with the cadency mark of the mullet, and a wreath, the last relic of the effaced crest. "A famous antiquary in Cork" told my father that it was the ring of a Spanish knight, lost in the Armada,—none of whose ships were wrecked within very many miles of Kilkerin,—while the bows of the wreath were the sacred tetragrammaton,—such was local archæology in 1840! The "raven" version was that most popular, but it was a cormorant that figured in the oldest version recovered by me.
Another highly valued gold ring is preserved by the Molony family of Kiltanon. It belonged to an ancestor's brother, a Roman Catholic Bishop of Kilaloe, about 1690, but no superstition attached to it so far as I could learn from the last generations of the family, I have been told also of a "lucky" flint arrow head, or "thunderbolt," preserved by another family in the north of the county,[1] but know nothing of its qualities.
It was lately, and I believe is still, the custom at Scattery Island on the lower Shannon for each boat to bring a pebble from St. Senan's grave, or even from the beach. In 1816 a leaf from his "alder" (elder-tree) was equally effectual in preserving from wreck. A "slip" of the mountain ash or a forked hazel twig protects against fairies. A red string round the neck protects a child against fairies and a lamb against fairies and foxes.
Wishing.—Thomas Dineley, travelling in Clare in 1680, heard of a stone on Loop Head "whereon if any one turns on his heel and thinks of any one" of the other sex for a mate "he shall never fail of his thought." Many had cut their names, but dared not make the turns, for the stone was balanced at the edge of a fearful precipice. It seems to have disappeared, but was remembered as "Clough an umphy" even in the middle of the last century.[2] At Urlanmore Castle, between Kilmaleery and Newmarket-on-
- ↑ This was told to me in 18S5, and I did not note the name. I find a "thunderbolt or head of spear" named in a Ms. "Journey to Kerry" (1709) in Trinity College, Dublin, and the belief in the fairy origin of such objects is universal in Clare; stone spindle whorls are reputed "fairy querns."
- ↑ Transactions of the Royal Historical and Archæological Association of Ireland (now Royal Society of Antiquaries of Ireland), vol. viii. consec. (N.S. v.), p. 189.
