School: Loughill
- Location:
- Ballymunterhiggin, Co. Donegal
- Teacher: Eibhlis Ní Mhathghamhna
Archival Reference
The Schools’ Collection, Volume 1026, Page 231
Image and data © National Folklore Collection, UCD.
See copyright details.
DownloadOpen data
Available under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)
- XML School: Loughill
- XML Page 231
- XML “Fairy Story”
Note: We will soon deprecate our XML Application Programming Interface and a new, comprehensive JSON API will be made available. Keep an eye on our website for further details.
On this page
- One time there was a woman and she had four sons and the youngest was the loveliest of them all. One time she was outside and when she came in she found a terrible ugly child in the cradle. The child cried away night and day until one day a neighbour came in and told her that it was not her own child and told her how she would get her own child back. To get eighteen duck eggs and boil the shells and throw away the yolks and also to redden the poker and cram it down the child’s throat. Then the woman put on a pot of water and was throwing away the yolks when the child got up on his arm and said “I am a hundred years to-day and I never saw anyone boiling the shells and throwing away the yolks.” She had the poker well reddened and she crammed it down the child’s throat, and when she looked again her own child was in the cradle. The child lived to be a hundred years old. It was said that the fairies took it away and left the ugly child in its place.
- Informant
- Mr Maguire
- Gender
- Male
- Age
- 58
- Address
- Ballyshannon, Co. Donegal
