494 Collectanea.
Maura Rhue. — The most interesting group of tales is attached to Lemaneagh Castle, a fine, but bare, old mansion, with curious gardens, courtyards, fishpond, and outbuildings, between Inchi- quin and Kilfenora.^^ An inscription over a gateway kept the remembrance green of Conor O'Brien and his wife Mary Mac- ^Mahon, but the gateway has recently been carried off and rebuilt in a modern garden at Dromoland. The garden near the fishpond has a sort of summerhouse in one wall, with a niche on each side of the door, and tradition says that Maura Rhue (Mary O'Brien) built it for a famous blind stallion, so fierce that, when his grooms let him out, they had to spring up into the niches for safety.^- Conor O'Brien built the gates to shut in the people of Burren, (for a road through the enclosures leads into that extraordinary mountain wilderness), and would let no one through who did not ask leave of him and of his wife; but one of the Burren gentry gathered a band of the inhabitants, broke the gates, and forced O'Brien to promise free right of way for ever.^^ "Maura," — or, as she is known in East Clare, " ]\Iaureen " Rhue (Little Mary), or, by some English-speakers, " Moll Roo," — used to hang her maids by their hair from the corbels on the old peel tower,i^ (the nucleus of the building). Others said that she cut off the breasts of her maids. I was told in 1878-81 that she married 25 husbands, all the later ones for a year and a day, after which either of the pair could divorce the other. She used to put her servants into all the houses of her temporary husband,, and then suddenly divorce him and exclude him from his property.^^ She was a MacMahon and had red hair (whence her name), and she and Conor O'Brien used to ride at the head of their troops in the wars.^*'
Her descendants at Dromoland and elsewhere told, in 1839 and later, a curious story of her and Conor. General Ireton was
^^ The Journal of the Royal Society of Antiquaries of Ireland, vol. xxx., pp. 403-7.
^2 Collected hy Dr. G. U. MacNamara.
'^'^ Ordnance Survey Letters (Co. Clare), vol. i., p. 55.
"At Lemaneagh in 1884, and also told by the Stacpooles.
i*So Dr. W. H. Stacpoole Westropp in 1S78, and Rev. Philip Dwyer in 1881,
^®At Lemaneagh in 1884.
