Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 21, 1910.djvu/232

 196 Collectanea.

of the cross over it, said the Lord's Prayer, dug a hole in the mud at the well with her left heel, and went away without looking back. As might have been expected, the butter had "come" by the time she had got home again, and she used to quote the case as "proof positive." Besides the forts and wells, the dolmens are believed to have been fairy homes, but in my enquiries since 1892 I have never been able to authenticate a case of offerings at them of milk and butter, although small basins like the Swedish "elf mills" are found in the covers of more than one of these structures, and large bullaims or basins at others, such as Bally- ganner Hill near Noughaval, Cappaghkennedy on the hills above Corofin, and Newgrove and Kiltanon near TuUa in eastern Clare. Food and drink, however, have been, until at least the present century, set out in plates and cups in Inchiquin and Moyarta Baronies, and in the latter, on the Shannon bank, the slops were thrown out and clean plates, water, chairs, and a well-swept hearth left by a punctilious servant for fairy guests in 1888 or 1889.

The greatest fairy monarch in Clare was " Donn of the Sand- hills " (now the golf links), near the old castle of Doogh, {i.e. Dumhach or Sand Dune), near Lehinch. He, or one of the other fairy princes named Donn, appears in a list of the divine race of the Tuatha De Danann,*i and is therefore of the family of the Dagda, and, it may be presumed, a lineal descendant of the ancient Ana, Mother of the Gods. A well-known Irish scholar and antiquary, Andrew MacCurtin, before 1730 addressed a political petition to Donn of Dumhach complaining, like most Irish antiquaries, of the neglect of the gentry, and praying for any menial post at his Court.*^ As there was none that answered, the petitioner had to rest content with the hospitality of the MacDonnells of Kilkee and the O'Briens of Ennistymon. Donn's heartless conduct met poetic justice, for he has ever since "lacked a sacred bard," and, save for a slight uneasiness in a few poor old people passing across the sandhills after the golfers have left and the sun has set, he is now all but forgotten. In another poem of MacCurtin's, on a monk's horse " overlooked " and killed by the evil eye, or by the look of a red-haired woman, or


 * ^ Cath Finntraga (ed. Kuno Meyer), p. 15.


 * 2 Mss. Royal Irish Academy, 23. M. 47.