It starts in Ulster, with Conchobar, the king of that land, at a great feast given by his story-teller, Feidhlim. Everyone of importance was there. Such a feast lasted weeks or months and while this one was in progress, news was brought that Feidhlim’s wife had given birth to a daughter. Whereupon the Druid had one of his moments of vision and told the terrible evils that were to afflict the realm of Ulster on account of this new arrival. So impressive was he (they knew with what accuracy his ‘second sight’ worked), that there and then they seriously discussed the wisdom of taking away the young life. But Conchobar said no, leave her to be reared by me, and I’ll make her my wife.

So he put her into one of his forts, with a nurse to rear her and a tutor to teach her, and orders were issued that no one must go near her except Lebarcham, who was the king’s ‘conversation woman’. And no one went, until she had grown up and was ‘in beauty above the women of her time’.

One winter’s day the tutor killed a calf, and when Deirdre saw a raven on the red and the white snow, she said to Lebarcham that she would like to have a husband with these colours; raven hair, and red cheeks, and white skin. And in the idle way that women have of precipitating the destiny that is their undoing, Lebarcham answered, ‘I know a man in Conchobar’s following who is just like that. His name is Naesi.’ ‘O Lebarcham,’ said Deirdre, ‘get him to come privately, so that I may see what he’s like.’

Lebarcham did this, and in a little while Deirdre was telling Naesi how thrilled she was by all the wonderful stories she had heard about him—and would he take her away by stealth? In the end Naesi agreed, ‘yet reluctantly, for fear of Conchobar’. So he got his two brothers and other heroes to help him, and together they abducted Deirdre and fled to Albyn or Alba. They navigated the Falls of Lora (without aid from railway bridge or villa garden; possibly they had a pilot) and came up past Taynuilt (the wood the Mate and I went through is still mapped as Coillenaish or Naesi’s Wood) and went on past the spit opposite Bonawe Quarries and so up the loch until they reached that spot where she built her first house. They had many adventures and once went as far as Inverness, where the high king of Alba lived, for Naesi and his brothers were mighty warriors and were prepared to give service for their new land. A great feast was held at Inverness, whereat, it is related, there was a considerable amount of drinking, for even in those days they drank out of glasses in the northern capital. (As, indeed, they do to this day, and the distillate is still the best.) Well, from one drink to more, the high king could not keep his stricken eyes off Deirdre, and so she and Naesi had to fold their tent and steal away. Thus, with one thing and another, the happiest days of Deirdre’s life were spent in Alba.