Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 21, 1910.djvu/231

 Collectanea. 195

afterwards festered. The wreckage of the dolmen was lying untouched on the ground a few years ago. The collapse of a calf shed on its occupants followed the demolition of Templenaraha oratory for building the unstable structure ;^^ this might be ascribed to a more sacred anger than that of the fairies, but the oratory stood in a ring fort. Another case of supposed vengeance occurred near Lehinch on the Atlantic. Some workmen were employed to level the earthworks of Dooneeva,^^ a fort on a low cliff at the end of the bay and near the modern Protestant Church. The man who originated this outrage was digging at the mounds when he fell to all appearance dead. The news was at once taken to his wife, a reputed "wise woman," and she ran to a "fairy spot" and "did magic." She then went to her apparently lifeless husband, and ordered the fairies in a peremptory way to restore him at once and take his stick. Then, before everyone, the stick vanished, and the " dead man " sat up none the worse for his "rapture to the land of faery." ^9 The date of this event could not be fixed, but it seems to be attributed to the period before 1840, and Dooneeva seems to have been in its present condition in 1839.

Two forts named Lissardcarney and Ballyhee in Templemaley Parish were in 1839 reputed strongholds garrisoned by troops of fairies. The songs of the fairies were heard in Cahernanoorane in Inchiquin, and Leskeentha near Noughaval.^^ They danced in the Lisnarinkas, played " hurley " in Lisfearbegnagommaun, and laid in wait to worry the belated traveller in Rathfollane and a small fort near the rectory, to the south of it, near Newmarket- on-Fergus. Fairies haunted the well of Tobesheefra, while even at the holy well of the powerful and vengeful St. MochuUa at Fortanne milk was once offered to them. The butter had refused to "come," and the mistress of the house, (a Protestant woman of good birth and fair education), as she told me herself about 1878, took some of the refractory milk to the well, made the sign

37 Told to Dr. G. U. MacNamara about 1907.

^ Not Doonmeeve as on the Ordnance Survey maps.

3^ Told to Miss Diana Parkinson. I heard it locally, but more vaguely, in 1907.


 * " Local traditions, 1904, 1908.