recovered. Similar cases of necrosis of the bone have been treated elsewhere without suggestion of fairy origin or cure![1]
Over thirty years before (about 1880) a young man had his coat left at Campulnamuckagh saying he would fetch it away by night. He set off in the dark, but got a sudden panic and fled to a friend's house. "Whatever he saw," his terror was so evident that no one dared go and tell his relatives that he was safe. Meanwhile, alarmed at his non-appearance, his people set out in a crowd to rescue him—they only found the coat and hurried home regarding him as carried off into the Síd. He returned by daylight, a sadder and wiser man, and I could see that jest or defiance of the powers of the air in the Campulnamuckagh was even still regarded as dangerous in the extreme.
Near Ballycroy we heard of a man who built an addition to his house which encroached on a fairy hill. Soon afterwards he was drowned and his brother died, for the "gentry" love to dwell in these old earthworks, and it is most unlucky to injure an old rath even when in the midst of cultivated land.
I will only add that on Galway Bay, about Ards and Carna, I found in 1899 beliefs that the good people were the less wicked of the fallen angels and caused diseases in infants and cattle, playing mischievous tricks and substituting changehngs for human children. The people carry a lit pipe or a "coal" of burning turf in the dark for security. Mr. P. Mongan of Carna and Mr. Cahill at Mace Harbour told us several stories. Unfortunately on the occasion of our stay a local "fairy man" saw fit to warn his clients against answering our enquiries, so we got less information than usual. However, at Gorumna and Lettermullen, not far to the east, on the same bay, Dr. C. Browne got fuller particulars of all these beliefs and a few others already given. Aran has ceased to be safe ground since my early visit in 1878; even by 1885 caution was very necessary and, since then, a crowd of tourists and students of Irish have overlaid the genuine tradition, and it seems almost a point of honour among the peasantry to mislead incautious enquirers.
- ↑ I recall a nearly disastrous "cure" by an herb doctor and astrologer in N.E. Co. Limerick about 1886.
