I first came to East Clare as a naive ‘blow-in’ in 1986. I couldn’t drive then and if I wanted to get anywhere I had to hitch lifts. When you are hitching, people tell you stories and ask for your story, because that’s what you do to shorten the road. Back then I wasn’t too sure what my story was, but thankfully it’s a bit clearer now. Now I know that wherever you are there is a story to hear, whether that’s in a small shop-come-pub in someone’s front room, the elderly neighbour who drops in of an evening, or the stranger who happens to be walking on the same stretch of otherwise deserted shore. Stories seep into your cells and become part of you until sometime later you realise you know that story, and tell it again.
That’s how it was with some of these stories, but with others I spent days in front of the ancient microfiche machines in the Local Studies Centre in Ennis searching through reels of film of handwritten jotters full of folklore collected by schoolchildren in the 1930s. These stores of collective wisdom are part of the archives of the Irish Folklore Commission and they are a wee seam of pure gold. The only problem is that there is so much interesting material there it was hard to stick to looking for stories and not to go off on tangents of skipping games or cures for whooping cough.
One of the first snippets of story I found there was about a woman called Biddy Collins who lived in a cabin on a bog near Tulla, and who was regularly visited by fairies who told her stories in the night. In a way, that is how I felt as I worked on this book. Each day I got on with the stuff of living: all the necessary chopping of wood, carrying of water, feeding the cat, etc. At night, the fairies and other characters from the stories in this book came to visit me, retold their tales, and helped me to be comfortable in using my own voice, with its distinctly Scottish accent, to tell these stories from County Clare.
It seemed to me that in undertaking this project I needed to be aligned with the fairy presences of this place where I have made my home. I am used to working with landscape and through observing the elements (earth, water, air, fire) coming to meet the spirit of place. I am used to that ‘genius loci’ sharing its story with me, speaking through me. Working on this book required a different approach: the stories exist already. They have emerged over hundreds, perhaps thousands of years, spoken into the sleeping ears of those who lived here in County Clare. I did not need to dig deep into the earth to find these stories. I had only to mine the rich seam of memory – my own and those recorded many years ago.
I attempted to attune as closely as I could to the very essence of the tales. To put myself into the geographic locations, to feel in my body the living stories, and to re-tell them from that embodied place: from the inside out. I tried to be as true to the stories as possible. I asked for and genuinely felt the support of the mysterious otherworld. The work, both researching and writing my re-tellings, has been a joy and a gift. I have felt carried, supported, and encouraged by the stories themselves.
The stories I have included will not be everybody’s choice of typical Clare folk tales, but they are the ones that speak to me, that grabbed my attention and demanded to be told. They are stories that I am happy to tell, that sit well on me, that contain some essential truth that still has relevance for us.
I am conscious that the largest section is on Wise Women, Wild Women, Harridans & Hags, and I make no apology for this. These are the stories that I found most interesting and exciting. I found myself empathising with the hags, who were often maligned in the old tales, as a patriarchal society belittles women and presents them as wicked for simply being wilful. I found that when I pieced together snippets of the same story from different places, I found the ‘back story’ that explained, for example, how the Cailleach Bealaha was wronged as a young woman, and thus became a vindictive ‘hag’ in later life. Stories explain how we have come to be as we are. Even hags had hearts that were broken.
I come back to the old woman Biddy Collins. Some may have thought her mad or deluded, but I saw in this brief glimpse of her, a woman who knew the power of story and the power of blessing. I hope you will find this book holds something similar that might enrich your life. So I’d like to offer you the blessing she spoke when she told her stories. To you, readers, listeners, tellers, re-tellers, and to the land of County Clare itself: ‘God bless the hearers and tellers, and when ’tis told and those that’s telling it.’
Ruth Marshall, 2013