Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 28, 1917.djvu/472

 438 Collectanea.

dig in the court of the ruin a voice from underground told him, in Irish, to stop, and he gave up the search. ^

The legend of the white cow is so out of relation with all history that I reserve it for a later section on supernatural animals.

Aran. — Save the legends of the saints I got no quasi history in Aran save that Cromwell's soldiers levelled the Round Tower (which really fell in a gale) and the churches, at Killeany. In 1878 no legends were told of the forts, even of the gigantic Diin Aengusa and Dun Conchobhair. One man said Dun Oghil (Eochla) " may have been made by the Danes." In the Middle Island the vast prehistoric Dun Conor was attri- buted to King Conor O'Brien about 1 260. In 1839 O'Donovan (who was too fond of generalizing on isolated facts) said the last man who knew the name of the first huge fortress was one Wiggins, of Cromwellian descent, who knew it as " Dun Innees," but I see no reason to doubt that the forms " Aun Donguis " (1825), "Dun Unguish," or "linguist" (in 1858), and "Dun Aingus " or " Aineez " (in 1878) are genuine traditional names (not book-names) despite the great scholar's assertion.

Grania Uaile.

Grania Uaile ^ (O'Malley), " Grace O'Malley " or " Granny Weal ! " is a favourite in local tradition in the Islands of Achill, Clare and Bofin. The " famous fem.inine sea-captain " (as the Elizabethan soldiers called her) was an ally and friend of the British Government, but, by a strange perversion of tradition, she has become in ballad poetry a great patriot and in English tradition an assertor of equality with the Tudor Lioness herself. Grainne looms large in local tradition from Doonah, on Blacksod

^ I have collected this material in the Clare Island Survey, pp. 68 and 69. See also Dr. Browne in Proc. A'. I. Acad. vol. iii. ser. iii. under the account of Inishbofin.

^ For her legends I may refer to MacParlan's Statisinal Sui-vey of Co. Mayo (1802), p. 136 at Rockfleet, p. 138 at Uunah ; O.S. Letters, Mayo, vol. i. p. 165; Clare Island Survey, part 2, pp. 18, etc. ; Proc. K.I. Acad. vol. v. ser. iii. p. 67 ; Dr. Charles Browne's " Ethnography," ibid. ; Ethnography of Ballycroy, vol. iv. ser. iii. p. 106; Here and 7 here Through Ireland {Miss Banim), part i, p. 138; and Caesar Otway, Tottr in Connaught, pp. 287-294.

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