Roche stepped out of a bohreen with a sword in his hand and said, “I defy any two men single handed and no person will dare pass.”

To contextualise the importance of such tales and their reflective of Old Ireland’s homely belief system, Professor Cashmond discussed the idea that folklore and other traditional customs are in essence a vernacular social contract created by a community, and deeply personalised to the local level.

A few more years and a tradition where Seventeenth Century poets, Mediaeval storytellers, Fathers of the Church, even Neoplatonic philosophers have left their traces in the whole poems of fragmentary thoughts and isolated images will have vanished.

"I'll tell you how you'll find out whether it is a fairy changeling or not" says he "when you go home tell him that Gort na Pisha is ablaze".