DR. EMMETT O’BYRNE – 28 September 2011
“IN CONTRAST to the popular image of the Vikings as fearsome seaborne plunderers, the late Dr. Ailbhe MacShamhrain felt that the impact of the Vikings at Wicklow and Arklow upon the neighbouring Irish was of a minimalist nature.
The first definitive mention in the Irish annals of Viking activity within the Wicklow region came during the year 827 – some three decades years after the Irish annalists recorded the first sighting of Viking fleets off Dublin. Yet the Vikings were to announce their intervention in Wicklow in the most dramatic of ways, launching a direct attack upon the local king of the Forthuatha (a kingdom that covered much of coastal Wicklow from Newcastle to Ennereilly and inland to Glendalough). Then the annalists tersely recorded that a pagan Viking force (described as heathens or ‘ gentibh’) over ran the encampment of Conall mac Cu Chongalt, killing him and ‘countless others’.
The origins of the conflict between the Wicklow king and the Vikings are uncertain. Moreover, we just do not know whether the Viking victory was the culmination of a long struggle with Conall mac Cu Chongalt. Equally, it could have been a sudden attack upon the Wicklow king by a predatory group of Vikings newly arrived in the region.
But it is likely that it was around this time that the first Viking communities settled astride estuaries of the Vartry and the Avonmore at Wicklow and Arklow respectively. While the evidence is distinctly fragmentary, the Vikings that drew up their long ships on the banks of estuary of the Avonmore at Arklow proved through their aggression to be more prominent than their kinsfolk at Wicklow.
What seems clear is that the Arklow Vikings during these years were led by a daring and self confident leader. The presence of such a leader was reflected through the ability of the Arklow Vikings to strike terror into Irish hearts within the interior of Leinster. There are clues to the identity of this leader. Quite possibly, he was the man from whom Arklow takes its name – Arnkell or Arnketill.
Indeed, the placename Arklow was a combination of this forename with the Norse word lo – denoting a low lying meadow near water. Indeed, the memory of this founding Arnkell or Arnketill was preserved by the descendants of the Vikings through their names, as an Arnkell was cited in a case before the royal justices of the King’s Bench during 1307.
The activities of the Arklow Vikings during the 830s do not reveal any discernible political alliances between them with the local Irish kings. Rather, it seems that the motivation of the Arklow Vikings was plunder and slaves. For in 834, the Arklow Vikings were identified as the plunderers of the ecclesiastical settlement of Kildare – being described by the annalist as ‘ the foreigners of Inbher Deaa’.
Indeed, the great Wicklow historian Liam Price was of this view – holding that Dee was the Avonmore upon which Arklow is sited. The Viking impact in Wicklow continued to be dramatic – sacking the monastic city of Glendalough in 834 and 835.
Indeed, the Arklow Vikings were also strongly suspected of attacking Ferns in north Wexford during 835 before ravaging Clonmore in Carlow on Christmas Day 835, carrying off many prisoners. Their interest in taking captives is significant, as slavery was a profitable economic activity and a slave was considered a valuable economic unit.
As Arklow was sited on a broad estuary, it was uniquely suited as a hub or entrepot for the distribution of slaves to the bigger slave markets of Dublin and further afield, suggesting that Viking Arklow may have been bigger than previously thought.”
Arklow History 