01/07/2025
‘Up the airy mountain, down the rushy glen, we daren’t go a hunting for fear of little men, wee folk, good folk, trooping all together, green jacket, red cap, white owl’s feather.’
The ‘Sceach Geal’ or fairy bush outside our house, backlit by the reflected moon on Lough Inch last night, reminded me of these lines by the 19th century Donegal poet, William Allingham, that we learned in primary school, by rote, though with little context. It may be bog-bare and wind-scorched up on the escarpment above Barna, but there is beauty too, if one only has the eyes to see and the mind to conceive!
‘The Fairies’. The full poem is quite dark, with references to the fairy’s practice of swapping-out unhealthy babies for healthy ones, leaving a ‘changeling’ in the unwatched cradle, instead of the bonnie baby that had been there just a moment before, no doubt in a veiled a reference to the high infant mortality rate amongst infants in the 19th century.
Infants died inexplicably, we now know from a host of diseases, but back then, there was no sign, just a sudden change in the child’s health, and an unlikely poem, reinforcing a ‘pisheog’, that provided devastated parents with an acceptable, though implausible explanation for their terrible loss.
There are ‘Cilleens’ or children’s burial grounds all across the country, where unbaptised babies were buried. Most remain unmarked, but are remembered in local lore. There is one that is marked by a single stone in Salthill at the sea-side of the Galway Golf Club.
We have come a long way since then, TG
The full text of his poem ‘The Fairies’ is here;
‘Up the airy mountain,
Down the rushy glen,
We daren’t go a-hunting
For fear of little men;
Wee folk, good folk,
Trooping all together;
Green jacket, red cap,
And white owl’s feather!
Down along the rocky shore
Some make their home,
They live on crispy pancakes
Of yellow tide-foam;
Some in the reeds
Of the black mountain-lake,
With frogs for their watchdogs,
All night awake.
High on the hill-top
The old King sits;
He is now so old and grey
He’s nigh lost his wits.
With a bridge of white mist
Columbkill he crosses,
On his stately journeys
From Slieveleague to Rosses;
Or going up with the music
On cold starry nights,
To sup with the Queen
Of the gay Northern Lights.
They stole little Bridget
For seven years long;
When she came down again
Her friends were all gone.
They took her lightly back,
Between the night and morrow,
They thought that she was fast asleep,
But she was dead with sorrow.
They have kept her ever since
Deep within the lake,
On a bed of fig-leaves,
Watching till she wake.
By the craggy hillside,
Through the mosses bare,
They have planted thorn trees
For my pleasure, here and there.
Is any man so daring
As dig them up in spite,
He shall find their sharpest thorns
In his bed at night.
Up the airy mountain,
Down the rushy glen,
We daren’t go a-hunting
For fear of little men;
Wee folk, good folk,
Trooping all together;
Green jacket, red cap,
And white owl’s feather!’
Poem; William Allingham
Story and photo; Brian Nolan - Walking Tours of Galway
