Page 73. The weasel, like the cat, is an animal that has many legends
and superstitions attaching to it. I remember hearing from an old
shanachie, now unfortunately dead, a long and extraordinary story about
the place called Chapelizod, a few miles from Dublin, which he said was
Séipeul-easóg, the “weasel’s chapel,” in Irish, but which is usually
supposed to have received its name from the Princess Iseult of Arthurian
romance. The story was the account of how the place came by this name.
How he, who was a Connachtman, and never left his native county except
to reap the harvest in England, came by this story I do not know; but I
imagine it must have been told him by some one in the neighbourhood, in
whose house he spent the night, whilst walking across the island on his
way to Dublin or Drogheda harbour. The weasel is a comical little animal,
and one might very well think it was animated with a spirit. I have been
assured by an old man, and one whom I have always found fairly veracious,
that when watching for ducks beside a river one evening a kite swooped
down and seized a weasel, with which it rose up again into the air. His
brother fired, and the kite came down, the weasel still in its claws, and
unhurt. The little animal then came up, and stood in front of the two men
where they sat, and nodded and bowed his head to them about twenty times
over; “it was,” said the old man, “thanking us he was.” The weasel is a
desperate fighter, and always makes for the throat. What, however, in
Ireland is called a weazel, is really a stoat, just as what is called a
crow in Ireland is really a rook, and what is called a crane is really a
heron.
Cáuher-na-mart, to which Paudyeen (diminutive of Paddy) was bound, means
the “city of the beeves,” but is now called in English Westport, one of
the largest towns in Mayo. It was _apropos_ of its long and desolate
streets of ruined stores, with nothing in them, that some one remarked
he saw Ireland’s characteristics there in a nutshell—“an itch after
greatness and nothingness;” a remark which was applicable enough to the
squireocracy and bourgeoisie of the last century.
Page 79. The “big black dog” seems a favourite shape for the evil spirit
to take. He appears three times in this volume.
Page 81. The little man, with his legs astride the barrel, appears to be
akin to the south of Ireland spirit, the clooricaun, a being who is not
known, at least by this name, in the north or west of the island. See
Crofton Croker’s “Haunted Cellar.”
Page 87. “The green hill opened,” etc. The fairies are still called
Tuatha de Danann by the older peasantry, and all the early Irish
literature agrees that the home of the Tuatha was in the hills, after the
Milesians had taken to themselves the plains. Thus in the story of the
“Piper and the Pooka,” in the Leabhar Sgeulaigheachta, not translated
here, a door opens in the hill of Croagh Patrick, and the pair walk in
and find women dancing inside. Dónal, the name of the little piper, is
now Anglicised into Daniel, except in one or two Irish families which
retain the old form still. The _coash-t’ya bower_, in which the fairy
consorts ride, means literally “the deaf coach,” perhaps from the
rumbling sound it is supposed to make, and the banshee is sometimes
supposed to ride in it. It is an omen of ill to those who meet it. It
seems rather out of place amongst the fairy population, being, as it
is, a gloomy harbinger of death, which will pass even through a crowded
town. Cnoc Matha, better Magha, the hill of the plain, is near the town
of Tuam, in Galway. Finvara is the well-known king of the fairy host of
Connacht. In Lady Wilde’s “Ethna, the Bride,” Finvara is said to have
carried off a beautiful girl into his hill, whom her lover recovers with
the greatest difficulty. When he gets her back at last, she lies on her
bed for a year and a day as if dead. At the end of that time he hears
voices saying that he may recover her by unloosing her girdle, burning
it, and burying in the earth the enchanted pin that fastened it. This
was, probably, the slumber-pin which we have met so often in the “King of
Ireland’s Son.” Nuala, the name of the fairy queen, was a common female
name amongst us until the last hundred years or so. The sister of the
last O’Donnell, for whom Mac an Bhaird wrote his exquisite elegy, so well
translated by Mangan—
“Oh, woman of the piercing wail,
That mournest o’er yon mound of clay”—
was Nuala. I do not think it is ever used now as a Christian name at all,
having shared the unworthy fate of many beautiful Gaelic names of women
common a hundred years ago, such as Mève, Una, Sheelah, Moreen, etc.
Slieve Belgadaun occurs also in another story which I heard, called the
Bird of Enchantment, in which a fairy desires some one to bring a sword
of light “from the King of the Firbolg, at the foot of Slieve Belgadaun.”
Nephin is a high hill near Crossmolina, in North Mayo.
Page 89. Stongirya (stangaire), a word not given in dictionaries, means,
I think, “a mean fellow.” The dove’s hole, near the village of Cong, in
the west of the county Mayo, is a deep cavity in the ground, and when a
stone is thrown down into it you hear it rumbling and crashing from side
to side of the rocky wall, as it descends, until the sound becomes too
faint to hear. It is the very place to be connected with the marvellous.