Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 21, 1910.djvu/520

 478 Collectanea.

classes at Scattery and along both banks of the river, at Kilkee, Kilmihil, and round Doolough and Miltown Malbay. In the fifteenth-century details of the " Cathedral " of Scattery a large- eyed dragon with crocodile jaws is conspicuous ; there was another carving at Kilrush ; and a third, — the " pattern-stone " removed from Scattery and until lately at Kilkee, — showed the Cata as "the amphibious beast of this blessed Isle," a nondescript creature with spiked back, scales, fish tail, nose curling up spirally, and clawed forefeet.

St. MacCreehy, a generation later than Senan (about 580), rivals the latter as a "dragon queller." He subdued the " Bruckee," a demon badger {broc sidh), at Rath Blathmaic near Inchiquin, which slew men and cattle and resisted the prayers of six local saints.^ MacCreehy by his holiness soon over- powered and chained it ; the aged saint then threw it

" Deep in that forgotten mere Among the tumbled fragments of the hills "

below the hill of Scamhal (or Scool) where its den Poulnabruckee (Poll na broic sidhe) is still shown. As already suggested (p. 181) the Bruckee may have been a bear, and "a terrible bear, — he is death to a herd of cattle" in Bricriiis Feast ^ sounds like an allusion to a common occurrence. The Bruckee on " MacCreehy's tomb " in Kilraacreehy church, on the shore of Liscannor Bay» is exactly like the Cata carvings in Scattery, with long pointed ears, large eyes, and huge jaws blunt-ended, but bristling with pointed teeth. In the fifteenth century it had become a dragon in local belief

Another Bruckee haunted Shandangan Lough near Corofin, a little pool famous, when I first knew it, for remarkable changes of colour. There are two funnel holes, eight to ten feet wide, full of water, in the soft ground near the pool which are still

''See Plate XIV., p. 340, ante. O'Curry, Manners and Ctistoms of the Ancient Irish, vol. iii., p. 322 ; The Jotirnal of the Royal Society of Anti- quaries of Irelatid, vol. xxix., p. 249.

® P. 64 (ed. Irish Texts Society). However, if the animal was common in the literary period, one might expect that the Life of King David would have suggested an Irish counterpart to the monks. Fights with the wolf are practically absent from Irish tales, and it seems safer to regard the identity with the bear of the badger " as big as a cow " as a mere speculation.