‘The Run Of The Black Pig’ is widespread in folklore from Donegal to Louth

There could well be another border; up at the border --- and its thousands of years old. It’s a discontinuous line of ramparts and ditches running across the country known as, The Danes Cast, or the Black Pigs Dyke.

Its an antiquity I was to encounter as a head rig in an arable field close to the border at Meigh, as a bank at Jerrettspass and further north as a deep tree lined gully at Lough Shark close to Poyntzpass. 

It is the most mysterious of all our archaeological features, portrayed by some of those those who have studied it as a fortified boundary that cut off the Ulidia tribes in the north; and behind which they found refuge in a reduced territory of Armagh and Down.

The boundary is also known as ‘The Run Of The Black Pig’ and has of course a legend to it, a saga widespread in folklore from Donegal to Louth.

“A very skilled magician, a schoolmaster had a powerful white wand and when he got bored of teaching he would sweep it over his students transforming them into a hare and a pack of hounds.

"Then opening the door he would watch the ensuing chase until he saw fit again to wave his wand and recall the boys and girls now bemused and bedraggled back to their desks.

"It was a sport that did not go down well with the father of the child who had been turned into the hare. Enraged he went up to the school, burst in, grabbed the wand and with it struck the schoolmaster on the back.

"The clout transforming the teacher into a ferocious black pig. A monster so repellent that people threw rubbish at it. So angering the great beast that it fled gouging a track and forming the earthwork.”

I found almost every archaeological feature to have its own local ‘authority’ and sure enough just where the railway line crosses the road at Jonesborough I met (not a local but) A New Age Traveller.

Inclined to be mature students ‘rebels without a course’. Often they were vegans, smoked a lot of roll up tobacco and, come to think of it, were a forerunner of the present ‘Extinction Movement.’

They carried all their worldly goods in a back pack, followed music festivals, and their motto was ‘Bring what you expect to find’.

Well true to form he told me there were links between The Black Pigs Dyke, Skara Brae in Orkney, Newgrange, and the Nazca lines in Peru.

Then he went on to tell me that ‘The Run of the Black Pig’ had been a great elliptical platform sweeping from Sligo in an arc right across the country. I could only gather it was a smooth sweep more or less following and tidying up the border as we know it today.

It had been the launching pad for a space ship, a craft that could only be rationalized in the minds of primitive people as a fire breathing black pig. A huge rocket that laid waste the land on each side of the line.’ 

In the same area I was told that ‘The Calliagh Barras Lake’ on the top of Slieve Gullion is bottomless and if you throw a stick into it, that same stick will be seen floating in Camlough Lake the next day. I often think that when the aboriginals had the pick of the country; what would have took them up in the hills? and that’s why there’s lots of raths and soutterains -- everywhere there’s good soil.

A rath is an ancient farmstead, its outline still visible by a circular earthen bank, some times two. A soutterain is an underground passage often lined with dry stone walling and roofed with slabs.

Those who study this sort of thing tell us these diggings were used to hide in, or store food, or possibly even keep pigs. Notwithstanding there was always someone to tell me that ‘their rath’ was linked to every other rath by an underground tunnel, and ‘their soutterain’ would lead to fabulous treasures deep in the ground.

But for a one off; there’s a field in Killowen looking directly into Carlingford that has a pile of stones in the corner (a possible cairn).

In the bungalow at the bottom of the field the woman of the house was baking bread. She was a sonsy, no nonsense woman with flour up to her elbows and through the open kitchen window I asked her did she know anything about the pile of stones. ‘She did’ she said.

‘Every year on the night of the seventh of August two teams of small black men come up from under those stones. They play a game of football in the field and then they run back to the corner --- and go back down’.

She told me this in the most matter of fact way as she continued to prepare the dough for her griddle of bread.