Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 21, 1910.djvu/230

 1 94 Collectanea.

of Fortanne says that the coach was heard at the deaths of certain Westropps after 1873, but nothing happened after its last appearance.

The phantom of a coach and horse was seen not far from Corofin, at Cragmoher, not long since, but it is agreed that no death took place after the apparition. An equally vague story was told about 1870 at Attyflin by a very old woman, Norry Halloran, whom the sound of the coach pursued one dark evening for a long way, but it did not pass her door, and nothing happened afterwards.

IV. Fairies and Fairy Fo?'ts and Mounds. MacCraith, in the Triumphs of Toriough, in describing the prognostics of the death of Prince Donchad early in the fourteenth century says that " lights shone on the fairy forts," and it has already been noted that the sidhs or fairy mounds were lodgings of appalling apparitions, like Bronach when not at her proper residence in the lower deep. The Dindsettchas, — that early encyclopaedia invaluable for everything but the reliable account of the origin of place names which it purports to be, — describes how a lady dwelling in such a mound sprang out at her would-be lover in the form of a dragon.^** Probably such beliefs, and the consequent fear of irate and deadly beings in earthworks, have helped until recent years to preserve the residential earthen "forts," although the ring walls were destroyed with but little scruple. Nevertheless the son of a farmer named Nihill told me in 1892 that, after some days wreckage and removal of the outer wall of the fine triple stone fort of Cahercalla, near Quin, his father was stricken with acute pain, and only recovered from his illness when the work was stopped, — whence this interesting ruin has been preserved to the present day. A certain landlord, still living, nearly lost the use of one eye from the dust of an explosion when blasting a rock in an earth fort which was being removed, and this incident has upheld the faith and fear of the fairies in north-eastern Clare. A locally famous "astronomer" and weather prophet tried, many years ago, to blast a dolmen in Inchiquin Barony, and a splinter hit his hand, which was badly injured and '^'^ Revue Celtiqtie, vol. xv., p. 441.