Browse Items · Digital Derg: A Deep Map

The March of the Dead Maguires

An account of Lough Derg folklore on a fishing trip, explaining the strange circular currents of the lake in supernatural terms

Tags: fishing, Folklore, ghosts, Henry Newland, lake, Maguire family, memoir, mythology, nineteenth century, seventeenth century, Station Island, supernatural, water, weather

"In nine cases out of ten, the legend is simply an attempt made by an unlettered, but imaginative people, to account for natural appearances by supernatural agency"

A description of the power given to unexplained natural phenomena in Irish folklore, and the character of the storytellers

Tags: colonialism, conversation, debate, dispute, fishing, Folklore, Henry Newland, Irish identity, memoir, mythology, negative description, nineteenth century, superstition, upper lake

The salmon of Lough Derg

"There is one strange fact connected with this lake - no salmon come into it, though they come up to the very point where the River Derg escapes out of it…"

Tags: Atlantic Salmon (Salmo salar), empiricism, fauna, fishing, Folklore, John O'Donovan, letters, nineteenth century, ordnance survey, River Derg, Salmon, scientism, St. Patrick

The monster guards a crock of gold

"The same or a similar monster inhabits the lake yet (still) and was seen not many months ago. It guards a crock of gold which lies buried in the ancient island of the Purgatory…"

Tags: Fenian Cycle, Fionn mac Cumhaill, Folklore, gold, John O'Donovan, letters, Ludovicus Pyrrhus, monster, mythology, nineteenth century, ordnance survey

"Now let me at my old antagonist Oral tradition: The chair of Davog lies in the townland of Suidhe Dhabheog (Seeavoge) where in the living rock some impressions of elbows &c are strewn. Davog was a woman, who came to make the turas but she died…

Tags: fifth century, Folklore, gender, John O'Donovan, letters, nineteenth century, Oral History, ordnance survey, St. Dabheoc, St. Dabheoc's Seat, St. Patrick, women's history

"Though my letters are wild as the mountains in which they were written"

"Though my letters are wild as the mountains in which they were written, still do I feel myself very sober in thought, and exceedingly (excessive) in love with truth even to the prejudice of all national feelings…"

Tags: detachment, emotion, empiricism, environment, Folklore, John O'Donovan, letters, nineteenth century, Oral History, ordnance survey, region, remoteness, wildness

Oral history and facts

A debate over the reliability of oral history, in which O'Donovan cites the heterogeneity of County Donegal local stories

Tags: debate, empiricism, Folklore, John O'Donovan, letters, nineteenth century, Oral History, ordnance survey, reliability, religion, scientism, tradition

An omen of disaster prior to the 1795 accident

"As a boat was being loaded with passengers at eleven o'clock, an elderly man arrived at the shore and urgently signalled to his son to come away with him..."

Tags: 1795 disaster, Alice Curtayne, boating, disaster, dream, drowning, eighteenth century, Folklore, omen, Oral History, pilgrim, pilgrim crossing, pilgrimage, supernatural, survivor, twentieth century

"Tradition, when jealously guarded and carefully handed down is a reliable source of information"

"With the destruction of the buildings in Lough Derg and the expulsion of the Franciscans in 1632, all the records of its glorious part were also destroyed..."

Water-Horses

"Long ago the people used to send their horses to the mountain for the summer months.

One day a man was going to the mountain for his horse as he required him to do some work at home.

When he went up to the mountain he saw all the horses…

Tags: Croaghbrack townland, fairies, Folklore, horse, lake, Lough Kilraway, mountains, Oral History, supernatural, water, water horse

Browse Items (35 total)