Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 21, 1910.djvu/521

 Collectanea. 479

regarded with fear and suspicion. Ned Quin of Coad, a honest truthful man who died about eight years ago, firmly believed that he had seen the Bruckee in this lake. When he and a man named Pilkington were passing by, they saw a brown hairy monster swimming and plunging in the water, and it had eyes as large as turnips.^ It was probably a " tussock " of peat and coarse grass that had, as often happens, fallen off the crumbHng shore. There is no tradition that this pest was confined by the local sainted lady (Findclu) Inghean Baoith.

John Windele, amongst much speculation as to there being a dragon temple {dracontiuni) at Scattery and others at Loop Head in Clare and at Dun Farvagh in the Middle Isle of Aran, asserts, on the authority of The Adventures of the Three Sons of Thorailbh, a romance written in 1750, that several other formidable monsters belong to this district.^*^ These were the Faracat,^^ Fearboc or Fearbach, and three other dragons, the spawn of the " all- devouring sow, on the rock of Cruine " reared by " the red demon of Doolough." Comyn, in the same romance, derives the name of lUaunmattle, an island off the neighbouring coast, from the Matal, a formidable beast, (perhaps a demon boar), defeated by the same heroes.^- How far those of Comyn's stories without local attestation are genuine folklore is doubtful. Akin to these monsters is the mighty serpent hunted and slain by the O'Briens' army down the valley of the Daelach in Corcoraroe. They stoned it with rocks which still form the great cairn of Carnconnachtach, near Ennistymon, over its remains.^^ This cairn, being at Bally- deely (Daelach's town par excellence), may have been the reputed tomb of the Firbolg chief Daelach, son of Umor, and is almost certainly the "Carn mic Tail" where the O'Conors of Corcamodruad inaugurated their chiefs.

9 So Dr. G. U. MacNamara.

^"Windele, Topographical MS. (Royal Irish Academy), p. 3; Ordnance Survey Letters (Co. Clare), vol. i., p. 350.

'^'^Ante, p. 183.

^^The Mata, a giant, many-legged, and carapaced monster, infested the Boyne valley, and left a pyramid of its bones in the cemetery of Brugh. See "Dindsenchas," Revue Celtique, vol. xv. (1894), pp. 292, 329.

^* Ordnance Survey Letters (Co, Clare), vol. i., p. 309.