Page:The Folk-Lore Journal Volume 4 1886.djvu/263

255 DONEGAL SUPERSTITIONS.

By, M.R.I.A.

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SHEETIN is a very fair pronunciation of the Irish words sidh (fairy) and teine (fire), or, loosely translated, fairy-struck or shot. There is a very general belief in Ireland, even among the people of English and Scotch abstraction, that cattle can be fairy-struck or bewitched, and in the co. Donegal the first is called "sheetin" and the second "blinked," the Irish believing most in the first; the Scotch element, which is great in the county, in the second. To take them in order:—

Generally in Ireland, but more especially in Munster and Connaught, the fairies are supposed to throw soighd (anglicè darts), these being the flint implements that are picked up here and there in the fields; and, to cure the cattle, formerly they gave it a hair of the dog that bit it, the flint being boiled in a pot of water and that given to the cow, or the flint was passed over the cow, it at the same time being rubbed in places with it. The exact formula that was gone through I have not been able to learn, because, although once it was the general cure in Donegal, it has now become obsolete, a "sheetin" cow being now measured. Measuring is as follows:—The beast is measured three times, beginning at the butt of the tail, and thence along the back to the head, and back under the belly, the measure being man or woman's half arm, from the elbow to the tips of the fingers; next it is singed—a lighted turf held in a tongs being ran three times along its back from the butt of its tail to the top of its head, and afterwards three times round its body, beginning at its backbone, this operation being performed by two persons starting at