School: St Egney's (C.), Buncrana
- Location:
- Buncrana, Co. Donegal
- Teacher: Ellen Daly
Archival Reference
The Schools’ Collection, Volume 1112, Page 382
Image and data © National Folklore Collection, UCD.
See copyright details.
DownloadOpen data
Available under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)
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
- Priests hunted - Father Hegarty
20-6-38
Long ago here about 1171 in Ireland in Buncrana there was a priest called Father Hegarty. This priest lived along with his sister for a while. But it was not long until the Priest Hunters found out about him. He went to hide in a cave, at the sea near Buncrana, and every day his sister brought him food. The priest said Mass when he was able, and he heard the confessions of the people. But the priests hiding place was soon found out.
It is said that his sister was married, and her husband knew Father Hegarty's hiding place and he told the Priest Hunters. As soon as they heard where he was, they went and arrested him. One of the soldiers cut off his head with his sword. This man's name (traitor was Kelly from Fahan, and it is said that from that to the end of his life he never arose from bed with a terrible sickness.
When Father Hegarty, who was swimming out to Fanad to escape came back on promise that he would be saved to the land from the shore the wicked man cut his head off. His head bounced nine times on the land. You can see the nine holes in the land yet, and no grass grew on any one of them yet. The first five holes are larger than the other(continues on next page)
