Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 24, 1913.djvu/227

Rh dragon slept with its body looped round Scattery and its tail in its mouth; how the angel brought the saint to Knockanangel hill (and church), and helped him to drive out the monster; how Senán would not let the lady saint (Cannara) land on his island, and only let her be buried where the tide ebbs and flows over her tombstone; and how he let no woman enter the church. At that time no one prevented girls from entering Teampul Shenáin, and the holy elder bush, from which in earlier days it was reckoned fatal to break a twig, was a mere memory. St. Senán's bell, folk told, came down ringing from the sky upon a roadside altar between Kildimo and Farighy. The late Rev. Sylvester Malone heard from Dean Kenny how his curate, the Rev. S. Walsh, about 1827 first persuaded some women to enter Senán's church. Soon afterwards their families were evicted. At the patterns the women used to wait at the Cathedral while the men finished their devotions at St. Senán's grave and church, for they held that any woman intruding was either struck barren or met with some other disaster.

Caritan, Senán's disciple, is vaguely remembered as "Credaun" at Kilcredane near Carrigaholt. In 1816 he was known as Credán neapha (naomh, holy), and by his well cured sore eyes and rickets, giving its waters a circular motion which kept the tide from uniting with them.

The tale of "St. Senán's Warning" tells, as by Tom Crotty, an old guide, how thirteen boats full of people came to 'make rounds' and merrymake upon one Easter Monday; one man, who only came for sport and did no reverence to the saint, got drunk and was drowned on his way to land. The guide gives a circumstantial account of the saint's appearance to his father, Dan Crotty, but it was probably at least "dressed to amuse the quality,"—a pestilential custom, encouraged by former generations of thoughtless gentry and originating many a sham legend. The convivial