Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 28, 1917.djvu/471

 Collecta7iea. 437

pirates living on Inishbofin.i The ruin, called " Aittighe Guarim," near Bunnamullen Bay, was levelled to supply- material for the priest's house before 1839, the late Mr. Cyril Allies (whose kindness to me when on the island I must recall) tells me that a quern was dug up on its site in recent years, before 191 1 ; whether, as on Torry Island, this had been set in the foundation for luck or a propitiatory act I could not learn. Guarim's castle stood on high ground near the new Church of St. Colman, but had been levelled before the earlier named date. Guarim is said to have been " a certain old chief " who quarrelled with the monks of St. Colman's monastery, refusing to pay tithes to them. Not content with this, he laid an ambuscade, captured six monks, and put them to death in the townland of Middle Quarter, where their blood still is said to rise from the ground on the anniversary of their slaughter. This sacrilege was too much even for the millstone consciences of his followers ; they bound him and brought him to Renvyle Castle, on the opposite mainland, where he was tried and condemned and chained to a rock for the tide to drown. Since then it is said that none of his family, now " Gorham," can enter the priesthood. When the new church was built in recent years the legend took an entirely new form, that a bishop had been drowned in a similar manner by the Cromwellian garrison. Older legends varied in making Guarim, some, a contemporary of St. Colman of Lindisfarne, a.d. 664, others of Grania Uaile nine centuries later.

Bosco, whose castle was supposed to be embodied in " Crom- well's Barracks," was another tyrant and pirate, a Dane or a Spaniard. He stretched a chain from a rock across the mouth of the harbour to protect the ships of himself and the sea-queen Grania Uaile. He planted a cannon on another rock, still called " the Gun Rock," for their further protection, and used to throw his prisoners into the sea through an embrasure, still shown, in the " Barracks." He buried his vast treasures in the fortress and set a spirit to guard it. When even a priest ventured to

^See Dr. Charles R. Browne, " Ethnography of Inishbofin and Inishark," R.I. Acad. Proc. vol. iii. ser. iii. pp. 360-363 ; Ord. Survey Letters, vol. i. p. 484 ; and Clare Island Siiifey, p. 68.