Sligo’s last untranslated name, and the manufacture of the Devil’s Chimney
Understanding Sligo Series – Dylan Foley
There is a waterfall on the Sligo–Leitrim border that most people who photograph it have never actually seen. It cascades nearly five hundred feet off the limestone edge of Kings Mountain — the Benbulben massif — down into the Glencar valley. On a still day it is a thin white thread. But when the wind comes up the glen from the south-west and strikes the scarp, it catches the falling water and drives it back up over the lip, so that the stream appears to climb the cliff it is falling from. The water runs the wrong way.
That is not a trick of the light. It is the thing the place is named for.
Its name — its only real name, and until very recently its only name of any kind — is Sruth in Aghaidh an Aird. Literally, the stream against the height. But, the phrase in aghaidh an aird is an old idiom for something running upstream, backwards, against the current. The Electronic Dictionary of the Irish Language records the phrase plainly: anaghaidh aird, “uphill”; and glosses a line about the river Jordan turning in its course — a n-aghaidh áird — as “flowed backwards, up-stream.” So the name resolves, without much strain, to the stream that flows backwards. It is a precise folk-observation of an anomaly, fixed in speech. You have to earn the sight of it — wait for the right wind, in the right season, and look. Most people miss it. The name is the reading that a patient eye, over a long time, arrived at and passed on.
You can now find this waterfall on signposts, on the county’s tourist pages, on a thousand phone screens, under the name the Devil’s Chimney.
That name is not old. That name is not a translation. That name did not exist before December 2016.
A name that was never rendered into gibberish
To see what has actually happened here, it helps to distinguish three quite different operations that the last four centuries performed on Irish placenames. They are not the same.
The first is translation — Irish into English, meaning carried across. It is rare, and it is comparatively benign: the content survives the crossing even when the sound does not.
The second is anglicisation — the Irish rendered into English phonetic gibberish, the meaning destroyed, but a trace of the sound left behind. Sligeach becomes Sligo. Cúil Irra becomes Coolera. The word is disfigured, but a thread remains: you can work back along the sound to the body of the original. This is the operation that fell on very nearly every name in the county in the nineteenth century, most systematically through the Ordnance Survey. It is a partial glamour — a disfigurement but recognisable.
The third is fabrication — the Irish name discarded whole, a new English name invented in its place, and false content installed where the reading used to be. No sound survives. No thread. And, characteristically, a phantom meaning is fitted over the gap so that the absence does not show.
Sruth in Aghaidh an Aird had survived the second operation entirely. It was never anglicised, never mapped into gibberish, never flattened. It kept both its Irish form and its meaning, intact, into the twenty-first century — one of the very last prominent features in the county of which that could be said. (This is the sense in which it is “the last”: not that no other Irish name survives in speech, but that this was among the last major, visible landmarks whose name had never been mapped, translated, or mangled — it remained live, meaningful Irish.)
And then, having escaped anglicisation for four hundred years, it was subjected to the most total of the three operations — fabrication — in living memory. In 2016.
The manufacture
The name the Devil’s Chimney appears to enter the record with a video uploaded to YouTube in December 2016.
From there the sequence is ordinary. A walking-trail listing adopts the new name. The county’s own tourism material carries it. Signage goes up. Each step is individually unremarkable — a trail needs an English signpost, a marketing page needs a title that pays off, a sign follows the path already worn by the ones before it. No single act in the chain looks like an erasure.
And note what the new name does, beyond replacing the old one. “The Devil’s Chimney sounds dramatic, and it is.” It invents a folklore. It implies a local belief — that the people of this valley looked at this cliff and thought of the devil, named it for him, carried some association we might now recover.
Ask what that association was and the answer is: nothing. There was no such belief. The rising spray read as a chimney’s smoke, a devil supplied to furnish the chimney, and a piety back-projected onto people who never held it. The fabrication does not merely empty the slot. It manufactures a false depth to fill it — a heritage-shaped object where the heritage used to be. And the phantom is satisfying: it feels like folklore, so nobody enquires whether it is.
Why it survived, and why it was vulnerable
The obvious question is why this one name, alone, survived the nineteenth century intact —
It survived because it was obscure. It was never on a map. It was a thing of local knowledge, pointed out to visitors sometimes as the place where the water flows backwards — a gnomic puzzle, a wonder you had to be shown and then had to wait to see. Its visibility to officialdom was low precisely because its meaning was conditional: the anomaly only appears in the right wind, and a surveyor passing on a calm day would see nothing to record. Hidden in plain sight, it slipped under the machinery that mangled every name it could actually catch hold of. Obscurity was its shelter.
And obscurity is what it lost, all at once, in December 2016. The video, the trail, the signage made it visible — and visibility is what took it.
Eochaidh Ó hEoghusa, writing of the whole territory around 1600, built his lament on a single counter-intuitive idea: that Sligo’s wealth is the cause of her destruction, that she is taken because she has something to take, that her fertility is her wound. He puts the covetous look and the spear-point under one word — renna — so that to be seen and to be struck are the same act. Sáithid Gaoidhil is Goill … renna a rosg: they drive in the points of their gaze.
The name obeyed that law exactly. The property that made it worth stealing — its vivid, brandable, share-able wonder — is the very property that had kept it safe for four centuries by keeping it off the map. Spared by obscurity; destroyed by exposure. Once seen, it was taken. As it was in the 16th century, so is it now.
What cannot be carried off is changed instead
Taken, though, is not quite the right word for what happens to a waterfall. The renna law describes the taking of things that can be taken — cattle, grain, worked and defended land. But a waterfall cannot be carried off. Five hundred feet of falling water on a cliff of Dartry limestone is not portable, not burnable, not destructible by any raid. And this is precisely the case the poem reserves its strongest word for.
In Ó hEoghusa’s catalogue of what was done to Sligo, the summits come last, and they are handled differently from everything else. The towers can be thrown down; the corn-yards can be burned; the pastures can be blanched. But the bare summits — maoilinn, indestructible — cannot be attacked in any of those ways.
So what is done to them is done to their appearance: do siabhradh maise a maoilinn, “the beauty of her bare summits was bewitched” (q. 10). Siabhradh is the poem’s word for the operation performed on what cannot be destroyed. It is not decay and it is not decline. It is the changing of a thing’s aspect into something not-itself — glamoured, made spectral, made uncanny. When the substance is invulnerable, the operation moves to the countenance.
That is exactly the operation on the waterfall. The water cannot be taken, so the name is changed — and the name is the countenance, the aspect under which the thing is known and reached. “Devil’s Chimney” is a siabhradh in the poem’s precise sense: an uncanny, demonic guise laid over a feature that could not otherwise be touched.
But the modern case adds a clause the poem does not contain, and it is honest to mark the addition rather than smuggle it in. In Ó hEoghusa the siabhradh is an act of malice — a thing done to a territory by its enemies to disfigure what they could not destroy. In 2016 it is an act of commerce. Here the enchantment is not the end of the operation; it is the enabling first move of an appropriation. You cannot sell a five-hundred-foot cliff. But you can change its countenance — enchant the un-sellable landscape feature into a branded product — and the branded product can be sold, indefinitely, to everyone who arrives to photograph the devil. The siabhradh is what converts the immovable into the monetisable. Enchant first; then take.
This is a synthesis of the poem’s two economic ideas, not a claim the poet makes: it welds the renna law — the covetous gaze that takes what it covets — to the siabhradh — the changing of what cannot be taken — and reads the fusion off a modern signpost. The poet kept them apart, one for the moveable wealth and one for the indestructible hills. The marketer joins them. What cannot be carried off is first changed in its aspect, and once changed, it can be sold.
The name is a key, and the brand is just noise
Set the two names side by side as information, and the material core of the case comes clear —
Sruth in Aghaidh an Aird encodes an observation: at this cliff, under certain conditions, water moves against gravity. It is a fact about the behaviour of a specific place, arrived at by attention over time and stored in the name so that the attention need not be repeated from scratch by each generation. It is of a piece with the other precise water-language the same poet uses of the same country: he calls Sligo tirm-shreabh, the dry-stream, three separate times, and in the same breath describes her uplands as dripping wet. Rain-soaked hills, streams that run dry — a paradox only to someone who does not know limestone.
On karst, rain sinks fast through fissured rock and surface streams vanish and resurface. The poet reports this accurately without any theory of it; he is simply recording what was seen. In aghaidh an aird is the twin of tirm-shreabh: two folk-readings of anomalous limestone-water, each one true, each one carried in a name.
The Devil’s Chimney encodes nothing about the place. It is a misreading of the same upward spray — the rising mist taken for smoke — stripped of context, stripped of the territory, and refilled with an invented devil. It carries no recoverable observation. It only pretends to. The irony being of course that such a name could not be ancient – because such chimneys simply did not exist in Ireland. And this is what gives it a way as a modern invention, even if the renaming had not been catologued on the internet.
So the operation is not simply Irish-replaced-by-English. It is a reading replaced by noise dressed as a reading. A name that was an instrument is swapped for a name that is a brand — and the difference is that the instrument required something of you (patience, the right conditions, the earned sight) while the brand requires nothing and delivers its devil on schedule, every visit, in any weather. That is the deeper reason a marketeer cannot tolerate the true name: a name that only reads sometimes is, to the tourist industry “footfall as god” gaze, a defect to be corrected. The wonder that had to be waited for is re-cut as a product that never disappoints.
What the name holds, and what losing it destroys
It would be easy to file this under trivial vandalism — a signpost, a lost word, no great matter. That underrates what a name of this kind actually is.
Sruth in Aghaidh an Aird is not a label stuck onto a boundary. It is the boundary’s retrieval-key. The waterfall marks the Sligo–Leitrim county line — but the county line is only the latest tenant of a far older division. It follows the ancient border between the tuath of Cairbre Drom Cliabh and that of Dartraighe, the country of the MacFhlannchadha (Clancy), a sept under the O’Rourke of Bréifne. Hanging off the name, reachable through it, is that whole territorial memory: the tuath boundary, the sept, the confederation, and the hydrological observation all at once. The name is the index by which every one of those things stays retrievable in ordinary speech.
Ó hEoghusa has a word for the destruction of a store like this. In his catalogue of what a raiding party does to Sligo, alongside the towers thrown down, he lists do hadhnadh a hiothlonna — her corn-yards were set alight. The iothlann is the bulk grain store. To burn it is not to win a battle; it is to convert a raid into a famine, to destroy not the visible object but the means by which life reproduces itself through the coming year. The poet knows this and lists it in the same breath as the towers.
Erasing the name is iothlann. It does not lose a word. It burns the index — the means by which the deeper territorial history reproduced itself in the mouths of the people who used the name daily. The event is small; the famine of memory it produces is not. That is why renaming of this kind should be charted by anyone who takes heritage seriously. It is the modern equivalent of the burning of a grain-store, done quietly, with a signpost.
The poem is about this ground
Intriguingly, Ó hEoghusa’s poem is not describing Sligo in general. Its landscape vocabulary almost certainly describes this escarpment. He speaks of the all gruaidh-fhliuch — the “wet-cheeked” cliff, the rock-face streaming with water down its front (q. 22). He places the danger on the bearna fuara a himeall, the cold passes on the margin, the very rim of the territory (q. 23). He calls the uplands braontana, dripping (q. 25), and the slopes aol-chorcra, lime-purple, white stone and heather in one word (q. 6). And he locates the tract that smarts most um ghort Bhréifne — at Bréifne’s tilled field, the landward eastern edge (q. 16). Wet-faced limestone cliffs; cold passes on the border; dripping karst summits; the wound on the Bréifne march. That is certainly the Dartry scarp above Glencar, and it is the boundary this waterfall marks.
The System that Failed
There is one institution whose stated purpose is to prevent precisely this destruction, and it is the heritage function of the County Council. Others involved in this story acted in good faith and without malice. The machine that devours the heritage was set up centuries ago. But the council and its agents have no such escqape route.
Its own published best-practice document opens by insisting that “perhaps the most important feature of our heritage is that it is non-renewable and unique,” and lists among its own duties to “provide advice to Sligo’s local authorities and communities on signage and placenames.” Signage and placenames. Non-renewable and unique. The remit could not be more exactly the shape of this case. Sligo County Council not only failed to protect the name, it actively used public money to destroy it.
We acknowledge that mistakes are made sometimes, but when confronted with this there is a stony silence. The council, its heritage office, and its public advisory committees, such as the PPN committee on placenames, have not shown any interest or effectiveness in enforcing their own stated objectives, and have instead ironically become the agents of destruction of irreplaceable heritage. And in a manner far more complete than the remapping in the 19th century.
Silence is also the default position of most of Sligos archaeological authorities, whether individuals or institutional who have left it up to the public alone to take up the issue.
Against that remit, two facts. The county’s signage now carries the fabricated name. And through years of petitions, radio phone-ins, social-media argument and direct complaint, the council has issued no statement whatsoever on the matter.
I report that silence as a fact, because it is one. The silence is the evidence. The evidence is unanswerable: nír fhiosruigh, ‘s nír aithin — the poet’s five-word diagnosis of how a thing is lost. They did not enquire, and so they did not recognise. Here it is nearly literal. The name that went onto the signs was not asked-after; it was sourced, at one remove, from a video and the mistaken belief that the waterfall had no name. Nobody posed the question that would have overturned it. And having not asked, they could not recognise what was already there.
Against the current
There is a last thing..
The poem that gives us the tools to read this erasure is built, at its centre, on the return of Odysseus — the man who comes home unrecognised and must be slowly, laboriously known again before anything can be put right.
The word Ó hEoghusa uses for that homecoming is frithing (q. 30): the counter-motion, the going-back-against, the retracing of a path. The whole nostos (longing for home) is a frithing. And the name being erased on the poem’s own border is water in counter-motion — in aghaidh an aird, the stream against the height, the going-back-against made visible in falling water.
The figure at the heart of the poem — the counter-motion that restores what was lost — and the name of the waterfall are the same type of problem. The recovery the poem argues for and the name the marketers erased are both, precisely, against the current.
So let this essay be what the poem asks for and what nobody yet supplied. The fiosrú: someone, asking what the place is called. The éisteacht: listening to the thing itself and what it tells us — the record, the water — rather than to the report of it on a signpost. And the aithne will come as it always comes, go hionmhall, slowly, against the current.
The name was never destroyed. It cannot be. It was only made unrecognisable, and that is a condition with a cure.
The stream still flows backwards. You only have to wait for the wind to see it..
This is a working document, not a finished one. Corrections, and especially the pinning-down of the first-appearance date and the scope of the “last untranslated name” claim, are welcomed — the piece will be better for them. The full documentary timeline, with the search-and-fail record and the council correspondence, is set out separately.
Further Material
Link to the original “fail” video uploaded to Youtube December 7th 2016.
Link to the Enniscrone /inshcrone controversy
https://www.irishtimes.com/news/environment/plebiscite-due-on-enniscrone-versus-inishcrone-conundrum-1.3565874