Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 24, 1913.djvu/535

 Collectanea. 497

Eve a kern went to shoot wild fowl on the shore, and saw four men carrying a bier on which lay a body wrapped in white. He fired and the bearers ran away, and he found a beautiful girl apparently asleep. She neither spoke nor took food or drink for a year, and on the following November Eve her preserver overheard the fairies talking in Lisnafallainge fort, and learned that she was daughter of O'Conor Kerry and could not recover till she ate off her bier covering, which was her father's tablecloth. The kern broke the spell accordingly, and ultimately won her for his bride.

Sir Donat O'Brien of Lemaneagh looms large in the popular memory. He made the old straggling lane-way, traceable in fragments sometimes a mile apart, from Lemaneagh over Roughan hill and north-eastward through the barony of Inchiquin, and it is known as "Sir Donat's road." He bought Moghane Hill near his property at Dromoland for threescore cows and twenty bullocks.-^ His mother, Maureen Rhue, apprenticed him to a London goldsmith. When the later Civil War broke out. Sir Donat and his (apparently elder) brother, Teigie O'Brien, doubted sorely which side to support. At last Donat suggested that the brothers should take opposite sides, so that, whichever won, the family would have a friend at Court. -^

The unfortunate James the Second was the object to the peasantry of contempt and dislike far stronger in story than aversion to his triumphant son-in-law. In Moyarta the loyal Lord Clare and his yellow dragoons {Dragon buidh) were remembered, and in 1816 a proverb ran, — "Stop! Stop! Yellow Dragoon, — not till we come to the Bridge of Clare, not till we come to the pass of Moyarta ! " It was believed that the ghost of Lord Clare nightly drilled his phantom army before Carrigaholt, and the belief was not forgotten round Kilkee in 1875. Graham'-"^ heard that the ghostly dragoons were seen "to traverse "Tiie West" in the winter nights, and plunge at the dawning of the day into the surge that foams round the ruins of Carrigaholt." The drill field was said to have been to the east of the Castle, where the harbour lies and the great river breaks against the low banks, all having now

^Prof. Brian O'Looney, 1891. "'Chatterlon, op. cit., vol. ii., p. 184.

'-*W. S. Mason, op. cit., vol. ii., p. 430.