Eric the Bloodbath, Rufus the Brute and the awful secrets of Tyrone

The hand-written notice in the youth hostel in Omagh in Northern Ireland promised a personal
bicycle tour of the Secrets of Unknown Tyrone the Ireland that the Guide Books Ignore.
We meet at the Church of Ireland graveyard on the Drumnakilly Road just Mr O'Roarty
and me and our bicycles. He is a butcher from Omagh whose words are colourful streamers
fluttering out of a magician's mouth, set in the midst of a red, puffing face.
On the slender roadways that twist into the foothills of the Sperrins he keeps stopping to
point out roads that are not there and name towns that are illusions. And then suddenly he lets his
bike fall and starts running through the hedgerows in a peculiar crouching way, calling, "Here it is!
Here it is!" and, panting, he points to a hollow beneath a tangle of briars.
"Here it was, he resumes on regaining his breath, that Eric the Bloodbath gave a horrible
thrashing to the friars of the Mullaghturk Abbey with the Lurgan spades! Your Lurgan spade is a
power for the peat but more terrible still than the iron mangle for beatings."
A little further on, past an imaginary intersection at which we pause, looking right then left
then right again, ORoarty points out the awful spot where Dennis the Idle clashed with Conor the
Scourge of Spaitindoagh; Dennis was vanquished and his followers "cruelly shoved into a pit,
trampled by a thousand piebald cows and covered with deep wet bog".
But muttering that it was too terrible for lookin, he leads me away. We push our bikes
with tremendous exertion through moss and muck until ORoarty locates a stone heap in the middle
of a marsh. "By the powers! he cries. "On this spot, Rufus the Brute from faraway Norway, flailed
with hot pokers, stoned till they were deader than the ghosts of Mullaghclagha, and fed into steam
threshing machines, all the baby boys of the wailin mothers of Ulster!
"When, exactly?" I enquire.
In 1601 it was, to be sure".
And they were steam ?
Oh that they were, and a wonder in their day!
"Mr O'Roarty", I persist, as we cycle away, "how is it that the historians of Ireland know so
little of these fascinating finds?"
"The historians of Ireland, bedad!" he shouts, his head itself steaming. "They are a
perplexing party, being overly fond of the leather pews in the public library and the port closet in
Trinity Halls!"
This incomplete explanation is interrupted by our arrival at a bend on the Gortaclady Road
where a whiskery farmer sits motionless on his tractor.
"By the dads!" he roars when he sees O'Roarty, and then, to me, he remarks, "You'd be a
hearty gent, a hearty gent altogether, to be pedambulatin' over the landscape and into the secrecy of
the forests and glens with this whiskey-soaked tinker!".

This vignette was first published in The Australian