Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 28, 1917.djvu/480

 446 Collectanea.

boats along the coasts and may well have done as stated in the Mullet. The " high and bending heads " of the rocks at the three places added an embellishment to the tale, not unknown elsewhere, in Lives of the saints. The others were probably due to transference of the legend for story-loving sightseers, the north site being only accessible by a long drive and weary walk through marshes and over crags. Little was told at Cromwell's Barracks at Inishbofin, and that little confuses the Puritans with the tales of Bosco and Guarim. The new legend, started at the rebuilding of the church near the castle, was an old tale of Bosco, furbished up to excite popular interest in the v\-ork. Even the most redundant martyrologist of the time knows it not. In Aran, at " Cromwell's Barracks," Arkin, I only heard in 1878 that it was built from the material of the (five) destroyed " seven churches " and the Round Tower ; the first most probable, the last false. Loch Curafin ^ in Mayo owed its origin to a Cromwellian massacre of a priest and his congregation. The horrified earth sank and filled with dark red water, ever fretting " the lake water lapping in low sounds on the shore," on even the calmest day, and the fish never taking a fly.

I must again briefly transgress my original rule to recall some traditions of the expulsion of the religious bodies in Galway city. The Dominican nuns were aided by a merchant to escape to Spain. Two returned in more peacable times and were again expelled, but their ghosts joined the worshippers in their ruined church. One person showed a large chest where a nun was hidden for many days and only escaped in a fisherman's clothes. Another ghostly nun walks through the walled-up door of the Lady Chapel every Friday. She was murdered (by Cromwell's soldiers, some said) in- the stone hall and was buried in the vaults below. The Puritans also drove the Franciscan nuns, at the point of the sword, to drown them in Loch Corrib, but the intended victims found they could walk on the water and so escaped to Nun's Island. Later on an English officer, who had been saved by the Irish and held the nunnery, let its old owners return and go through an underground passage to wor-

1 Proc. R.I. Acad. vol. iv. ser. iii. p. 106.