SPIRIT MOUND

A NOVEL OF ANCIENT IRELAND
By Richard F. Fleck

AUTHOR’S PREFACE

With SPIRIT MOUND: A Novel of Ancient Ireland, I have created a companion to CLEARING OF THE MIST, both set in Ireland and both depicting tribal cultures whether in ancient Ireland or of Native America. While the two novels are separated by 5,000 years in time, they both focus on the perpetual human quest to be free and to heed the powerful guiding light of deep inner convictions. Both novels deal with the external dangers of superimposed thought control. Both novels do have interlinking Irish and Native American characters of modern times.

SPIRIT MOUND proved to be a challenge to write in that there is no anthropological record of what the Neolithic cultures were like which built the great Bru Na Boinne or Newgrange burial mound near present-day Drogheda. Its entrance stones come from the distant Mountains of Mourne and its outer lining of white stones come from the Wicklow Mountains.

From what I was able to determine, Ireland apparently had modest residual glaciers in the mountains of County Down 5,000 years ago.. Frost heaves or “pingos” stretched southward as far as the Lakes of Kilarney. Perhaps these prehistoric people made use of the ice to transport the large entrance stones some sixty miles away. Were these tribal people of the old Boyne River Valley polygamous or monogamous? I guessed that they chose the number of mates based on need and comfort. Some perhaps had only one mate, others of the tribal community may have had three or four. As for their spoken language, I could only assume that it was pre-Indo-European and sounded nothing like modern day Gaelic, I conjectured that three tribes ultimately forged a primal union of community: hunters (the wolf tribe), fishers (the heron tribe), and farmers (the wheat tribe).

The overcoming of individual rivalries and tribal jealousies led to the lengthy and arduous task of constructing Bru Na Boinne—a spirit connector of all living beings with past spirits. In other words, I believe that the Bru was and is a spiritual vortex.

Readers of CLEARING OF THE MIST will notice that both the Mountains of Mourne and Bru Na Boinne play a role, though an oblique one, and that they play a prominent role in SPIRIT MOUND. The characters of Samuel Ravelle, Kitty O’Connell and her brother Michael are in both novels. As such, these two novels comprise a duology (or dialogy).

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