Visions and Beliefs in the West of Ireland, First Series
History
Visions and Beliefs in the West of Ireland, First Series
Atlantic Coast (Ireland) -- Social life and customs; Folklore -- Ireland; Ireland -- Social life and customs
_I put up my pony at a little inn. There were portraits of John
Dillon and Michael Davitt hanging in the parlour, and the landlady
told me Parnell's likeness had been with them, until the priest had
told her he didn't think well of her hanging it there. There was also
on the wall, in a frame, a warrant for the arrest of one of her sons,
signed by, I think, Lord Cowper, in the days of the Land War. "He got
half a year in gaol the same year Parnell did. He got sick there,
and though he lived for some years the doctor said when he died the
illness he got in gaol had to do with his death."_
_I had been told how to find Biddy Early's house "beyond the little
humpy bridge," and I walked on till I came to it, a poor cottage
enough, high up on a mass of rock by the roadside. There was only a
little girl in the house, but her mother came in afterwards and told
me that Biddy Early had died about twenty years before, and that
after they had come to live in the house they had been "annoyed for
a while" by people coming to look for her. She had sent them away,
telling them Biddy Early was dead, though a friendly priest had said
to her, "Why didn't you let on you were her and make something out of
them?" She told me some of the stories I give below, and showed me
the shed where the healer had consulted with her invisible friends. I
had already been given by an old patient of hers a "bottle" prepared
for the cure, but which she had been afraid to use. It lies still
unopened on a shelf in my storeroom. When I got back at nightfall to
the lodge in the woods I found many of the neighbours gathered there,
wanting to hear news of "the Tulla Woman" and to know for certain if
she was dead. I think as time goes on her fame will grow and some of
the myths that always hang in the air will gather round her, for I
think the first thing I was told of her was, "There used surely to
be enchanters in the old time, magicians and freemasons. Old Biddy
Early's power came from the same thing."_ (_Note_ 11.)
_An Old Woman in the Lodge Kitchen_ says:
Do you remember the time John Kevin beyond went to see Biddy Early,
for his wife, she was sick at the time. And Biddy Early knew
everything, and that there was a forth behind her house, and she
said, "Your wife is too fond of going out late at night."
_I was told by a Gate-keeper:_
There was a man at Cranagh had one of his sheep shorn in the night,
and all the wool taken. And he got on his horse and went to Feakle
and Biddy Early, and she told him the name of the man that did it,
and where it was hidden, and so he got it back again.
There was a man went to Biddy Early, and she told him that the woman
he'd marry would have her husband killed by his brother. And so it
happened, for the woman he married was sitting by the fire with her
husband, and the brother came in, having a drop of drink taken, and
threw a pint at him that hit him on the head and killed him. It was
the man that married her that told me this.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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