Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 21, 1910.djvu/225

 Collectanea. 189

washing armour and rich robes till the red gore churned and splashed through her hands.-^ Calling an Irish ally to question her, De Clare heard that "the armour and clothes were of the English, and few would escape immolation." " I am the Water Doleful One. I lodge in the green fairy mounds {sidh) of the land, but I am of the Tribes of Hell. Thither I invite you. Soon we shall be dwellers in one country." Next day De Clare, his son, and nearly all his English troops lay dead upon the fields near the ford of Dysert for miles over the country in their flight.

The belief of the early eleventh and fourteenth centuries is still extant, for local legend near Dysert tells how Aibhill and twenty- five banshees washed blood-stained clothes in Rath Lake before " Claraghmore " (De Clare) fell, and that they still do so when mischief is afoot.^*^

For nearly 300 years there is no other Clare banshee tale, till the famous one of 1642 in the Menioires of Lady Fanshawe, (published in 1665). 2'' It is so well known that a brief abstract will suffice. Her Ladyship, staying with some of the O'Briens, was sleeping in a room, of which the window overhung water at some height, at a castle, perhaps Bunratty or Castle Lake. She was awakened by a horrible scream, and saw a girl outside the window. The apparition was pale, rather handsome, and with her reddish hair hanging dishevelled over her shoulders. After some time the unwelcome visitor vanished, with other ghastly shrieks. In the morning Lady Fanshawe, telling her tale, was told of the death of a relative of the family whose illness had been concealed from her. The spirit was that of the peasant wife of a former owner of the castle, drowned in the moat by her husband and of evil omen to his descendants.

The next story was told in my own family and, I understand, in that of the Ross Lewins. I have traced it to a daughter of Jane Ross Lewin, one of the girls who saw the banshee. It related to Jane's father, Harrison Ross Lewin of Fortfergus, who probably died in 1776, as his will, dated November, 1775, was proved in

'■^Another "washer of the ford " appears in "Da Choca's Yiosit\,'" Eevue Ccliiqtie, vol. xxi. (1900), p. 157, and she is also a Bodbh.

^"Told me by Prof. Brian O'Looney in 1890, and I have heard more recently of the existence of the belief. "^ Loc. cii., pp. 83-6.