Ferdiad at the Ford (Ferdia)

The best friend Cú Chulainn was manoeuvred into killing, and the town still named after the place it happened.

Ferdiad and Cú Chulainn trained together in Scotland under the warrior woman Scáthach. They were foster brothers, which in early Ireland was a bond at least as strong as blood, and they had sworn never to fight one another.

Medb needed someone who could hold Cú Chulainn at the ford and there was nobody else. Ferdiad refused her. She offered land, treasure and her daughter Finnabair, and he refused again. So she turned to the one thing he could not refuse, and had her poets promise to make a satire on him that would raise blisters on his face and follow his name for ever. In a culture where a poet's satire could end a man, that was not a threat he could survive.

He went to the ford. The fight lasted three days. Each evening they stopped, and each evening they sent healing herbs across the water to each other and food from one camp to the other, and their horses were put in the same paddock and their charioteers slept by the same fire.

On the third day Cú Chulainn was losing and called for the Gáe Bolga, the barbed spear thrown with the foot that cannot be drawn out of a body. It killed Ferdiad, and Cú Chulainn carried him out of the water and collapsed over him, and the lament he speaks is one of the great passages in the literature.

The ford is Áth Fhir Dhiadh, Ferdiad's ford. The town there now is Ardee, in Irish Baile Átha Fhirdhia.