School: Athgarvan, Curragh (roll number 13350)

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1. Scéal Q (continued)

   “My father's maternal grandmother was a Mrs Galvin.”

   

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   was any treasure-hunting to be done they would do it themselves. They were encouraged to do so by a British Army pensioner named [?]. He told them that he had been through the Crimean war and through some skirmishing in India, he had seen piles of dead at every side of him but he had never seen a ghost. He added that he had seen soldiers loot from dead Indians and from dead Russians, but neither white man nor black could come back from the dead to defend his treasures and he assured them that Lord Clare could not come either.
   On the appointed night they got ready. The party consisted of my grand-uncle Patrick Galvin and his "servant boy" Jackie Quealey, two brothers named Hogan, the Army pensioners and my father who was them about 12 years old. They waited until nearly midnight before beginning operations. Storm lanterns were utterly unknown 66 or 64 years ago but they built a big fire of turf and body-deal chips near where they were going to dig and my father's job was to attend to the fire. By the light of this fire they began to work. One man cut away the top sods, two used spades and two others shovelled away the clay. They worked like this for a couple of hours until they had made a pretty deep hole. Suddenly a mighty whirlwind came tearing across the valley and took the fire and blew it right over the wall into the Hogan's land and left the diggers in complete darkness. They were all

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   Transcribed by a member of our volunteer transcription project.

   History Edit

   Language

   English

   Location

   Kilmaley, Co. Clare

   Collector

   Bríghid Bean Mhic Niocaill

   Gender

   Female

   Occupation

   Múinteoir