Abstract

This short narrative was one of hundreds of legends gathered in the 1930s and 1940s from men and women then in their seventies and eighties living in southwest Donegal. Many of the stories related individual and social dramas with religious themes and actors - saints, holy wells, and powerful priests. All such figures or places displayed power, by punishing of enemies, as in the preceding case, or by rewarding the believer with a cure. Gathered by a native-born folklorist and now stores in the National Folklore Archive, this corpus of texts constitutes and rare and potentially fertile resource for a historical ethnography of the region in the late nineteenth century.