Abhartach

Also Known As: Ábhartach; anglicised Averty and Avartagh in the nineteenth-century records; the Ordnance Survey memoir of 1835 calls his monument Leachd-an-Abhach, the grave of the abhac or dwarf
Region/Culture: Northern Europe
Mythos: Irish Mythology, Celtic Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Undead/Cursed Beings
Mythical Attributes: His magic outlasts his own death, so that burial does not hold him and he comes back up through the earth head first.
Role in Mythos: He is the tyrant of one north Derry townland whose repeated killing explains a monument that is still standing in a real field.
Relation to Humans: He ruled and terrorised his own people until a neighbouring chieftain, named in most tellings as Fionn mac Cumhaill, was persuaded to kill him on their behalf. The people around Glenullin still treat the ground he lies under as bad land, and few of them go near it after dark.

The stone sits in a field between Garvagh and Dungiven, in a district the maps call Glenullin, and there is a hawthorn growing out of it. When the wind gets into that thorn it whips and rattles and the whole thing looks briefly like something trying to stand up. Local people call the place the Giant’s Grave. The townland is called Slaghtaverty, and the name is the only reason anyone remembers the man underneath.

In November 1835 an Ordnance Survey officer walked the field with a measuring chain and wrote down what he could see. Two cromlechs and a burial ground within a hundred and fifty-four yards of each other, set out west to east in a straight line. The western one lay under a cairn of small stones eighty feet across, though the farmer had already been at it and only three of the uprights were left. The middle one was a flat slab seven and a half feet long, resting on the ground, with four standing stones set square around it at a little distance. He noted, in the flat voice of a man filling in a form, that both were well worth drawing. Then he wrote down what the parish said about them.

What the parish said was that a battle had been fought there between Fion Mac Cumhal and a man skilled in magic named Cannan, and that a dwarf belonging to Cannan had been killed in it and buried under the middle cromlech. The dwarf was a magician too, and his art turned out to be of no small service to him after death. He came out of the earth several times, always forcing himself through the ground head foremost. So they turned him over. They buried him head downwards and laid the flat stone across him, and the stone and its four companions were called Leachd-an-Abhach, which the tongue wore down over generations into Slaghtaverty.

A year earlier another surveyor had sent a shorter and stranger version to Dublin. In that one the dead man is Averty, a remarkable enchanter and a great enemy to Fin McCool, and he is vulnerable in exactly one place on his body. Fionn puts his thumb in his mouth, which is how Fionn learns everything he needs to know, and the secret comes to him. He aims the spear at that one spot. Then he buries the enchanter head downwards, and the surveyor gives the reason in a bracket, almost apologetically: lest he might effect a resurrection.

The fullest telling was printed forty years later by Patrick Weston Joyce, who had it from a man standing in the field. In Joyce the dwarf is a dreadful tyrant and a magician, and after great cruelties he is beaten and killed by a neighbouring chieftain, some say by Fionn. They bury him standing up. The very next day he is back in his old haunts, more cruel and vigorous than ever. The chief kills him a second time and buries him the same way, and again he gets out, and terror spreads across the whole country. Only then does the chief go and ask a druid what he is dealing with, and only then, on the druid’s instruction, does the third grave go in upside down. That, Joyce says, subdued his magical power, so that he never again appeared on earth.

Three killings, three graves, and the third one holds because it is the wrong way up. Nothing in that turns on wickedness or on any bargain. It turns on orientation, on the simple physical fact that a thing which climbs upward will climb the wrong way if you point it at the floor, and the stone is there to make certain of the argument.

The blood came much later. In 1997 two English writers, Peter Haining and Peter Tremayne, retold the story in a book about Bram Stoker and had Abhartach rise the next day and seek the blood of the living to sustain his vile corpse. Three years after that Bob Curran, who lectured in Celtic history and folklore at the University of Ulster, expanded it in a magazine article that is now the version almost everyone repeats. In Curran the chieftain acquires the name Cathán, the druid becomes an early Christian saint at a hermitage in Gortnamoyagh Forest, and the saint delivers the diagnosis: Abhartach is not really alive but one of the neamh-mhairbh, and moreover a dearg-diúlaí, a drinker of human blood. He cannot be slain, only restrained, and only by a sword cut from yew wood, an inverted grave, thorns and ash twigs scattered over him and a heavy stone laid on top. Lift the stone and he walks.

The oldest written account of him dates from 1834, and the blood does not appear until 1997. None of the three nineteenth-century versions mentions drinking, or a vampire, or a saint, and none of them calls the killer Cathán. The name that does appear in the old records is Cannan, and he is not the hero but the dwarf’s own master.

Even the word is unsteady. Irish has abhac for a dwarf, and the 1835 memoir plainly heard the monument as the dwarf’s grave, Leachd-an-Abhach, before the later form Sleacht Ábhartaigh turned a common noun into a man’s name. Joyce, working with the poor dictionaries of his day, took ábhartach itself to mean dwarf, which it does not. There are other Abhartachs in the older manuscripts, including one recorded as a chieftain of the Tuatha Dé Danann and a musician of such power that a surveyor’s note calls him their Orpheus, and it is not at all certain they are the same person or that any of them ever were one.

What is certain is the field. The land there has a reputation, and it is a modern one. In 1997 an attempt was made to clear the site and cut down the thorn, and a new chainsaw is said to have stopped for no reason three times running. When men tried to lift the great stone a steel chain snapped and opened a labourer’s hand, and the blood went into the ground and was gone. That story is barely thirty years old, which is exactly how folklore works when it is still working. Few people in the townland will walk up there after dark.

His powers are small and specific and entirely sufficient. He is a magician, he keeps his magic through death, and he can get out of a grave. That is the whole inventory. His weaknesses are the mirror of it: in the oldest account a single vulnerable spot that a seer can find, and in all of them the discovery that his one talent runs in one direction only. Point him downwards and the talent works against him. Put a stone on top and he stays where he is, which he has done now for as long as anyone has been counting, under a thorn tree, in a field, with the wind coming through.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Abhartach in Irish folklore?

Abhartach is a magician and tyrant from the townland of Slaghtaverty in County Derry who kept returning from his grave until he was buried head downwards. The story was recorded three separate times in the nineteenth century, in the Ordnance Survey Letters of 1834, the Ordnance Survey Memoirs of around 1835, and Patrick Weston Joyce’s book on Irish place names in 1875. His grave gave the townland its name.

Was Abhartach really an Irish vampire?

No early source describes Abhartach drinking blood. The blood-drinking version first appears in a 1997 book by Peter Haining and Peter Tremayne and was expanded by Bob Curran in a History Ireland article in 2000, which is the telling now repeated almost everywhere online. The three nineteenth-century accounts describe a magician who climbed out of his grave, with no mention of blood, no vampire and no saint.

How was Abhartach finally stopped?

He was buried upside down. In Joyce’s 1875 version a chieftain killed him three times, and only after consulting a druid did he bury the body head downwards, which subdued the magic. The Ordnance Survey memoir adds that a large flat stone was laid over him, and the modern retellings add a sword of yew wood, scattered thorns and ash twigs.

Who killed Abhartach?

The nineteenth-century accounts name Fionn mac Cumhaill, or else a neighbouring chieftain left unnamed. In the 1834 Ordnance Survey Letter, Fionn learns the one vulnerable spot on Abhartach’s body by chewing his thumb and kills him with a spear. The name Cathán, given as the killer in modern versions, does not appear in any of the old records.

Where is Abhartach’s grave?

It is in a field in the townland of Slaghtaverty, in the Glenullin district of County Derry between Garvagh and Dungiven, and is known locally as the Giant’s Grave. It survives as a large stone with smaller stones beside it under a hawthorn tree. In 1835 an Ordnance Survey officer recorded two cromlechs and a burial ground on the site, one of them already partly dismantled by the farmer.