Ath Gabla

Overview

Ath Gabla is a ford on a stream, and the text says exactly how it got its name: "the ford of the forked branch." Kinsella's route list for the army puts it late in the march, after the ridge Druim Licce, and ahead of Ard Achad, Féraind and Finnabair. His list of place-names gives it as a ford on the Mattock, near Kellystown. It lies on the army's road into Cuailnge.

Cúchulainn has just tried to count the host from its tracks. He needs Laeg and the chariot before he can do it, and he reckons eighteen troops of three thousand, with the last troop of three thousand, the Galeóin, scattered through the rest so that the count is muddled. Then he goes around the armies to Ath Gabla and does his first piece of work there.

He cuts a tree-fork with one stroke of his sword and sticks it in the middle of the stream. It is set so that a chariot has no room to get by on either side. Err and Innel arrive with their two charioteers, Foich and Fochlam, and he takes the four heads and tosses them onto the four points of the fork. The horses go back to the army with their coverings crimson, and the whole army thinks there is a battle-force waiting at the ford. A troop sent to look finds nothing but the track of one chariot, the fork with the four heads, and ogam cut into its side.

A man of theirs reads the ogam. A single man threw the fork using one hand, and the army must not go past until one of them does the same, single-handed. Fergus is left out of the challenge by name. Ailill is surprised at how quickly four men were killed. Fergus says that is not the surprising part. The surprising part is that the fork was struck off its trunk with one cut, that it is driven in without any hole dug for it, and that it was thrown one-handed from the back of a chariot.

Medb tells Fergus to get rid of the obstruction. He asks for a chariot and breaks fourteen of them under him before he gets the fork onto dry land with his own. Then they can see the base is a single cut. Next Ailill tells them to get their food ready and turn their minds to the sort of people they are approaching, and it is here that the army hears for the first time about the exploits of Cúchulainn.