We passed three scolts. I don't know of an English word for these rocky indentations; "Fjord" is the Norse, but I usually think of fjord as narrow rocky sided embayment miles long. "Zawn" is a Cornish word that kayakers are bringing into English: they look for these places in rocky headlands to land their boats. The Irish word is "Scolt"; it means 'scar', a place where the ocean's force has sharply wounded the land. All around Inis Bo Finne, the ocean has broken away the rock foundations and made narrow defiles. All are rock sided. Some terminate in a cave that the ocean scours. Some end with a small beach of stones and boulders, noisily thrown about by the last of the surf rush. They all have names, translated to English: the scar of the altar; the scar for little boats, the scar of poteen makers; the scar of the ginger-haired girl; the scar of the sheep sheering. There are others. As long as people live on Inis Bo Finne, the places also all have histories. The scolt of the sheep shearing terminates in a cove, a pebble beach leading narrowly upwards onto a platform of grass with high rocky sides: easy to see this as a place in which to keep sheep corralled while cutting the fleeces. Near here was the ginger-haired girl's scolt. Passing that, we came to Scoltnabrooey.
The Oilean Na Marbh is not an island, but almost. It is a knife edge of broken and bare black rock almost severed from Inis Bo Finne. A spine, eighty feet tall where it breaks from the main, maybe thirty feet wide at its base, it slopes down to its point of submergence in the sea a couple hundred yards to the west. It is a jumble of sharp and broken rock not quite big enough to hide or save the islanders from what came. The little girl would not tell the soldiers where the other islanders had hidden. But the soldiers threatened to kill her if she didn’t. When she told, they killed her anyway slicing her with a sword. They marched onto the high ground, where we were sitting adjacent to Oilean na Marbh. "The soldiers climbed down, then onto the rock, found the hiding islanders and killed every one of them, women, children and men on this spot." After that, Inis Bo Finne had no people. Tom didn’t know the names of the families that were of Inis Bo Finne from that time of the slaughter. Years later, the Colls came in to Inis Bo Finne from coastal and island settlements further to the west. The McGinley, McGees, McFaddens and Ferrys came onto the island later, after the Colls. We walked back, past Scoltnabrooey, past the sheep sheering place, past the scar of the ginger-haired girl, and around the southwest bulge of Inis Bo Finne that faces Ireland. We walked along a mound of earth 5 or 6 feet high, extending two hundred yards. Tom called this 'the dike of the dannemach'. He said the word translates to "foreigner". Its means Denmark men, people from the North, Norsemen, Vikings. Tom didn't know their family names. "They that built this lived here long ago, Joe, even before the families that Cromwell's killed."
He planted hatred that to this day lives in field and hedge, bog and rock. In Irish histories there are few figures more reviled than this one. Even at the remove of 350 years there are some who cannot pronounce his name without choking on it. My first visit to Ireland with my brother Jim was in 1970. We stopped in a pub in Claremorris, County Mayo, to get directions to the village in which my maternal grandmother had been born. The publican, John Murphy, gave us directions to Dalkey, but then thought them too complicated for us to follow. He closed his pub (the middle of the day), and drove us, himself, to Dalkey. Along the way he told us of an awful rape and farmhouse burning that had taken place somewhere along the road to Dalkey. He was fierce upset about it. I was in the back seat of his car, but I could see his neck distend and get red, his voice grow loud and angry in the telling of the story. I couldn't completely understand his Mayo accent and missed a lot of the detail of the story, but none of the bile that swelled in John Murphy as he told us about some evil thug. Later, I asked my brother, who was Murphy talking about. "Cromwell." Three hundred and twenty years had not slaked Murphy's outrage. The slaughter at Oilean na Marbh would have taken place, if it happened here in this place, in the mid-seventeenth century. If it didn’t happen here as I was told, it did happen elsewhere, for the violence of destruction of the Cromwellian suppression is well documented. In Joe Kelly’s book "Aspects of Our Rich Inheritance" (page 139), he tells of a recounting by Edward Durning of a Cromwellian slaughter in the Church at Ray in July of 1652. Enough detail in this account parallels Tom's - soldier's approach, the people fleeing to a hiding place, the discovery and the complete massacre - a historian would worry about fact. But I think that the truth of the matter is there, and that seed gets planted in earth, no less than in the remembering people. Tom took me to the Oilean na Marbh because it is the only place where the truth about him and his place can possibly be harvested. Pat Coll, then separately, his brother, Dan, as well as Tom told me that the fishermen of Inis Bo Finne had a superstition about ginger-haired girls: If a fisherman saw a red-headed girl as he was readying for sea, he would not go upon the sea on that day for he would be lost. Each of the men that told me, all of them, told me, though it was true about the Cromwell soldiers, the little girl, the islanders, and the treachery that led to the naming of the Oilean na Marbh, he himself pays no attention to these superstitions about ginger-haired girls. Young Mary Ferry, living on Inis Bo Finne, the daughter of John Ferry, is now the little girl with the flaming hair. While I was on Inis Bo Finne, I never saw any fisherman putting out to sea, her own father included, after I saw Mary and her sister Maeve, going up to Tobermoorish, as they did each morning, to fill their water buckets for their mom and family for the day. And I never saw Mary out and about much before ten in the morning, and by that time the salmon fishermen were well out, and the lobster potters back from their early round.
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Island
of the Bones 
Tom
McGinley doesn't go out fishing much anymore. His brothers,
Taig and John, younger, go out most mornings to tend their
lobster pots, crab pots, or put out a gill net for salmon.
After his morning prayers in the chapel, Tom walks round
the island. 
Tom
sat on a rock on the far side, rolled a cigarette, lit up.
He pointed to a wall of jagged rock jutting West into the
Atlantic, "That would be Oilean na Marbh, Joe. In English
you'd probably call it 'island of bones'. During the time
of Cromwell, a band of his soldiers came in to Inis Bo Finne.
People, seeing Cromwell's troops approach, fled to the back
of the island and hid in rock caves and hideouts at this
western tip of the island." Tom told me that the soldiers
spied a little ginger-haired girl because of the brightness
of her hair. She had been separated from the others, and
was hiding near the place that islanders keep sheep at the
time of shearing. 
Oliver
Cromwell is a respected figure in English histories; a brilliant
military leader, administrator, and the central figure in
a regicide that historians see as one of the earliest of
the European uprisings stumbling toward democratic state
institutions. Cromwell was “Lord Protector of the
Commonwealth”. He executed the king, Charles I, but
refused himself to take up the offered crown. He ordered
the killing of many in Ireland, his sense of religious tolerance
not extending to anyone Catholic. As payment for their murderous
work, he transferred ownership of most fertile fields and
forests of Ireland to his soldiers and others he planted
in Ireland, guaranteeing loyalty and taxes to what he called
'the Commonwealth'. 
Joe
Ferry