Folklore: Time of the Priest-Hunters

Collector: Tomás Ó Ciardha

Location: Kilworth, Co. Cork

Date: 1936

Informant: James Carey


Long ago there lived a family near Macollop and they were noted priest-hunters.

They always kept a fool in the house working for them.

They went wan time to a priest's house to arrest him. They had it planned and all to kill him. The fool heard it all going on; and he made the quickest haste he could and gave word to the priest that they were coming. Three of them went to search for the priest. They searched the house upside down and he was gone. The priest told the fool to go home the short cut across the river Blackwater; and he walked across the top of the water and never sank.

When the three priest-hunters were going the road after searching the house they passed the priest on the road, and never saw him. Only the youngest of the three of 'em saw him, but he didn't interfere with him when the others didn't.
After they had gone a good bit the young fellow said to the others: "where are ye going ? Ye have passed the priest on the road" And they said they never saw him at all. After he passing them out on the middle of the road. The young fellow was surprised that he should see him and that the others did not see him at all.

When he went home he told his story to his old nurse, who nursed him when he was a child. "How was it", says he, "that I saw the priest and the others did not?" "I'll tell you", says the old nurse "the reason why you could see him, and they could not is I got you baptised, in the Catholic Church, when you were a child, wan day I got a chance. That's why you saw him.
It was said that the young fellow turned a Catholic after that.


Credit to the Dúchas project at the National Folklore Collection, University College Dublin.

Please find more of their fascinating work here:

https://www.duchas.ie/en/info/res

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