Corleck Head

The Corleck Head is a 1st or 2nd century AD three-faced Irish stone idol discovered in Drumeague in County Cavan c. 1855. Its dating to the Iron Age is based on its iconography, which is similar to that of contemporary northern European Celtic artefacts. Archaeologists agree that it probably depicts a Celtic god and was intended to be placed on top of a larger shrine associated with a Celtic head cult.
The head is carved in the round from a single block of limestone. It contains three relatively simply described faces, each with similar features, including protuding eyes, thin and narrow mouths and enigmatic expressions. Its dating and cultural significance are difficult to establish. The faces may depict all-knowing, all-seeing gods representing the unity of the past, present and future. Corleck Hill was a major religious centre during the late Iron Age and continued in use as such for the celebration of the Lughnasadh, a pre-Christian harvest festival.
Archaeologists assume that the head was buried in the Early Middle Ages, perhaps c. 900–1200 AD, due to its obvious paganism and association with human sacrifice. When unearthed, the sculpture was regarded as an insignificant local curiosity and for decades was placed on a farm gatepost. Its age and significance was realised in 1937 by the local historian Thomas J. Barron and Adolf Mahr, then director of the National Museum of Ireland, which acquired it that year; it is usually on display there.
The Corleck Head was unearthed around 1855 by the farmer James Longmore while looking for stones to build a farmhouse later known colloquially as the "Corleck Ghost House". While the exact find spot is unknown, it was probably on Corleck Hill in the townland of Drumeague, the site of a large c. 2500 BC passage grave that was then under excavation to make way for farming land. The head was uncovered alongside the Corraghy Heads—a stylistically very different janiform sculpture with a ram's head on one side and a human head on the other. Archaeologists assume the Corleck and Corraghy Heads were intended as elements of a larger shrine and were buried around the same time, probably to hide them from Christian iconoclasts who sought to suppress the memory of older pagan idols, and especially, according to the archaeologist Ann Ross, the suggestion of "surrogate sacrificial heads".
The local historian and folklorist Thomas J. Barron recognised the Corleck Head's age and significance after seeing it in 1934 while a researcher for the Irish Folklore Commission. Barron found that, after Longmore sold the lease on the farm to Thomas Hall in 1865, Hall's son, Sam, placed the Corleck head on a gatepost. He interviewed Emily Bryce, a relative of the Halls, who remembered childhood visits to the farm and throwing stones at the head, having no idea of its age. Barron also discovered that around this time Sam Hall had inadvertently destroyed a large part of the Corraghy Heads while trying to separate its heads. Barron contacted the National Museum of Ireland (NMI) in 1937, after which its director Adolf Mahr arranged the Corleck Head's permanent loan to the museum for study. Mahr presented and described the head in a lecture to the Prehistoric Society that year. He secured funding to acquire it for the museum, and study of the head and similar stone idols preoccupied Barron until his death in 1992.
Corleck Hill's Irish name is Sliabh na Trí nDée (the "Hill of the Three Gods"). The literary evidence indicates that the hill was a significant druidic (the priestly caste in ancient Celtic cultures) site of worship during the Iron Age, and was traditionally known as once being "the pulse of Ireland". From the early Christian period, it became a major site for the Lughnasadh, an ancient harvest festival celebrating the Celtic god Lugh, a warrior king and master craftsman of the Tuatha Dé Danann—one of the foundational Irish tribes in Irish mythology. Corleck is one of six areas in Ulster where clusters of apparently related stone idols have been found. Other ancient objects found near Corleck include the 1st century BC wooden Ralaghan Idol (also brought to attention by Barron), a small contemporary spherical stone head from the nearby townlands of Corravilla, and the Corraghy Heads.
The Corleck Head consists of a circular piece of local limestone carved into a tricephalic skull with three faces. It is a relatively large example of the type, being 33 cm (13 in) high and 22.5 cm (8.9 in) wide at its widest point. The head cuts off just below the chin, and the low relief faces could be male or female. They are similar in form and their enigmatic expressions. Each has basic and simply described features, yet they appear to convey slightly different moods. They all have a broad and flat wedge-shaped nose and a thin, narrow, slit mouth. The protruding eyes are wide yet closely set and seem to stare at the viewer; they lack facial hair or ears. One has heavy eyebrows, and another has a small hole at the centre of its mouth, a feature of unknown significance found on several contemporary Irish stone heads and examples from England, Wales and Bohemia.
Archaeologists assume the Corleck Head was intended as a prominent element of a larger structure containing other stone or wooden sculptures. It has a hole on its base indicating that it may have been intended to be placed on top of a pedestal, likely on a tenon (a joint connecting two pieces of material).
The Corleck Head is widely considered the finest of the Celtic stone idols, largely due to its contrasting simplicity of design and complexity of expression. In 1962 the archaeologist Thomas G. F. Paterson wrote that only the triple-head idol found in Cortynan, County Armagh, shares features drawn from such bare outlines. According to Paterson, the simplicity of the Corleck Head indicates a degree of sophistication of craft absent in the often "vigorous and ... barbaric style" of other contemporary Irish examples. In 1972, the archaeologist Etienn Rynne described the Corleck Head as "unlike all others in its elegance and economy of line".
Most surviving iconic—that is, representational as opposed to abstract—prehistoric Irish sculptures originate from the northern province of Ulster. The majority consist of human heads carved in the round (free-standing without a side attached to a flat background) with relatively shallow carving to depict the faces. Although most are thought to originate from between 300 BC and 100 AD, dating stone sculpture is difficult given that techniques such as radiocarbon dating cannot be used. Stone heads are thus dated on the grounds of their on stylistic similarities to works whose dating has been established, in particular to contemporary iconography in Romano-British (between 43 and 410 AD) and Gallo-Roman (1st century BC to the 5th century AD) art.
The archaeologist and scholar Anne Ross points out that the Corleck Head's style corresponds closely to other Iron Age representations of the head from the late La Tène period". The number three seems to have been especially significant to the Celts. Three-headed figures such as the Corleck Head are a common feature of Celtic art and according to Ross had a religious significance "fundamental to early Celtic thought and outlook". Triple "mother goddesses" are common, as are sculptures of the hooded figures known as the Genii Cuucullati.
From surviving artefacts, it can be assumed that multi-headed (as with the "Dreenan" figure and the Corraghy Heads) and multi-faced idols (such as the Corleck Head) were a common part of Irish Celtic iconography. According to the archaeologist Miranda Aldhouse-Green, the Corleck Head may have been used "to gain knowledge of places or events far away in time and space". The faces are assumed to represent all-knowing and all-seeing gods, symbolising the unity of the past, present and future. These may have been the Irish mythological gods Conn, the Dagda and Ogma, whom archaeologists assume were venerated at Corleck Hill. In addition, a small number of other contemporary Irish and British anthropomorphic examples have two or three faces with similar expressions. These include a three-faced stone bust from Woodlands, County Donegal, and two carved triple heads from Greetland in West Yorkshire, England.
The Iron Age dating has been challenged by the archaeologist Ian Armit, who points out that there was a folk art revival of stone head carvings in the 17th- or 18th-centuries. Although many of the Ulster group of heads are believed to be pre-Christian, others have since been identified as from the Middle Ages or early modern period.
The Corleck head is one of the earliest known figurative stone sculptures found in Ireland, with the exceptions of the Tandragee Idol from nearby County Armagh, dated c. 1000 – c. 400 BC, and the Ralaghan Idol, of c. 1100 – c. 900 BC, found less than five miles east of Corleck Hill. Archaeological evidence suggests a complex and prosperous Iron Age society in the Corleck area that assimilated many external cultural influences.
Stone idols were typically used as part of larger worship sites, and many of the surviving Irish examples were unearthed near sacred wells, rivers or trees, usually on sites later adapted by early Christians for churches and monasteries. The hole at the Corleck Head's base indicates that it was at least periodically attached to a larger structure, perhaps a pillar comparable to the now-lost 1.8-metre (6 ft) wooden structure found in the 1790s in a bog near Aghadowey, County Londonderry, which was originally capped with a figure with four heads. Archaeologists speculate if the larger structure represented a phallus—a common Iron Age fertility symbol.
Many of the surviving Celtic stone idols are of human heads, sometimes with multiple faces. The modern consensus, as articulated by Ross, is that the Celts venerated the head as a "symbol of divinity" and believed it to be "the seat of the soul".