Ath Firdia

Overview

Ath Firdia is Ferdia's Ford. Kinsella lists it as Ardee. It is the ford where Cúchulainn fought his foster-brother Ferdia and killed him, and the army spends the rest of the story moving off from it.

The first thing that happens near it is not the famous fight. Medb sends twenty-nine men together against Cúchulainn in the swamp of Fuiliarnn, which is on the near side of Ferdia's Ford. They are Gaile Dána, his twenty-seven sons and his sister's son Glas mac Delga, and they argue it should count as a single combat because the sons are limb of their father's limb. Every one of them has poison on him and on his weapons. They fling their spears together and Cúchulainn does the rim-feat so that all twenty-nine sink half way into his shield. Then they pile on him with their fists and bear him down until his face meets the sandy gravel of the ford. Fiacha mac Fir Febe, who came to watch, hacks off all twenty-nine hands, and Cúchulainn and the two sons of Ficce kill them. A stone in the middle of the ford still carries the mark where the shield was thrown and the marks of their fists and knees, and twenty-nine standing-stones were erected there.

The main business is the combat of Ferdia and Cúchulainn. The combat chapter calls the place only "the ford" and "the ford of battle"; the name Ferdia's Ford is the one Kinsella uses in the chapters on either side of it. They fight four days. On the fourth they fight in the ford water, split their shields and drive the river out of its bed, leaving a dry space in the ford big enough for a royal burial-ground. Cúchulainn kills Ferdia with the gae bolga, carries him north across the ford so the spoils will be north of it and not west where the men of Ireland are, and faints beside his head. He tells Laeg that after this all his struggles seem only playful games.

After that the armies go off southward from Ferdia's Ford and Cúchulainn lies there sick, until Senoll Uathach and the two sons of Ficce find him and carry him to Conaille. Later Mac Roth uses it as a marker. His eye travelled from Ferdia's Ford to Slemain Midi and fell on men and horses where hills and slopes ought to be. In the last chapter Cúchulainn is lying at Fedan Chollna, and Kinsella's note on the line "west of Ferdia's Ford he had killed no one" says the Irish literally reads "to the left of".