I am interested in artificial caves; I wonder if you are?" came a letter from Hartford, Conn., as this book was being started - and it was signed by a gentleman whose repute and experience as an archeologist and restorer of ancient ruins, debunker of legends about certain - and uncertain - structures of stone and earth in many parts of the country made his statement and his query somewhat startling.
I supposed that it was something in the line of old mines or some sort of man-made tunnels into the ground which he meant, but upon replying to his letter, I began to receive information which was, indeed, astonishing.
Before we had finished corresponding and visiting, together, inspecting several curious rock buildings, walls and ruins about Massachusetts and New Hampshire, it had become evident that we were peering into the gloomy depths of the very "dens and caves" in which a fabled people, many times mentioned in the ancient history of the Norsemen and the Icelandic-Norse may have lived. And that they had built them. And that they had lasted perhaps a thousand years.
And that here, written in the stones, as well as in the sagas which gave the first clue to their origin, was the story of the real discovery of America - by an unknown band of Irish voyagers.
Not troglodytes or gnomes but hardy, sturdy members of a race of Christian people driven from their ancient strongholds by the fiercer and hardier Vikings - who found them in America when they came.
Here is the story of Great Ireland in New England.
In the year 795 A. D. fierce sea-rovers of Danish origin made the first recorded Viking raid on Ireland and other parts of the British Isles. The piratical invasion extended from the west coast of Scotland and the isles west of Scotland, such as the Isle of Iona, the foundation of St. Columba's ministrations to the Picts, the Isle of Man, the Isle of Skye and others; along the Welsh coast and possibly the coast of Cornwall and the island and mainland of Lambey, north of Dublin, Ireland.
In this self-same year there appeared in Iceland bands of Culdees or Irish monks who wore white robes and used bells and books and croziers and who marched in procession, bearing banners on long poles and shouting or chanting as they marched. The Culdees were a non-monastic order founded by St. Columban, a younger contemporary of St. Columba, with headquarters in Armagh, in the north of Ireland, and attached to the various monasteries founded by St. Findian and others in Ireland. They had an ancient tradition and culture, predating even the Christian era, but they had become "the first true priests of God" in Britain, sometime in the fifth century.
Driven from their monasteries by the raiding Vikings, they sought peace and quiet in Iceland, settling mostly on the island of Papey. Their history is related by Ari Thorgilsson, the Icelandic historian, writing in 1026. Earlier than this, the tale of the raids had been told by Ducil (Ducilius) the Irish Monk, writing in 825 in a monastery in Bohemia. References to these Culdees run all through early Icelandic history, but these religious colonists did not remain long in Iceland for soon there came to its shores the "black strangers" (Vikings from Norway) and the Culdees fled again.
They had come in their own wooden ships, and evidently were accomplished voyagers in an age when puny wicker boats were the principal vessels of the Britons. They left Iceland in their own ships - but to what port they sailed or what became of them, neither Irish nor Icelandic history, saga or legend says. But, again, Ari Thorgilsson, in the oldest Icelandic historical work, the "Book of the Icelanders," tells a tale which, when connected with other sagas and circumstances, and with recent astonishing discoveries in America, points to the probable landing of these Culdees, or at any rate, of some Irish voyagers, in America prior to 1000 A.D.
There has been found, excavated and partly restored since June, 1937, in the Merrimac Valley in southern New Hampshire and entire stone village or monastery or fort of recognized Irish architecture, a fortified and evidently sacred place on a solid granite hilltop and hillside. It is in the tiny town of North Salem.
William B. Goodwin of Hartford, Conn., widely experienced and conservative archeologist has purchased the site and some acres surrounding it and has restored some of the half-ruined bee-hives, dolmens, cromlechs and solars, including a large Y-shaped stone hall or man-made cavern which is comparable only to the souterrains constructed by the master-builders who worked under the early Irish kings in the land that now is Eire.
Had Douglas Corrigan, who reached the east by pretending to fly west and landed in Ireland swerved a little more northeast when he took off from American shores, he might have flown over Great Ireland in America. Mr. Goodwin and several fellow archeologists and historians believe that the site at North Salem is the capital or one of the villages of Hvitramannaland or Ireland the Great or Albania, another name for it.
More than one thousand years ago the greatest of Iceland's saga-masters wrote of it. Ari Thorgilsson's first reference to it in the "Landnamabok" or Icelandic history is as follows:
"To the south of Inhabited Greenland are wild and desert tracts and ice-covered mountains; then comes the land of the SKARELLINGS, beyond this Markland, and then Vinland the Good. Next to this, and somewhat behind it (inland) lies ALBANIA; that is to say, Hvitramannaland, Whitemansland whither vessels formerly sailed from Ireland. It was here that several Irishmen and Icelanders recognized Ari (Marson) the son of Mar and Katla of Reykjanes, whom there had not for a long time been tidings of, and whom the natives of the country had made their chief."
Another account says, "Ari Marson was blown there from Iceland and was not allowed to depart and was baptised there," a casual but direct reference to the presence of a religious Christian people in Great Ireland in America in 1000-1001.
Great Ireland in America was known to the Vikings from their earliest voyages to Greenland which was colonized by Eric the Red, and the Icelandic-Norse saga of Thorfinn Karlsefni, who landed on the American continent when he sailed to find Leif the Lucky's houses in about 1007, tells of the capture of two Skarelling boys who spoke Irish, gave Irish names, likewise the names of their parents as Irish and the names of two white Irish kings who ruled "a land across the water from them." This saga, today, is given a significant meaning which it did not have before.
These two captive youths who were caught by the bearded Vikings after a landing and a chase, were members of a party of five. One of them was, significantly, a bearded man. The native SKARELLINGS were smooth-faced. There were two white women in the party and they and the bearded man "sank into the ground" and escaped. The boys, taught to speak the Norse language, then said that their people had no houses, but lived in caves or dens. The "people across the water" wore white robes and carried banners and shouted loudly as they marched in procession, and were ruled by two white kings.
These kings were Avalldamon and Valdidia. The names of the boys' father and mother were Uvaegi and Vaetillidi.
"It is thought that (land) was Hvitramannaland or Ireland the Great" concludes the saga of Karlsefni, one of Norway's greatest sea-rovers. By a strange coincidence, fresh translations of the old Icelandic sagas which include references to these Irish people were made by a man who is a direct descendant of Snorre, the son of Thorfin Karlsefni and Gutrid, the first known white child born in America, and these translations, coupled with recent discoveries and research, serve to clear away the mists of antiquity and to solve the hitherto ambiguous seeming statements of what has generally been considered a saga-singers' myth. Professor Halldor Hermannsson of the Icelandic library at Cornell University, the greatest collection of its kind in America, is the most noted Icelandic scholar of modern times and his interpretation of the sagas is accepted as beyond question.
The North Salem site and other finds in New England offer material evidence of the remarkable accounts of these ancient sagas. Among these recent discoveries is a carving on a rock at Westford, Massachusetts, along the Mohawk Trail, a cross with a human face atop of it, typical of Irish carvings of sacred significance in the old country. A rune-stone found on the North Salem site which has been translated by Prof. Olaf Strandwild of Washington, greatest American authority on runes. Another rune-stone found near Upton, Mass., and the great stone bee-hive at Upton, largest known structure of its kind in America, and last and least but just as interesting, a small bee-hive at Hopkinton, Mass., plus some finds of artifacts made by William Cheney of Hopkinton, a lifelong student of ancient artifacts.
The rune-stone at North Salem is a fragment. The remnant of a rune found upon it spells "sea" with its characters (S-I-U); the one at Hopkinton spells "son" (S-O-N). A bronze boss, also discovered by Mr. Cheney in an old camp near Hopkinton, a fragment of a sword or knife found at North Salem, stone hammers and chisels, all form accumulative evidence of the presence of artisans and men of fighting ability of Irish origin in the wilds of New Hampshire and Massachusetts.
The tools used by the builders of the bee-hives and other structures were, evidently, of stone of a harder grain than the bastard granite (gneiss) from which all the huts, walls and other structures were formed. One of these tools is an excellent specimen of a short-handled stone hammer which was picked up at the North Salem site as a curiosity before the site itself was recognized as of ancient European origin.
The Village is a curious cluster of stone huts, houses, shelters and altars, walls and wells, ramps and drains, guard-houses and streets, a plaza, and what may be the ruins of the foundations of a large church building. There is no evidence of doors or windows but the whole group is arranged in some sort of orderly fashion. The buildings surround a rectangular court or plaza into which lead stone-paved streets and passages. The whole Village - if it is such - stands on a gentle slope in the thin woods which have grown up after several cuttings of the earlier trees. One decaying trunk of a pine that had grown up through the stone structures is seven feet in circumference. This tree-stump is important as a mute but irrefutable contradiction of the local legend which has it that this Village was built by Seth Jonathan Patee, a French Huguenot and his five sons in about 1825. The ruins had been known for more than a century as "Patee's Caverns." The Patees did have a wooden house on the site in 1835-55, but since the great pine grew for an estimated one hundred and fifty years before it went down, thrusting up through the stone walls and dislodging some of them, and then decayed for another fifty years or more, the Village could not have been erected by the Patees for private apartments or to shelter their cattle or sheep. In fact, the excavation and study already made have shown that the Patees erected their frame house atop some of the existing great walls and built their own partitioning walls in the cellar - of quite different type from those laid up around the half-acre area occupied by the stone Village.
There are some score of buildings recognizable, a great Ramp, eighteen yards wide at its point of beginning on the hilltop, twenty-one yards from this point to the face of the wall which rises from four to eight feet above the bed-rock floor of the central Plaza.
This Village stands on a hill two hundred and seventy-five feet above sea-level, forty odd miles from the sea-coast and almost equally distant from the Merrimac river shores on its south-flowing course at Nashua, N. H., and its northeasterly flowing course at Haverhill, Mass. At the foot of the abruptly rising ground on the east side runs the old pre-Colonial Indian trail from Concord, N. H. to the mouth of the Merrimac. To the north and west a sizeable stream, the Spickett river flows around the hill, to enter the Merrimac at Lawrence, Mass. The hill is a solid mass of granite, worn smooth at its southern exposure by glacial action where these stone building were raised from the highest to the lowest slope of this rocky hillside.
The structures, of various shapes and sizes are formed entirely of the native bastard granite set upon the solid bed-rock of the hill. The stones used in the several individual classes of buildings of every size, weigh from fifty tons, forty, thirty, twenty, ten, down to lintels and capstones of an average of from five hundred to one thousand pounds. Supplementing these larger stones are tens of thousands of stones, either actually in existing walls or lying about in complete confusion close by, a welter of rock, once a part of now totally ruined structures whose purpose is more or less problematical - but whose appearance is irresistibly suggestive at a glance.
Whoever the master-builder may have been, he possessed a keen, analytical mind, trained to perform this peculiar task. Beneath the Village was constructed a stone drain, capped with flat slabs, with a total length of fifty to sixty feet, so far uncovered.
Grooves in the stone floors of the huts indicate painstaking carving of the rock to carry off such water as might seep in, to the main drains. No wood was used in the construction although there was plenty all about; no mortar or pegs, and save for the possible employment of tree-trunks as levers or rollers or to form a tripod for lifting, it is believed that the huge capstones and lintel-stones were dragged or rolled up the Ramp, perhaps slid on ice in winter, and lowered to the walls of the huts previously erected to receive them.
When the Site was first investigated by Mr. Goodwin in the spring of 1937 it resembled nothing more than an abandoned granite quarry in a scrub thicket, but close inspection revealed rooms, caverns, dens - and the great Ramp as the most outstanding, bulky and suggestive feature of the whole.
One other single stone attracted instant attention. It was a slab of granite in situ, on stone legs, against a wall, lying nearly level, eight by ten feet by one foot thick, with a carved groove or channel, three inches deep, running all about its edges and neatly off at one end. This slab suggested itself as a sacrificial stone - or a wine-press - or a block for slaughtering beasts, or even as a place where white robes might be beaten and washed. Whatever its purpose, it was found upon microscopic examination that the deep groove had been made without the use of metal tools.
It remains intact, today, a striking feature of the site.
The excavation of the Village meant the removal of silt and rubbish and loose stones which could only have accumulated on this exposed hill during centuries of the dropping of foliage, the rotting of wood and the wash of water. In some places silt was packed five feet deep. Lichen on the rocks in protected places showed the approximate length of time they had lain undisturbed in the hut walls, as lintels, capstones, altars, ovens, as a fireplace in perfect working condition inside the great Y-cavern, the sides and top of it and the stones of a small altar in the same cavern smoke-blackened from fire that must have flamed against the rock for many years - and then been fireless for centuries.
To those who slowly and painstakingly attempted to restore those weird housings with the greatest care and study of what the builders were aiming at, the site in general seemed, beyond question, to have been a sacred center for comparatively few people. Further, it was a semi-fortified place in which the actual uneven ground level on which it stands was taken full advantage of so as to render it a secret hideout against hostile and more numerous enemies. (The Norse sagas speak of the difficulty of rooting out the inhabitants of these underground houses or souterrains along the Irish coast and of finding swords and spears of iron or bronze, which the Vikings valued highly.)
It was clearly to be seen from the first that the first comers to this New Hampshire hilltop visioned the work ahead of them with wonderful sagacity and keen minds as to what eventually developed as it is seen as a whole today. In other words, those who erected this prodigious Village were master-builders, craftsmen with culture and a plan.
Mr. Goodwin, the excavator and restorer of the Village, was well equipped for the task he had. He had excavated Indian ruins in the state of Washington. He had mapped the mounds of the Ohio Valley Moundbuilders for the State of Ohio in the 1920's; he had excavated in Jamaica for the proof of Spanish ruins and artifacts. He is a member of the Walpole Society, the American Geographic Society, Curator of the Wadsworth Museum of Colonial Arts, Hartford, and possesses one of the most complete private libraries of early discoveries and voyages from Europe in existence.
Mr. Goodwin is not alone in his conviction of the Irish origin or the Stone Village.
Professor Samuel Eliot Morison and the secretary of the Hulkut Society of London, England, both believe it possible that the ruins at North Salem stand in Hvitramannaland or Great Ireland in America, which was so well known to the Norsemen before they came here. Other Irish archeologists who have seen photographs of the Village declare the structures exactly similar to those in Ireland, known to be of ancient origin.
The Irish and the Welsh have legends of the early discovery of a continent across the Atlantic, westward. The earliest known reference to a possible voyage to our coasts is the story told to Saint Brendan (C 551 A. D.) by his friend, the Abbott Meurke, to the effect that the Monk, Barrenz, a nephew of the Abbott Meurke, had reached the Land of Byheest and described it as in the Western Ocean, a sort of Paradise on earth. As Barrenz returned after a reasonably short time he could not have been the builder of the stone houses.
In turn, in the life of St. Brendan is the story that he, too, having built a wooden ship in 552-3 A.D. sailed in search of Byheest, and found it, but stayed only a short time, being advised by an angel to return home. St. Brendan refers to this land as "terra firma." He and his company returned in their ship to Ireland and St. Brendan became the Abbott of Clonfert where he died at the advanced age of ninety years. It is not possible to attribute the stone houses to St. Brendan - but he is known to have built a monastery in Ireland with stone bee-hive huts for his novitiates similar to those at North Salem, Upton and Hopkinton.
There is the further story of the Welshman, Madoc, son of Prince Llewellyn, and his reputed discovery of America, and the incorporation of the Welsh (Celtic) language among our mid-Western and Southern Indian tribes is attributed to his voyage. As Madoc did not live until some two hundred years after the voyages of Karlsefni or Gutleib, the Icelander, it does not seem plausible to connect him with the Irish speaking SKARELLINGS found by the Norsemen in Great Ireland, even though the Welsh or Celtic tongue is from the same linguistic source as that of the Celtic Goodhae Irish. The Indians who used Welsh words were never in New England.
The Stone Village, monastery or fort-temple which covers the hilltop at North Salem has been enclosed within a cyclone fence for protection. It needed guarding to prevent further careless vandalism. Fortunately some outlying stone work was so well hidden in the woods that it escaped much destruction. Outside the immediate area of the central Village are certain walls, a well and two structures, evidently intended as watch-houses or guard-houses, one of them to protect the well. This one is a little stone bee-hive built into a wall which swings about, almost parallel with another wall, sweeping away from the central site, past the well. The guardhouse has a lintel and peep-holes below it, on the level with the eyes of a man standing inside, below the ground level.
The northern boundary of the Site, from east to west, is a line of rimrock on the hillcrest, above which there are no buildings. It served as a low but sufficient height-of-land against excessive water. First, knowing quite well what they were undertaking, these people laid down on bedrock their drainage system, composed of covered stones in line, to take care of water from rainfall and melting snow that fell directly on the Site and which otherwise would have seeped under these unmortared structures and rendered them uncomfortable to live in. Moreover, they ran a drain counterwise, of much larger size, east to west, to take care of such water as might overflow the rimrock line.
In the Y-cavern, largest of the bee-hive structures, there is a drain commencing at its lower end, fifteen feet underground, extending through the walls and down the hillside at least forty-two feet long, possibly longer. To this day it keeps the Y-cavern, so named from its shape, fairly clear of seepage water.
In looking back at the keenness of the builders, this elaborate drainage system is one of the remarkable features of the Site.
In their plan, the builders, realizing that it was necessary to handle very large stones as capstones, did two things to make it possible. In the line of huts or cromlechs, whatever they may be called, they certainly are shelters from the weather - of different shapes and sizes, they erected a wall to form one side of a passageway and also filled in an inclined plane behind that wall with earth and stone. This formed the true Ramp - such as was used by the pyramid builders in Egypt.
Through this Ramp, whether as a drain or passageway, was first laid a tunnel, thirty-six feet in length, through which a man or boy weighing not more than one hundred and twenty-five pounds may crawl today. An investigation of this tunnel by a son of Mr. Cheney, who has studied archeology with his father, showed that there was no opening from it, beneath the Ramp, and it seems to be designed to carry water off the somewhat depressed rear portion of the Ramp. The earth composing the Ramp was evidently brought up from the foot of the hill. The west wall of this great soil-and-stone plane contains six huts, cells or shelters which face the east side of the Plaza, that was laid out on the most level space of bedrock on the entire slope. From the Plaza the bedrock begins to drop off very rapidly. Before it begins to drop off steeply, a wall of heavy stones was erected for a short distance, enclosing the south side of the Plaza level. On the north side is another wall in which two dolmens, exactly like some found in Ireland, are found. On top of the dolmens, which are low and stand but a few feet above the court floor, another heavy wall was formed to make the north wall of the Plaza, back of which are several sets of walls.
The main entry to the Plaza from the north is a street, very neatly laid out. On one hand is the dolmen wall; on the other the west half of the wall of the ramp. On the west side of the Plaza it is open, for the most part. In the widest part of the street, behind the Y-cavern is the grooved slab described above. Near it is a small cell, now uncovered but formerly roofed, which might have confined beasts intended for slaughter or sacrifice.
As the Plaza stretches out to the west there are several very large stones, three of which are grouped together and for no imaginable purpose; yet they are carefully drained. This is one of the pretty puzzles of the Village. On one of these rocks are various cuttings. One cannot call them carvings and their meaning is a mystery. Next beyond, to the west, is a perfect beehive where the bedrock begins to slope sharply down.
In all these individual beehives which are quite different in type from the other shelters, cromlechs, dolmens, solars, and whether they be at this Site or as in the case of two beehives found, one at Upton, one at Hopkinton, Mass., seventy-five miles to the south, they were built against a side hill and / or a great glacial rock in situ. The use of the hill or rock seems to have been to lower stones onto the walls of shelters, previously built to receive them. In other words the builders either found or formed a ramp.
A beehive is like a haystack and the stones are flat stones, laid up in tier after tier, overlapping inwardly until they meet in a center line, like a circular flying buttress on which the last capstone, either from the hill or great rock was laid on.
Such beehive structures are found, both very ancient and of modern construction, in parts of Europe. Notably in Galacia in northwestern Spain, the Balearic Islands, Minorca, the "heel of Italy's boot" and Sardinia.
In Italy they are called "trulli"; in Minorca, talayots, tanlas, and naus and a variation of the truili are called nuraghis.
A striking resemblance of the American stone houses is found in a description given of "The Ogam Inscribed Monuments of the Gaedhil in the British Islands," by Richard Holt Brash, a Fellow of the Royal Historical and Archeological Society of Ireland, and author of the "Ecclesiastical History of Ireland."
These earthen walled structures were called raths and were constructed by specially appointed builders, such as "Troigleathen, the rath-builder of Tara" and "Ringin and Gabalan, the stone-builders of Ailech," etc. The souterrains, underground houses or crypts were excavated within the area enclosed by a rampart and consisted of one or more chambers, sometimes circular or oval on plan, sometimes square or rectangular, connected by low passages or galleries. These crypts were usually lined with dry rubble masonry, the passages being covered with slabs of stone, while the chambers were domed over with courses of the same material, each one overlaying the preceding slab, until a single stone at the apex closed with the vault, the mode of construction being identical with that adopted by the builders of the so-called treasuries of Atreus at Mycene and Minyas at Orchomenus, though of ruder workmanship. In some cases the chambers are covered also, with large slabs of rock.
Many of these crypts are excavated out of the hard earth, stone only being used for the entering tunnel. The walls of passages and chambers are also occasionally of upright stone pillars, filled between with dry rubble masonry.
In the planning of these underground constructions there is no uniformity but the greatest possible variety; the prevailing idea seeming to be concealment and obstruction to access. Hard to dig its inhabitants out.
The Galician stone houses are exactly like the Irish Monastic bee-hives found on the island of Skellig-Michael, off Ireland, and this is so, according to archeological analysis, because, about 300 B.C. the Goedhal-Celts conquered the Firbogs of Ireland, arriving from Galicia by way of Cornwall and Wales. The Italian trulli are quite different in shape, but exactly similar in a turret-like beehive form in their upper parts.
Were this North Salem Site the only thing of its kind in America it would be sufficient to suggest that the stone-builders, finished masters in their craft, had come here, perhaps a little band of bold explorers, perhaps wanderers, lost at sea or blown off course as was recorded of Ari Marson, perhaps fugitives, fleeing fomr invaders of their homes or monasteries, and happily landing in Byheest or Hvitrmannaland, Whitemansland, Markland, Vineland or Albania.
But there is, again, the great stone bee-hive at Upton, the largest and most perfect bee-hive yet discovered, and there is a small but perfect one on the property of Prof. Albert Nauvez at Hopkinton, Mass.
The odd accident of a family coming into possession of the Upton bee-hive when they brought a house and lot, led Malcolm Pearson of that village to become an archeological student. He wanted to know what it was all about - and it was Mr. Pearson who first directed Mr. Goodwin to the North Salem Site where the older and more experienced man at once recognized a plan in the ruins of the Site. He was the first to recognize the Ramp as a distinguishing and significant feature of the Village, too.
The Upton beehive opens from a glen near a streambed. The walls are over twelve feet thick at the base and taper toward the capstone, which is estimated to weigh twelve hundred pounds. The height inside is ten feet three inches, from floor to capstone. The diameter of the circular floor is eleven feet three inches. The whole is covered with glacial gravel on which topsoil has formed. It is built close to a bank above a marsh, from which bank the top stones, including the capstone, were laid. A tunnel entrance fourteen feet long, the lintel four feet six inches in height, leads into the circular hut, where ancient stones covered with lichens and mold lie firmly fixed, but with no suggestion here of altars, shelves, fireplace or any resting place.
However, at the rear is an irregular course of stones in the wall, suggesting an opening which had been long sealed up, deliberately and carefully, and at a distance of seventy-five feet from this beehive some buried walls of stone have been found which, in due time, may be excavated to discover if there are other structures, buried here in the Pearson garden, which answer the question of the sealed opening in the great hut.
The beehive at Hopkinton is but five feet high over all, and may have been merely an outdoor fireplace or smokehouse - or perhaps built by children in imitation of their elders. A man could not crawl into it very well. It is less than five miles from the Upton beehive.
On the Upton hut small trees are growing - and curiously, both here and at Hopkinton, the beehives are surrounded and partly covered by a rank growth of poison ivy. Visitors are welcome to both - but beware the weed! The owners of these huts and pestiferous vines, strangely, are not susceptible to the ivy poisoning.
At the North Salem Site elaborate provision seems to have been made to have a constant, nearby water supply. They even built a reservoir in a wall of the Village. In the lowest wall - which seems to have been the foundation for a building, and which was later made part of the foundation of Seth Patee's frame house, - is a cistern (or well) of stone, eleven feet deep, barely two feet in diameter and still holding water which now comes from crevices in the bed-rock. It is this foundation which Mr. Goodwin thinks may have been laid down to support a church or temple - perhaps of wood, and perhaps this was done under the direction of the Norse captives who became kings over the Irish, although the Culdees, in Iceland, built wooden churches, themselves.
The other well, to the westward, guarded by two low walls and the watch-house has at all times perfectly fresh water in it coming from a seam in the bed-rock.
The walls which embrace it are curiously interesting. So is the deep-dug watch-house in its location and construction. Before it the wall curves to form a bastion about eight feet long. There are many stone walls surrounding the Site, running in rambling lines and directions, and ending suddenly in large, monolithic glacial stones which somewhat suggest the monoliths or menhirs that are scattered about Europe as monuments to some unknown race.
All the stone on the Site was easily obtainable from the higher ground to the north. The glacier left innumerable stones of all shapes and sizes suitable to hand. The builders did not have to go far for their material and it could easily be dragged down in winter on runners.
Every ounce of silt, rubbish and gravel excavated from the Site so far has been sifted through fine wire screening, in the search for tools, weapons and artifacts. The stone hammer, previously picked up and a crudely shaped flint chisel, the two-pointed sword-like part, are the only objects of this sort yet discovered, save relics of the Patees, including part of a hoe of Revolutionary pattern, bricks of the vintage of 1825, plaster dust, charred wood in the Patee cellar-hole. However, inside the Y-cavern there was picked up a firestick such as Indians - and early Colonists ad Greenlanders used. And the writer, prowling about the Site with a companion one day in the summer of 1938, picked up an iron ring, rusted but still recognizable as probably from some tool or from a whiffle-tree.
Mr. Goodwin places little credence in the large runestones - if they are such - but the scarred faces of these monoliths are certainly suggestive of carvings, although the first one suspected of runes was found to have been scratched by tools, perhaps in splitting the rock.
The runes found in America are few and most of them mysteries. Professor Stranwold, who translasted Mr. Goodwin's small rune-stone, declares the Yarmouth stone still in question as authentic and the runic inscription on a rock found in No Man's Land, off Martha's Vineyard, is in dispute. A supposed rune at Dighton Rock has been declared false - but there is an inscription on it by Corte Reale of 1515.
Anyone who makes a study of it can write a rune, and some gravely practical jokers or deliberate fakers have carved them, in modern times, to deceive the public. For instance, there is the long-famous "Kensington Stone" a Merin-runic inscribd piece, which is questioned, not for incorrectness of its runic letters but because it goes into too many particulars and at too great length as compared to all other known authentic runic inscriptions in Europe, Iceland and the British Isles which have been seen and handled by Scandinavian experts.
It should be explained that the Norse, particularly the Danes, made a large percentage of all known runes. The Irish used OGAMS, not runes. The Vikings over-ran all Europe and the British Isles and, runic inscriptions are most plentiful, straight and retrograde in form, and of every varying quality of handiwork, most of them of finest quality. But with the exception of the Kensington runes and those found in Greenland, all so-called runes found on Continental America, thus far, are not of the better quality - certainly not those of the so-called rune-writers.
Mr. Goodwin concludes that if the two stones found, one at North Salem and one at Hopkinton, are old and man-made retrograde runes, they are not Irish but Scandinavian.
But it is a matter of history that there were two or even three Irish speaking "Skarellings" (strangers) found by the Norsemen and Icelanders in 1011-1017 and in 1029 in Great Ireland in America, alias Albania, which lay inland from the Vineland of Leif the Lucky and Karlsefni. These three persons definitely named were Ari Marson, Bjoine (or Bjarni), the Champion and Gutrid, the "Skarelling" who not only had an Icelandic name but conversed with Gutrid Karlsefni in her own language. Their stories are most interesting, likewise tempting for romantic conjecture. Ari was captured and baptised (he was undoubtedly born a pagan as Christianity had not been brought to Iceland before he left there.)
Bjoine the Champion left Iceland in the same year that Ari did (999 or 1000 A.D.). He also was a pagan. The sagas say that his followers spoke Irish. It is not improbable that he, also, was baptised a Christian and they could not have become leaders (kings) of the Irish-American settlers unless they had learned the Goedhal-Celtic tongue, the language of the Great Ireland people.
The sagas tell us that there were in Great Ireland the survivors of those two shiploads of fugitives from Iceland - or one shipload, if Ari and Bjoine came together, to be seized by the Irish who had arrived here several generations before them.
If one of these men hacked a rune with an axe or flintstone in his nostalgia for the "S-I-U" (sea) it would appear natural, for they both were born sea-rovers, immured as captive rulers inland from the coast of Vineland.
And incidentally, if this North Salem Site is Albania or Great Ireland, it means that the actual and much-disputed location of Vineland has been found! Which is, however, another and long story.
The most striking carving at the Site is not a rune. It is a crude but very clear outlined carving of a running deer. It is on the face of a small slab of schist in the north wall of the Y-cavern's downward extension, near a little altar. The antlers and forelegs and body are perfect but the rear legs are missing; possibly rubbed off by clothing as people came and went - or perhaps just unfinished. This deer is so well-preserved that it was easily photographed. It suggests certain carvings and pictures found of the walls of caverns in France, dating back twenty thousand years.*
(*See "Discovering the Oldest Statues in the World" by Norbert Casteret in The National Geographic Magazine for August, 1924.)
It has been mentioned that no doors or windows were provided to the huts. In Anglo-Saxon times, before the Norman Conquest, all windows and doors were covered with the skins of animals to protect the interiors from the weather.
With one exception, all the openings to the various huts at North Salem are small. The exception is the largest house on the Site, built to catch the rays of the rising sun and hold their light and heat until late afternoon. The solariums or solar rooms, here at the Site, are in ruins, but can easily be restored. One is in the southwest corner of the Ramp, the only double or two-story stone structure in the Village. Such double huts, one above the other, always facing south, are known in Ireland as solars. They were used by women in early times for distaff work. In July, 1938, a visitor to the Site who had been there twenty-two years before, declared the partly ruined solar at the corner of the Ramp had been intact on his first visit and he identified four large slabs of granite as the parts of what had been a larger capstone.
Although picnickers and curio-seekers, for a century have had their way with the rock structures, fortunately they have been unable to do much with the heavy rocks, save to crack some of them with fires. Perhaps the lingering atmosphere of this "sacred place" has helped to preserve the structures as well as they were. A wealthy Irishman who dabbles in archeology, excavates in Jamaica for Spanish ruins, has some stone buildings of ancient and supposedly Culdee origin on his estate. He had begun to excavate them, but one night had a dream which caused him to discontinue work entirely. Irish people have superstitions about the cromlechs, dolmens and bee-hives in their country which prevent them from disturbing the stones.
No one had ventured to disturb or even to scratch the great grooved "sacrificial stone" at North Salem, though it lay exposed and it was found with four or five feet of silt surrounding it and beneath it, intact. It is a unique object; its like not known anywhere else in the world. One can crawl beneath it now as it stands on its stone legs, originally five, one at each corner and one in the center. It may weigh fifteen to eighteen tons.
Prodigious efforts must have been necessary to move some of the great rocks. The lower walls of the Y-cavern in the main arm of this curiously shaped bee-hive, are formed from what was a single great block, four feet thick and formerly about seven to eight feet wide and fifteen feet long. This was split in two almost equal parts and the parts were moved apart a distance of five or six feet and then the upper portions of the walls built upon them. Along the right wall of this passage or room, cunningly constructed stone cupboards, or perhaps warming ovens and shelves were made. There is one beside the altar at the lower end of the room. In the main hall which is six feet three inches high at the entrance and just six feet high at the inner end and from four to three feet wide, there is in the east wall a long, deep recess resembling a Pullman berth with one curtain drawn. That curtain is a huge slab of rock, standing on edge. The recess will hold a man six-feet three inches tall, lying at full length. Altar, bed or throne, it makes a striking feature of the house plan. Above it is a hole reaching through the thick wall to a point outside, under the "sacrificial rock" and so concealed that it suggests a crude megaphone to carry a secret voice outside or from outside in.
The fireplace, at the inner end, opposite the entrance, is cunningly constructed. It is three feet wide and four feet high, its floor or hearth stone raised slightly above the floor of the room. The chimney is an opening in the roof - partly closed by two stone louvers which work to this day, perfectly, to control the draft. Beside the fireplace is an air-vent just under the roof, which is composed of very regular, flat slabs of great size and thickness. Wooden props were placed under the roof by the workers when excavating, to guard against threatened collapse from cracking slabs.
The general appearance of this great Y-cavern or souterrain is astonishingly suggestive of an underground crypt, catacomb or temple. At the same time it is fitted for comfortable shelter, with light, heat, ventilation and perfect drainage. It is the central one of the buildings, and so deeply covered with rocks and earth that it would make a good bombproof shelter.
The view of the entire Village, standing down at the southern extremity near the cistern in the wall and looking up the slope toward the ruins of the upper part of the Solar, above the Ramp, is bound to make a deep impression on any visitor. It reminds one somewhat of the cliff dwellings of the pueblos of our Southwest. The ground plan of the Village, drawn by Roscoe F. Whitney, engineer in charge of the restoration, suggests an elaborate fortress with breastworks, bastions, outposts, defensive walls, seemingly impregnable shelters and a plan for permanent residence against all efforts to dislodge its inhabitants. It is located, geographically, so that it would have been difficult for strangers in the country even to find it, did they venture to sail or row up the Merrimac so far. These stone builders, if they were Culdees, had grown wary of the coastal residence, from Viking raids upon the homes they had in Ireland and Iceland.
A summary of the findings which have been made from long and extensive research in ancient history, saga and legend - much of this only recently collated into a meaningful story through Mr. Goodwin's efforts and discoveries - is herewith presented from a manuscript written by Mr. Goodwin:
"First accounts of Norse Viking raids and settlement in Iceland, 860 A. D. Norse records of the Culdees, end in 874. The Culdees remained in Iceland from seventy to eighty years. Their departure came soon after the Norsemen invaded and they departed in such haste that they left sacred objects behind; book, bells, croziers, preserved to this day in the Danish National Museum.
"The final and complete settlement of Iceland by the Norse did not take place until 950, the time of Harald the Fair Haired's reign in Norway. It is conluded, however, that the Culdees left Iceland in about 874.
"The first aim of the Norsemen from 795 onward, and over a long period - whether they were Norwegians, Swedes or Danes - who harried the coasts of the British Isles, was to attack the monasteries, which contained the greater part of the rich hoards of gold, silver, vestments and valuables of the early Irish church. This was the plunder they were after. In the second place of these voyages, their objective turned to colonization and they founded colonies of which Dublin, Ireland, was the capital, all over the Irish coast.
"Many of the later expeditions were undertaken whenever the Vikings were repulsed along the shores of continental Europe - Germany, Spain and France. These were 'side issues,' with them, raids to renew their fleets in Norway, Sweden and Denmark through the medium of the treasure that they looted from these more distant people.
"Therefore we cannot tell what particular band of Irish Culdees or Monastic monks were driven from Iceland to the shores of America and founded Great Ireland, except insofar as those recorded later are confirmable history. However, Great Ireland was known of in Iceland, in old Ireland and in Greenland before Leif Erickson's first voyage to America in 1001-2, because we have the explicit relations in the sagas that both Ari Marson, about the year 1000 and Bjoine and Bjarni, left Iceland and both of them were heard of thereafter, as follows: 'Ari Marson arrived in Great Ireland and was there baptised and compelled to remain. Bjarni, fleeing from Iceland in a ship with others, was driven westward to the coast of America, in the vicinity of Great Ireland, where the people spoke Irish and had Irish names. These Irish speaking people were first noted on the Greenland expedition of Thorfinn Karlsefni, somewhere between 1007 and 1017. Bjarni, the Champion of Breidavik was proven by the Icelander, Gudleif Guglauggsin, to have been in Great Ireland in the year 1029.'
"It is therefore a certainty that whoever built the stone houses in America arrived at or near Great Ireland between 874 and 1001.
"We have remarkable proof that the people found in Markland by Thorfinn Karlsefni were Irish Culdee monks, for they were reported to wear white robes, bear banners on poles and march (in procession) shouting loudly. Also, we know that these informants of Karlsefni, the captured boys, were thought by him or his Icelandic-Greenland companions to be speaking the Irish tongue and their inference was that their habitat was Great Ireland, of which these Norsemen had heard before they came to Markland (or Vineland).
"The captives' description of the place where the white-robed men dwelt across the water from the place in wooded Markland, where they had been made prisoners. But the three who escaped and 'sank into the ground' into caves or dens, resided in the immediate neighborhood, and not where the white robed men, presumably Culdees, dwelt in caves and dens. It would seem, then, that these people were stragglers or members of another colony, entirely.
"Of Bjarni, the Icelander, we know from his own saga and from Gutleif, the trader to Dublin, in his saga, that years later, or in 1029, Bjarni specifically informed Gutleif, when he met him, that even if he persuades his people to allow Gutleif and his ship to depart unmolested, that there existed in the neighborhood more powerful people than he, himself, ruled over, who would not treat Gutleif and his companions so leniently as Bjarni's people had done.
"Couple this with the definite report that had come back to Iceland, that at the same time Bjarni had sailed, from Iceland, in 1000, Ari Marson, another Icelander, had been driven westward to America, had there been seized and forcibly baptised and compelled to remain with his captors in Great Ireland.
"It is reasonably possible that both Ari and Bjarni left Iceland in the same ship and reached Great Ireland together and made their peace with the Culdees already there (perhaps embracing their faith) and were forcibly detained by them, with their companions.
"It is interesting to conjecture whether the 'fair, tall, white leader' of the SKARELLINGS, who fought with Karlsefni was none other than Air Marson and the fair woman with the black kirtle who spoke to Gudrid, Karlsefni's wife, and said her name was Gudrid also, was Ari's wife. Of this we may probably never know except that Gudrid, the great-eyed SKARELLING, must have conversed with Gudrid the Greenland wife of Karlsefni in the Icelandic tongue."
What has happened to the remains of these stone builders? Nothing yet has been found to indicate burial mounds or barrows near the North Salem site, or elsewhere. If they were slain by savages or died of an epidemic wild animals may have destoryed their remains. If they tired of this lonely isolated place and took ship and sailed away - or feared another Norse invasion and again fled as they had previously done, hoping to return to old Ireland or some hospitable shore, they must have been shipwrecked and lost to all human ken forever. No record so far found exists to tell - nor what happened to the Culdees after they fled from Iceland or how they got to America.
Certainly they have left in their stone huts, their crosses, their carvings or odd sorts, in their stone tools and other scattered artifacts quite definite proof that Great Ireland of the Norse sagas was not a mythical place - and that probably it was New England rather than a more northern area. The ruined edifices still remain on the Island of Papey, southeast of Iceland, as yet unexplored by archeologists.
All the stone structures so far found are located at or near the original old Indian trails through New England, trails that were made before the white men came. The Hampton Rock, a stone with strange, sharp markings on it at Hampton, N. H., sometimes called "Three Daggar Rock" is on the trail from Amesbury, Mass., to Maine and connecting with the Concord-Merrimac trail. The "Sword Rock" at Westford, Mass., which is really a carving of a cross and human face of typical Irish religious symbolism, is on the main old Mohawk Indian trail from Albany to Boston Bay. The Upton beehive is within three hundred feet of the path to Connecticut and the Hopkinton beehive is likewise near that trail. Evidently these white invaders took advantage of the only existing passages through the primeval forests, the paths of the redmen.
The Norse never built such beehives. They used stone, especially in Greenland and Iceland where there was no timber save driftwood - but they roofed their dwellings, barns, etc., with turf or timber supporting turf, the wood sometimes imported from far places, such as from America to Greenland and from Norway to Iceland. New England Indians did not build in stone. Eskimoes did not come so far south. The Red Paint people of Maine left no such ruins behind them when these mysterious primitives vanished.
Explorations are being made in Maine, Nova Scotia and at the "Indian forts" at Andover, Mass. In Nova Scotia some rune-stones and a reputed Norse axe have been found. In Maine some barrows and mounds have been discovered. These may yield something which may help clear up what remains of the mystery.
Mr. Goodwin, after a severe illness of two years, resumed his explorations in 1941, and was able early in 1946 to announce that he had located at least fifteen other sites of these strange stone houses. In his eightieth year, the eminent archeologist feels that "the picture as a whole is of course unfinished, but enough has been done to warrant publication of my book, 'Great Ireland in New England.' " (the title taken from this chapter) in a final effort to confirm his belief that there must have been Irish explorers in America before the Norsemen came. His belief is unshaken, despite the fact that some archeologists who are considered supreme authorities on runes, ruins and sagas, have refused to accept his theory.
He lists his sites as follows:
North Salem, N. H.; Upton, Mass.; Hopkinton, Mass.; Danville, N. H.; Leominster, Mass.; West Andover, Mass.; South Berwick, Me.; South Windham, Me.; Mendon, Mass.; Webster, Mass.; Raymond, N. H.; West Raymond, N. H.; Candia, N. H.; Ackworth, N. H.; Shutesbury, Mass.; South Royalton, Vt.; Wampanoag, R. I.; Kingston, Canada.