Search Results for 'Joanna Burke'

On Monday March 4 1895, Bridget Cleary, walked up a hill to Kylenagranagh, the home of her father’s cousin Jack Dunne, who lived with his wife Kate, to sell eggs. The Dunne’s house, less than two miles from her slate-roofed labourer’s cottage at Ballyvadlea, Co Tipperary, was near an ancient circular mound of earth, or a ring fort, still known in rural Ireland as a ‘fairy fort’. Maybe it was because of the location of his house, or because of his skill as a story teller, a ‘Shanachie’, and that he had a limp, that Dunne had the reputation for being ‘an old man who is fairy-ridden’. People believed the local legend that he was once ‘chased up to his home by a man in black, and a woman in white’. He had knowledge of incantations, charms, and spells, and was sometimes consulted for a cure for animal or female sicknesses.