Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 24, 1913.djvu/534

 496 Collectanea.

ghost was reputed to haunt the long front avenue, near the " Druids' altar " already noted, -'^ when I was a child.

Cromwell (who was never nearer to Clare than the extreme southern border of County Limerick, fifty miles away) is said to have marched to attack Limerick along " Crummil's Road," — not the road so named on the Ordnance Survey maps, but an old hollow lane, evidently of great antiquity, a little above it and on the top of the long ridge from Ardnataggle House to Ahareinagh Castle, to the west of Clonlara and to the north-east of Limerick City. He is reputed to have destroyed most of the ruined castles in south-east Clare, and to have knocked down Kilnaboy round tower with his guns. His men cut down the trees and killed the deer in the Deer Park of Lemaneagh, General Irayton (Ireton) was remembered for many acts of cruelty and violence in eastern Clare. Cromwell, or "an army of Cromwell," attacked the very curious stone fort called " the Doon " at Ballydonohan between Bodyke and Broadford ; the army destroyed it, and went on to Galway by way of Scariff, and a sword was found there ( Ballydonohan). -1 I believe I gave offence locally by saying that Cromwell had never been in Clare.

In 1877 Mrs. Stamer, who was then 77, told me that, when a girl, she had heard how the wife of Col. George Stamer, about 1650, was standing on the battlements of Clare Castfe when her baby sprang from her arms into the river and was swept away. Ever since on dark and stormy nights the mother's ghost could be seen frantically searching along the bank. There is no basis for this story in the family records and pedigree.

Charles the Second has no place in Clare folk-tales, but the story I have already told- about the Westropp ring may be placed about 1670. Lady Wilde tells a legend of Querin -^ (which I have myself never heard in Moyarta parish), dated in 1670, but, if genuine, evidently of far earlier origin. On November

-*Vol. xxii., p. 51.

-' So Messrs. Denis Boulton and Daniel O'Callaghan at Ballydonohan. See also Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy, vol. xxvii. (c), p. 395. "Vol. xxii., p. 52.

'^Ancient Legends, Mystic Charms, and Superstitions of Ireland (1888), pp. 27-9.