Clodagh Finn: Queen Scotia, the daughter of an Egyptian pharaoh who went to war outside Tralee

Queen Scotia’s eventful journey through that landscape is marked by a tastefully decorated obelisk at the foot of the Slieve Mish mountains outside Tralee. If you have time — and the right footwear — pick a path along the Finglas river and try to find her grave in the glen that bears her name.

I say ‘try’ because it takes a little bit of time to find the collection of stones that mark her final resting place, but the walk in the lush glen is magical.

Little wonder they fought over it at some point around 200BC, to quote one account.

There are several versions of the story explaining how a woman of Egyptian royal stock found herself in Co Kerry doing battle with the Tuatha Dé Danann, the supernatural first occupants of Ireland.

According to the story I was told as a child, Scotia was Queen, by marriage, of the original Gaels, the Milesians. She ventured into battle — pregnant and on horseback — to avenge the death of her husband Miles. The Milesians defeated the Tuatha Dé Danann, driving them underground, but it was a bittersweet victory as Queen Scotia fell to her death.

I remember standing at her grave with my dad, looking for hieroglyphs or ogham or some other clues to this woman who is part of the foundation story of Ireland. There was little to be seen but my dad, a great teller of stories, recounted what he knew of this woman, almost talking her back to life.

It was fascinating, then, to see that his near-contemporary and fellow Tralee native Alice Curtayne did something similar in The Irish story: a survey of Irish history and culture (1960).

As a child, Curtayne imagined Scotia as a “comfortable-looking Kerry woman” about her mother’s age. Then, as now, little was taught in schools about Irish prehistory.

Her image could not be further from the truth — let’s assume it’s truth, for now — because when she journeyed through the ancient sources (the 11th-century Leabhar Gabhála, or the Book of Invasions, among them), she discovered a figure immense and formidable.

This is how she describes her in a chapter entitled “Heroes of the Celts”, which was very kindly sent to me by fellow Alice Curtayne fan, Mick Duggan: “Daughter of a pharaoh, widow of Miles and mother of his eight son, Scotia is a war queen.”

She goes on to describe the battle and how, as I was told, Scotia’s horse lost its footing in the boggy ground of the glen and fell to her death.

She visualises the events “in terms of a magnificent decorative painting”, as she puts it; a vast oil canvas of gigantic scale and scope (think the 'Marriage of Strongbow and Aoife' by Daniel Maclise.)

It’s worth quoting her beautiful, evocative description at length: “There is an account of her sons carrying her dead body on their shoulders to its burial place at the top of the glen. The funeral procession, though only briefly chronicled, has something about it that fires the imagination… The strong warriors carry their burden over rough stony ground, the cortège almost dwarfed by the huge background panorama of sea, mountain, valley, plain and the arch of the sky.

“Queen Scotia sleeps in a corner of Ireland, herself a cornerstone of our history. The whole district where the decisive battle was fought is still steeped in Milesian lore. The Slieve Mish mountains are named after one of Scotia’s daughters-in-law [Mis]. Fas, wife of another of her sons, is buried about 12 miles away.”

Fas? I’d never heard of her and don’t know of her grave site. That’s a project for the future, but it was a recent introduction to another ancient name that prompted this journey into the rich accounts of Ireland’s beginnings. In this case, Fóla, who was said to be a goddess of the Tuatha Dé Danann.

The woman who bears her name today, Fóla O Grady, explains that the choice was inspired by a bicycle trip her mother, then pregnant, made with her two elder brothers to Dun Laoghaire in Co Dublin in 1974. They spotted the Irish naval vessel, the LE Fóla, docked in the harbour and decided that the bump should be called Fóla.

The name stuck, and now it’s a frequent topic of conversation.

What a wonderful way to remind ourselves of the heroic sagas that are still visible all around us if we care to look.

The memory of Queen Scotia, for instance, was carried down through history in the names of boats, race horses and, at one time, as the title of a Gaelic League branch in Tralee.

These things matter, as an article in The Kerryman in 1950 illustrates with a large dollop of humour. In March 1950, there was a suggestion that Queen Scotia’s grave might be in Drogheda, but the writer of "Talking about Tralee" was having none of it.

“Poor old Queen Scotia and the threat to take her away from us left me wondering whether I should call in the Guards or the FCA for protection and then I thought of the local boxing club and straight away decided to ask for their adequate protection,” the columnist wrote.

The boxing club in question was the Desmond Club. It’s not clear if those gallant boxers needed to step in but, a decade later, Queen Scotia was very much centre-stage when the organisers of the Rose of Tralee put out a call for 200 volunteers to stage a massive Scotia-themed pageant to mark the opening of the festival.

Perhaps it’s time we revived such a pageant because — and I’m getting in early here — every time that festival comes around in late summer, there’s a series of voices calling for its immediate demise.

Look, the festival is indeed an imperfect beast, but it is the only time of the year when Tralee gets a moment in the fickle limelight. Give us a chance to tell the world all about the town, its people and its rich heritage going right back to the redoubtable Queen Scotia.