As the horses usually have panniers, the rider sits sideways
over the withers, and if the panniers are empty they go at full
speed in this position without anything to hold to.
More than once in Aranmor I met a party going out west with empty
panniers from Kilronan. Long before they came in sight I could hear
a clatter of hoofs, and then a whirl of horses would come round a
corner at full gallop with their heads out, utterly indifferent to
the slender halter that is their only check. They generally travel
in single file with a few yards between them, and as there is no
traffic there is little fear of an accident.
Sometimes a woman and a man ride together, but in this case the man
sits in the usual position, and the woman sits sideways behind him,
and holds him round the waist.
Old Pat Dirane continues to come up every day to talk to me, and at
times I turn the conversation to his experiences of the fairies.
He has seen a good many of them, he says, in different parts of the
island, especially in the sandy districts north of the slip. They
are about a yard high with caps like the 'peelers' pulled down over
their faces. On one occasion he saw them playing ball in the evening
just above the slip, and he says I must avoid that place in the
morning or after nightfall for fear they might do me mischief.
He has seen two women who were 'away' with them, one a young married
woman, the other a girl. The woman was standing by a wall, at a spot
he described to me with great care, looking out towards the north
Another night he heard a voice crying out in Irish, 'mhathair ta me
marbh' ('O mother, I'm killed'), and in the morning there was blood
on the wall of his house, and a child in a house not far off was
dead.
Yesterday he took me aside, and said he would tell me a secret he
had never yet told to any person in the world.
'Take a sharp needle,' he said, 'and stick it in under the collar of
your coat, and not one of them will be able to have power on you.'
Iron is a common talisman with barbarians, but in this case the idea
of exquisite sharpness was probably present also, and, perhaps, some
feeling for the sanctity of the instrument of toil, a folk-belief
that is common in Brittany.
The fairies are more numerous in Mayo than in any other county,
though they are fond of certain districts in Galway, where the
following story is said to have taken place.
'A farmer was in great distress as his crops had failed, and his cow
had died on him. One night he told his wife to make him a fine new
sack for flour before the next morning; and when it was finished he
started off with it before the dawn.
'At that time there was a gentleman who had been taken by the
fairies, and made an officer among them, and it was often people
would see him and him riding on a white horse at dawn and in the
evening.
'The poor man went down to the place where they used to see the
officer, and when he came by on his horse, he asked the loan of two
hundred and a half of flour, for he was in great want.
'The officer called the fairies out of a hole in the rocks where
they stored their wheat, and told them to give the poor man what he
was asking. Then he told him to come back and pay him in a year, and
rode away.
'When the poor man got home he wrote down the day on a piece of
paper, and that day year he came back and paid the officer.'
When he had ended his story the old man told me that the fairies
have a tenth of all the produce of the country, and make stores of
it in the rocks.
It is a Holy Day, and I have come up to sit on the Dun while the
people are at Mass.
A strange tranquility has come over the island this morning, as
happens sometimes on Sunday, filling the two circles of sea and sky
with the quiet of a church.
The one landscape that is here lends itself with singular power to
this suggestion of grey luminous cloud. There is no wind, and no
definite light. Aranmor seems to sleep upon a mirror, and the hills
of Connemara look so near that I am troubled by the width of the bay
that lies before them, touched this morning with individual
expression one sees sometimes in a lake.
On these rocks, where there is no growth of vegetable or animal
life, all the seasons are the same, and this June day is so full of
autumn that I listen unconsciously for the rustle of dead leaves.
The first group of men are coming out of the chapel, followed by a
crowd of women, who divide at the gate and troop off in different
directions, while the men linger on the road to gossip.
The silence is broken; I can hear far off, as if over water, a faint
murmur of Gaelic.
In the afternoon the sun came out and I was rowed over for a visit
to Kilronan.
As my men were bringing round the curagh to take me off a headland
near the pier, they struck a sunken rock, and came ashore shipping a
quantity of water, They plugged the hole with a piece of sacking
torn from a bag of potatoes they were taking over for the priest,
and we set off with nothing but a piece of torn canvas between us
and the Atlantic.
