School: Cúirt an tSéafraidh
- Location:
- Courtmacsherry, Co. Cork
- Teacher: Seán Ó Síthigh
Archival Reference
The Schools’ Collection, Volume 0318, Page 061
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: Cúirt an tSéafraidh
- XML Page 061
- XML “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
- Some harvesters were cutting and binding corn in a fort-field. Among them was a poor woman, who, having nobody at home to look after her baby had to bring it with her to the cornfield.
She placed the between some sheaves in the shelter of the fort while she worked at the binding.
After some time when she came to see the baby, she found it had been taken away and replaced by a changeling. On seeing this ugly crature the poor woman was horrified and screamed loudly. Her crying attracted the attention of the farmer who came up to see what was wrong.
On hearing what had happened he ordered the workers to gather dry bushes and ferns and bring them to the spot, and place them in a ring round the changeling. He then set one of the dry bushes on fire and as the blaze was drawing near the fairy child, a hound sprang out of the fort with the poor woman's child in its mouth and dropped it at her feet. Then it sprang in over the ring of blazing bushes, grabbed the strange creature in its mouth and disappeared with it into the fort.
The mother as well as all the other harvesters, were dilighted to have the baby back again.
- Collector
- Seán Sheehy
- Gender
- Male
- Address
- Courtmacsherry, Co. Cork
- Informant
- Mrs Holland
- Gender
- Female
- Address
- Meelmane, Co. Cork
