Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 28, 1917.djvu/223

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mountain and sending back word for it tiie book passed from hand to hand till it overtook him." This story is also told of St. Brendan and Mount Brandan at Kilmalkedar in Kerry. Yet another folk-tale, to account for the local incorrect name for Garland Sunday, or Domhnach cruim duhh (" Garlic Sunday"), is told in Mayo. The saint chased a witch to the Reek though she hurled back rocks at him. At last she raised a mist and the holy man's followers were afraid to follow him into the " foggy wilderness," so he ran on alone, by chance his foot struck a bell, which he rang till his followers joined him. Hence the first Sunday in harvest is called Donagh tram dubh,^ or the " Sunday of Gloom." He continued his pursuit up the hill and the witch threw garlic-water over him, but Patrick struck her dead with the bell and her blood made Loch Dearg red and gave it the name. He then got to the top and blessed the west and Connemara, which has ever since abounded m fish, but, unfortunately forgetting to bless Erris, the people to the north remained pagans, rakes, profligates and drunkards !^ The story is one of the numerous class embodying the hatred of district to district ; I have heard such against the Blasquet folk at Dunquin in Kerry and the Aran folk on the Clare coast and of Iniskea in the Mullet. Certainly I never found the Erris people worse than those of the rest of Mayo, and my recollections of the people of every part of that county are most pleasant.

One cannot but wonder whether the Reek (hke, as some suppose, Iniscatha in the Shannon) may not have been a centre of pagan worship, captured and consecrated to Christian usage by the tactful saint. The sanctuary in which the modern little oratory stands is evidently of great, if not of prehistoric, antiquity.^ It is locally called " the Altar," a rude enclosure of stones walled on three sides with a ledge or slab. The holes between the stones are packed with iron objects — nails, buttons, broken crockery and little bone crosses and crucifixes — votive offerings of the pilgrims. Further on is St. Patrick's

^ It is, of course, Croni dnbli, probably an early Christian nickname for a son god, the black crooked one.

-Lady Wilde, AncierJ Cures, etc. p. 95.

"And perhaps Turlough Hill "fort" in Barren, Co. Clare.