reach other logs nearby and use them to build up a blaze which kept the wolves away.

Even so, the secondary fire had almost burned down again by the time the guides returned and dispersed the wolves with gunfire.

Such trauma was worth it, however, when she got to see the Aurora Borealis in all its glory.

She viewed it from a mountain ridge:- "Suddenly above the rugged outline of the plateau a dark, semi-transparent cloud became manifest, from the outer edge of this cloud burst a wave of brilliant crimson light of semi-circular form.  The appearance of this light was accompanied by a harmonious sound like the music of innumerable stringed instruments."

"Ere this terrestrial music had died away a wave of brilliant rose light flashed upwards above the crimson.  Higher and higher rose these successive waves of colour and crimson fading into pale rose and amethyst shot with exquisite tints of pale green and purple," Martha recounted.

"This upward rising of successive waves continued until the Aurora stretched from east to west, and reached from the earth to the zenith.  Then from the outer edge of the dark disc flashed myriad swords of fire.  Piercing the radiant waves of colour, they rose above them in glittering tongues of flame."

"Their upward flashing was accompanied by a continuous crackling sound, which resembled somewhat an electrical storm.  I waited on the lonely plateau till the light of the Aurora had faded.  Only a few hours I had stood there, but in that short space of time I had seen an unmistakable proof that the planet on which we live is the centre of a vortex," she said.

Martha Craig travelled extensively in Europe and presented papers at various universities on her theory, combining this with a poetic bent and an interest in alternative medicine.

The journey from Loughmourne to Labrador was, metaphorically, quite a journey! And it means that Martha Craig, who sprang from that small rural Ulster-Scots community, was as much a legend as the story of the eels in Loughmourne.

Both, however, have not been well remembered as they might. So if you ever find yourselves in Loughmourne, spare a thought for a remarkable woman named Martha Craig.

And if anyone offers to sell you some matches, well, it might be worth the investment..!