Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 22, 1911.djvu/369

 Collectanea. ^2)Z

The names Thomas, James, and Patt. Cusack, and carvings of the round tcwer, Crucifixion, an angel, and a figure with a chalice, also appeared, as well as St. Senan with a crozier driving out a beast with a serrated back, belly, and tail, and the inscription " St. Synon and the Angel casting the amphibious beast out of the blessed Island." I could not find the stone after 1878. The devotees in 181 6 took their rounds about the holy well annually on their bare knees, and it was the practice of those who could not conveniently attend to hire for a small payment some poor person to act as their substitute. The pattern was sometimes held on Easter Monday, and, as it was degenerating into drunken- ness, the Roman Catholic Dean of Killaloe endeavoured to stop it.^ His curate also persuaded several women to enter St. Senan's church, but their families were soon after evicted and left the Island, so that the fame of the saint's legendary misogyny was established more firmly than ever. But in 1878, w-hen I first visited the Island, women entered the church without protest.

At Killone the great patterns have been long since suppressed,'^ and I could learn nothing about the actual rites. " Rounds " are still performed at other times, being frequently vowed in sickness or for a sick relative. The rite consists in going on the bare knees, with bare head, sunwise round the green tongue of land from the altar between the crags and the lake. This being done, prayers are offered at the altar itself. Some pilgrims also wash their heads, feet, and hands in the bathing tank. The details vary according to the vow, and count is kept of the rounds and prayers by the rounded stones on the altar.^ None of the observances seem to extend to the neighbouring abbey. The Pilgrim's Road is still visible, running north from the well far towards Ennis. The altar was last repaired by Anthony Roche, an Ennis merchant, in 1731.

The patterns on Iniscaltra, in Lough Derg, have long been nearly forgotten. In 1877 an old boatman told me that he had heard from old people of the flotillas of boats from every side of the great lake, the villages of tents, and the crowds of beggars,

® Mason's Parochial Sm-vey, vol. ii. , p. 459, under Kilrush parish. ''The summer pattern on St. John's Day still attracts a fair number of devotees, but seems to have no very exceptional feature. «Cf. ante, p. 50, and Plate III.