Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 27, 1916.djvu/289

 So7?ie Characteristics of Irish Folklore. 261

Another account, from West Cork and Kerry, gives: "At Calaghan's Gate we knocked him down,"^'-

and the Wren Boys there, if they could not find a wren, killed a robin.^^ The wren's breast was always smeared with blood.

A paper on Irish bird-lore has already been published by this Society,^* so I will only add a note on a point of bird- lore personally known to me, viz. the dislike, obviously imported, of the magpie — obviously, as the bird was not known in Ireland before the eighteenth century. Derrick, in 1578, wrote :

"No pies to pluck the thatch from house. Are breed in Irishe ground."^''

I remember once a Mayo man, just as our party was starting out shooting, caught sight of a magpie. " Bedad ! " says he, " if it's bad luck at all it'll be bad luck to the magpie ! " — and he shot the bird on the spot.

Another custom frequently noted is the bonfire or bone- fire. Accounts of May or Midsummer bonfires may be found in many eighteenth-century books, and as early as the days of Colonel Vallancey, speculation was rife as to their significance and origin. On May Eve and Mid- summer Eve bonfires are general. Shaw Mason mentions them on St. Peter's Eve and St. James's Eve in Co. Wex- ford,^*" and there is a note in the Cork H.A.S.J. of bonfires on the south-east coast on St. Peter's Day and Lammas Day.^" Personally I know them best in connection with political not calendar events.

The first points that suggest themselves to the student of Irish Calendar Customs are the marked division of the

^^ Calaghan's Gate is a meet of the Carberry Hunt. 1^ " The robin and the wren

Are God's two holy men." "A-Z. /., vol. ii. pp. 65-7.

^* Somers' Tracts, vol. i. p. 582, quoted by Lecky, vol. i. p. 19. I*' Shaw Mason, vol. i. p. 252. '" See also Shaw Mason, iii. 75.