Visions and Beliefs in the West of Ireland, Second Series
General
Visions and Beliefs in the West of Ireland, Second Series
Atlantic Coast (Ireland) -- Social life and customs; Folklore -- Ireland; Ireland -- Social life and customs
She was known to be a woman that had died nine years before; and she
would sometimes come into the sister's house, and bid her keep it
clean. But one time the sister's husband went to burn the inside of
the forth, and the next morning his barn where he had all the wheat of
the harvest and near a ton of hay and two or three packs of wool, was
found to be on fire. And his own little girl, about eight years of age,
was in the barn, and a labouring man broke through and brought a wet
cloth with him and threw it over her and carried her out. But she was
as black as cinders and dead. Vexed they were at him burning the forth.
_An Old Miller:_
Did _they_ get help to make those forths? You may know well that they
did. There was an engineer here when that road was being made--a
sort of an idolater or a foreigner he was--anyway he made it through
the forth, and he didn't last long after. Those other engineers,
Edgeworth and Hemans beyond at Ardrahan when the railway was made,
I'm told they avoided such things.
_A Slieve Echtge Man:_
There were two brothers taken away sudden, two O'Briens. They were
cutting heath one day and filling the cart with it, and a voice told
them to leave off cutting the heath, but they went on, and a blow
struck the cart on the axle. And soon after that one of the brothers
sat down in his chair and died sudden. And the other was one day
going to market, I was going to it that day myself, and he wasn't far
beyond the white gate when the axle of the cart broke in that same
place where it had got the blow, and so he had to go home again, and
near the river where they're cutting the larch he turned in to talk
to a poor man that was cutting a tree, and the tree fell, and the top
of it struck him and killed him. And it was last March that happened.
There was one Leary in Clough had the land taken that's near Newtown
racecourse. And he was out there one day building a wall, and it was
time for his dinner, but he had none brought with him. And a man came
to him and said "Is it home you'll be going for your dinner?" And
he said "It's not worth my while to go back to Clough, I'd have the
day lost." And the man said, "Well, come in and eat a bit with me."
And he brought him into a forth, and there was everything that was
grand, and the dinner they gave him of the best, so that he eat near
two plates of it. And then he went out again to build the wall. And
whether it was with lifting the heavy stones I don't know, but (with
respects to you) when he was walking the road home he began to vomit,
and what he vomited up was all green grass.
_A Man on the Connemara Coast:_
This is a faery stream we're passing; there were some used to see
them by the side of it, and washing themselves in it. And there used
to be heard a faery forge here every night, and the hammering of the
iron could be heard, and the blast of the furnace.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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