Page:The Folk-Lore Journal Volume 2 1884.djvu/148

140 Formerly they spent here eleven days successively at Christmas-time in this exercise, now they spend only one. Fires are lighted on Midsummer's Eve round which they drive their cattle to preserve them, as they believe it will, from accidents during the year; they believe also in the existence of fairies, and are very cautious not to say anything disrespectful of them. If any article of household furniture happens to be misplaced, they attribute it to the wee-people, as they call them, who stood in need of it at the time.

A friend of mine who lived a few years ago in a mountainy situation, assured me of the following fact: That his wife stepped quietly one day into a neighbouring house, when the family were out at work, and put an egg and an oaten-cake to the fire, inverting at the same time all the little furniture of the place. Soon after, conversing with the old woman of the family, she endeavoured in an indirect way to find out what impression the incident had made on her; but the woman, though communicative in other matters, kept this a profound secret, from which it was inferred that she was afraid to mention it lest her little friends might not pay her another kind visit.—(Vol. i. pp. 123-125.)

4. Parish of Ballintog.

There are no patrons nor patron days, nor any particular customs, except that on Christmas day and on the first of the year a great concourse of people assemble on the strand, at White Park, to play common or shinny.—(Vol. i. p. 157.)

5. Parish of Clonmany.

The titular saint, or, as some express it, the guardian saint of this parish, is Columbkill. The 9th June is his festival day, and is observed most ceremoniously by some of the old people in the parish: on that day they circumambulate certain places, repeating certain prayers, deified, as it were, by him. Men formerly drove down their cattle to the beach on that day, and swam them in that part of the sea into which runs the water of St. Columb's Well, which is thereby made holy water; but this custom of late has not been practised. There is also a traditional story told here, that the earth of a little hillock (tempo desh), on the right of the road leading from the chapel