School: Drumrora
- Location:
- Drumroragh, Co. Cavan
- Teacher: P. Mulligan
Archival Reference
The Schools’ Collection, Volume 0994, Page 372
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: Drumrora
- XML Page 372
- XML “Witchcraft”
- XML “Witchcraft”
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
- Long ago the people used to believe certain things about churning. One day a man was churning for a couple of hours. He, J, was wondering why the butter was not coming on. After a while he walked out. When he went out he saw a wild goat on the street. He took a stick and hit him. In a few days after he went to an old house an he found an old man lying on the floor and his back broken. It was believed that the old man had taken place, on the appearance of a wild goat in order to take the butter, and that when the man broke his back with the stick he turned into an old man again.
- There was a lot of witchcraft in Ireland long ago such as overlooking a cow and bringing butter of the churn. Old women would mostly change themselves into a hare. People used to tie a red rag on a cows tail or on a horses mane to protect them from being overlooked. Another cure was to burn the letters of the Alphabet under the animals nose to get back butter. When the people would be churning they would burn a part of(continues on next page)
- Collector
- Noel Reilly
- Gender
- Male
- Address
- Garrynogher, Co. Cavan
