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Customs, Lore and Legend of Other Clare Days:
Superstitious Beliefs and Charms


The 'death coach', or cóiste bodhar as it was more generally called, was sign of approaching death. It is sometimes described as a coach drawn by a team of horses without any driver on board; but some accounts refer to a 'headless' coachman in charge. This ghostly vehicle was usually a night-time phenomenon typically observed rumbling at speed towards the residence of the person who was about to die. There was a well-known tradition of the cóiste bodhar connected with the Macnamara family of Ennistymon House. This is recalled by Westropp in The Folklore of Clare:

"On the night of December 11th, 1876, a servant of the Macnamaras was doing his rounds at Ennistymon, a beautiful spot in a wooded glen, with a broad stream falling in a series of cascades. In the dark he heard the rumbling of wheels on the back avenue, and, knowing from the hour and place that no "mortal vehicle" could be coming, concluded that it was the death coach and ran on to open gates before it. He had just time to open the third gate and throw himself on his face beside it, on the bank, before he heard a coach go clanking past . . . On the following day Admiral Burton Macnamara died in London."

Ennistymon House
Ennistymon House

There was a fairly widespread belief that people who died young were sometimes taken by the fairies. Indeed it was believed that the fairies could interfere in human affairs at all stages in life and it was deemed prudent to stay on the right side of them at all times.

W.B. Yeats, in Fairy and Folk-Tales of Ireland, tells us that he once asked an old man if he had ever seen a fairy or such like. "Sure, amn't I annoyed with them" was the instant reply. He recalls another occasion that he was given a piece of friendly advice on the subject by a wise old man: "no matter what one doubts, one should never doubt the fairies for they stand to reason . . .". Lady Gregory, a great collector of folklore herself, once asked an old woman in north Clare if she knew anybody who was taken by the fairies:

"My own brother was, and no mistake about it. It was one day he was following two horses with the plough, and it was about five o'clock, and what way it came I don't know, but he fell twice on the stones - God bless the hearers and the place I'm telling it in. And at ten o'clock the next morning he was dead in his bed. Young he was, not twenty year, and nothing ailed him when he went out; but the place he was ploughing in that day was a strange place. Sure and certain I am its by them he was taken. I used often to hear crying in the field after that, but I never saw him again.


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