FAITH AND FAIRIES
In our parts of Ireland we do not for a moment pretend to be too
civilised for superstition. When Cromwell offered the alternative of
“Hell or Connaught,” with, no doubt, the comfortable feeling that it was
a case of six of one and half a dozen of the other, more creatures than
he knew of accepted the latter refuge. And when, in the County Cork, the
ancient saying was proved that “Beyond the Leap”--which is a village
about twelve miles inland from the Western Ocean--was indeed “beyond the
Law,” and that the King’s writ, if it ran at all, ran for its life in
the wrong direction, sanctuary was found there, also, for more than the
hard-pressed people of the land.
The “Fairies and Bridhogues and Witches” of the old song fled west and
south; in Galway, in Kerry and in Cork, they are still with us. Have I
not seen and handled a little shoe that was found in a desolate pass of
the Bantry mountains? It was picked up seventy or eighty years ago by a
countryman, who was crossing a pass at dawn to fetch the doctor to his
child. It is about two and a half inches long, and is of leather, in all
respects like a countryman’s brogue, a little worn, as if the wearer had
had it in use for some time. The countryman gave it to the doctor, and
the doctor’s niece showed it to me, and if anyone can offer a more
reasonable suggestion than that a Leprechaun made it for a fairy
customer, who, like Cinderella, dropped it at a dance in the mountains,
I should be glad to hear it.
At Delphi, in Connemara, to two brothers, a Bishop and a Dean of the
Irish Church, many years before its disestablishment, when Bishops were
Lords Spiritual and Temporal, and by no means people to be trifled with,
to these, and to their sister, there came visibly down the beautiful
Erriff river a boatload of fairies. They disembarked at a little
strand--one of those smooth and golden river strands that were obviously
created in order to be danced on by fairies--and there the fairies
danced, under the eyes of “Tom of Tuam” (thus I have heard that Bishop
irreverently spoken of by my cousin Nannie Martin), and of his brother,
the Dean, and of their sister; but to what music I know not. They were
possibly related to the Ross fairies, as it was noted (by the Bishop’s
sister, I believe) that they “wore red caps, and were very small and
graceful.”
Not half a mile from Drishane Gate there is a little wood that has not
the best of reputations. At its western end there is an opening, out of
the road that traverses it, that has been immemorially called the
Fairies’ Gap. I have in vain striven to obtain the facts as to the
Fairies’ Gap. Such information as was obtainable had no special
connection with Those People, yet was vague and disquieting. That there
was Something within in the wood, and it might come out at you when
you’d be going through it late of an evening, but if “you could have a
Friendly Ghost to be with you, there could no harm happen you.” The
thought of the friendly ghost is strangely soothing and reassuring;
perhaps oftener than one knows one has a kind and viewless companion to
avert danger.
Only eighteen months ago I was told of an old man who was coming from
the West into Castle Townshend village to get his separation allowance.
“A decent old man he was too, and he a tailor, with a son in the army in
France. He was passing through the wood, and it duskish, and what would
he see but the road full of ladies, ten thousand of them, he thought.
They passed him out, going very quietly, like nuns they were, and there
was one o’ them, and when she passed him out, he said she looked at him
so pitiful, ‘Faith,’ says the old tailor, ‘if I had a fi’ pun note to my
name I’d give it in Masses for her soul!’”
I was told by a woman, a neighbour of mine, of a young wife who lived
among these hills, and was caught away by the fairies and hidden under
Liss Ard Lake. “A little girl there was, of the Driscolls, that was sent
to Skibbereen on a message, and when she was coming home, at the bridge,
east of the lake, one met her, and took her in under the lake entirely.
And she seen a deal there, and great riches; and who would she meet only
the young woman that was whipped away. ‘Let you not eat e’er a thing,’
says she to the little girl, ‘the way Theirselves ’ll not be able to
keep you.’ She told the little girl then that she should tell her
husband that on a night in the week she would go riding with the
fairies, and to let him wait at the cross-roads above on Bluidth.
Herself would be on the last horse of them, and he a white horse, and
when the husband ’d see her, he should catch a hold of her, and pull her
from the horse, and keep her. The little girl went home, and she told
the husband. The husband said surely he would go and meet her the way
she told him; but the father of the woman told him he would be better
leave her with them now they had her, as he would have no more luck
with her, and in the latter end the husband was said by him, and he left
the woman with them.”
I know the cross-roads above on Bluidth; often, coming back from
hunting, “and it duskish,” with the friendly hounds round my horse, and
my home waiting for me, I have thought of the lost woman that was riding
the white horse at the end of the fairy troop, and of the tragic eyes
that watched in vain for the coward husband.
* * * * *
We have, or had, a saint in Castle Haven parish, Saint Barrahane was his
name, and his Well of Baptism is still honoured and has the usual
unattractive tributes of rag on its over-shadowing thorn-bush. The well
is in a deep, wooded glen, just above a graveyard that is probably of an
equal age with it. The graveyard lies on the shore, under the lee of
that castle that stood the bombardment from Queen Elizabeth’s sea
captains; the sea has made more than one sally to invade the precincts,
but the protecting sea wall, though it has been undermined and sometimes
thrown down, has not, so far, failed of its office. It is considered a
good and fortunate place to be buried in. All my people lie there, and I
think there should be luck for those who lie in a place of such ancient
sanctity. It is held that the last person who is buried in it has to
keep the graveyard in order, and--in what way is not specified--to
attend to the wants of his neighbours. I can well remember seeing a race
between two funerals, as to which should get their candidate to the
graveyard first. A very steep and winding lane leads down to the sea,
and down it thundered the carts with the coffins, and their following
_cortéges_.
In the next parish to Castle Haven there is a graveyard
[Illustration: E. Œ. SOMERVILLE ON TARBRUSH.]
lonelier even than that of Saint Barrahane. Like most of the ancient
burial places it is situated close to the sea, probably to permit of the
funerals taking place by boat, in times when roads hardly existed.
There, at the top of the cliffs, among the ruins of a church, and among
the dreadful wreck of tombs too old even for tradition to whisper whose
once they were, there took place, not long ago, the funeral of a certain
woman, who was well known and well loved. I was told of an old
beggar-woman who walked many miles to see the last of a friend.
“She rose early, and she hasted, and she was at the gate of the
graveyard when the funeral was coming,” another woman told me; “an’ when
she seen them, and they carrying in the corpse, she let the owld cloak
back from her. And when she seen the corpse pass her, she threw up the
hands, and says she, ‘That your journey may thrive wid ye!’”
That journey that we think to be so long and dark and difficult. Perhaps
we may find, as in so many of our other journeys, that it is the
preparation and the setting forth that are the hardest part of it.
In Ireland, at all events, it is certain that a warning to the
traveller, or to the friends of the traveller, is sometimes vouchsafed.
Things happen that are explainable in no commonsense, commonplace way;
things of which one can only say that they are withdrawals for an
instant of the curtain that veils the spiritual from the material. I
speak only of what I have personal knowledge, and I will not attempt to
justify my beliefs to anyone who may consider either that I have
deceived myself, or that the truth is not in me. In the spring of 1886
one of my great-aunts died. She had been a Herbert, from the County
Kerry, and had married my grandfather’s brother, Major John Somerville.
Her age “went with the century,” and when heavy illness came upon her
there was obviously but little hope of her recovery. I went late one
afternoon to inquire for her. She lived in a small house just over the
sea, and my way to it from Drishane lay through a dark little grove of
tall trees; a high cliff shut out the light on one hand, below the path
were the trees, straining up to the height of the cliff, and below the
trees, the sea, which, on that February evening, strove, and tossed, and
growled. The last news had been that she was better, but as I went
through the twilight of the trees a woman’s voice quite near me was
lifted up in a long howl, ending in sobs. I said to myself that Aunt
Fanny was dead, and this was “Nancyco,” her ancient dairy-woman, keening
her. In a moment I heard the cry and the sobs again, such large,
immoderate sobs as countrywomen dedicate to a great occasion, and as I
hurried along that gloomy path the crying came a third time. Decidedly
Aunt Fanny was dead. Arrived at the house, it was quite a shock to hear
that, on the contrary, she was better. I asked, with some indignation,
why, this being so, Nancyco was making such a noise. I was told that
Nancyco hadn’t been “in it” all day; that she was at home, and that
there was no one “in it.” I said naught of my Banshee, but when, three
days afterwards, the old lady slipped out through that opening in the
curtain, I remembered her warning.
Such a thing has happened thrice in my knowledge; the second time on a
lovely June night, the night of the eve of St. John, when every hill was
alight with bonfires, and one might hope the powers of evil were
propitiated and at rest. Yet, on that still and holy night, six boys and
girls, the children of some of my father’s tenants, were drowned on
their way home from a church festival that they had attended at Ross
Carbery. The party of eight young people had rowed along the coast to
Ross harbour, and of the eight but two returned. At “the mid-hour of
night” my sister, who was then only a child, came running to my room for
shelter and reassurance. She had been wakened by the crying of a woman,
in the garden under her window; the crying came in successive bursts,
and she was frightened. At breakfast the news of the drowning was
brought to my father. It had happened near an island, and it was at just
about the time that the voice had broken the scented peace of the June
night that the boatload of boys and girls were fighting for their lives
in the black water, and some of them losing the fight.
One other time also I know of, though the warning was not, as I might
have expected, given to me personally. The end was near, and the voice
cried beneath the windows of the room in which Martin lay. The hearing
of it was, perhaps in mercy, withheld from me. The anguish of those
December days of 1915 needed no intensifying.