Astride a White Horse

Declan Kiberd

  • The Burning of Bridget Cleary: A True Story by Angela Bourke
    Pimlico, 240 pp, £10.00, August 1999, ISBN 0 7126 6590 0

In the spring of 1998 a Dutch TV crew arrived in the parish of Moyvane, Co. Kerry. They were making a documentary about poetry and landscape, and interviewed a farmer about a fairy-mound in one of his fields near the village. He explained that for many local people it was a forbidden place, and that he had never dared to plough it over because of the distress it would cause. As he was saying this, his mobile phone rang. The TV crew carried on filming as he transacted his business. ‘Tell us, sir,’ the interviewer said when he’d finished, ‘a modern man like you surely does not believe in the little people.’ ‘Of course I don’t,’ he chortled. ‘But I’m very frightened of ’em.’

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