River Cronn

Overview

The Cronn is a river in Cuailnge. Kinsella's list of place-names gives it as the Big River, in the Carlingford peninsula. The name is also a man's: Cúchulainn kills a warrior called Cronn at the river, and the two are not the same.

The river's first appearance is as a spring. Two pig-keepers, who have been changing shape at each other for years, drop out of the air as worms. One gets into the spring of the Cronn in Cuailnge, where a cow of Dáire mac Fiachna drinks it up, and in that way Donn Cuailnge, the Brown Bull, is born.

It is also the last name on the army's route list: the army was to pass the river Colptha and "the river Cronn in Cuailnge" before reaching the rath. Dubthach, at Trego Plain, sings that it will rise, all clay, and bar the way to Murtheimne "until that warrior's work is done at Mount Ochaine to the north."

It does rise. In the version where the armies divide at the rath and go looking for the bull, the Cronn comes up against them to the height of the treetops, and they spend the night at the edge of the water. In the morning Medb sends some of her followers across. The warrior Ualu tries it with a big flagstone on his shoulder so the current cannot push him back, and the river overwhelms him, stone and all. His grave is on the roadway by the river and is called Lia Ualonn, Ualu's Flagstone.

It is also where Cúchulainn kills Cronn and Caemdele in heroic fury. A further hundred warriors die as they struggle with the river, and with them Roan and Roae, the two chroniclers of the Táin. Some say this is the reason the tale was lost and had to be found again long afterward. A hundred and twenty-four kings die at his hand at the same river. The army follows the Cronn up to its source, and is crossing between the spring and the mountain-top when Medb calls them back. She decides to cross the summit itself, and it takes three days and three nights to tear out the gap Bernas Bó Cuailnge.

The second version has Cúchulainn waiting at a ford on the Cronn when the army arrives. Maine, one of Ailill's sons, asks to be sent out, and Fergus tells him not to. Cúchulainn calls on the waters, the air and the earth, and "above all the Cronn river," and the water rears up to the treetops.