Com an Áir
Lakes.

Com an Áir

The official Irish name recorded by the Placenames Database of Ireland is Locha Chom an Áir for the lakes and Com an Áir for the surrounding townland. The lakes are the Coumanare lakes in English, and the name is commonly rendered as “the hollow of the slaughter”.

The Coumanare arrows

For generations that was explained by a battle between the champions of Ulster and Munster, and what kept coming out of the ground seemed to bear it out. On the saddle between Slievanea and Croaghskearda, where the peat is eroding back to bare stone, people have been finding short worked sticks: 150 to 170 mm long, up to 20 mm thick, sharpened at one end or at both. They have a name of their own, the Coumanare arrows. Several hundred were carried off and written up by Hitchcock in 1850 and Tempest in 1938, and many more went without record.

A UCC survey in 1970 found them still sitting in the peat faces, mostly in groups, some upright, some canted over, some lying flat, with slivers of wood beside them from the sharpening. The site runs to several acres and the peat is up to two metres deep: one arrow was recorded 0.61 m from the base of a face a metre deep, so the ground still holds most of them.

Two other things have come out of it. A flint flake, found loose on a peat bank during the Survey's own visit. And a large oak peg, 0.38 m long and 25 mm thick, pointed at one end and pierced by a hole at the other, which Tempest recorded and nobody has explained either.

A trap for deer, not a battle

The Archaeological Survey calls their purpose a mystery and the battle an unlikely explanation of it. The likelier reading is that they were set in the ground as a trap for deer. Pollen from the peat around one of them puts it near the point where the Middle Bronze Age was giving way to the Late. So there may well have been a slaughter here to give the hollow its name, about three thousand years ago, and it may have been of deer.

Sixteen carved panels

The arrows were found on the saddle above, not on this route. What this route does cross is rock art: sixteen panels within a hundred and fifty metres of the line, the nearest five metres off it, along with clearance cairns, hut sites and enclosures. The lakes sit inside a worked prehistoric landscape, and the route crosses the middle of it.