After Dark: Myths, Misdeeds & the Paranormal - Ireland's Darkest Folk Legends

Episode Date: April 14, 2025

*TW: This episode contains discussions and themes of infertility.*Fairies have long been part of Irish folkloric history, with its landscape dotted with thousands of 'fairy forts'. But there's a dark side to these beliefs.Changelings are thought to be evil fairies who steal humans from families, taking them to the fairy world and replacing them with weak, disfigured fairy lookalikes.It taps into a dark history of disease, poverty and even murder.Joining Anthony and Maddy today is Cecily Gilligan, author of Cures of Ireland: A Treasury of Irish Folk Remedies, to take us back to Ireland's unique and dark folk history.Edited by Tomos Delargy. Produced by Stuart Beckwith. Senior Producer is Charlotte Long.Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe.  You can take part in our listener survey here.All music from Epidemic Sounds.After Dark: Myths, Misdeeds & the Paranormal is a History Hit podcast.

Hi, we're your hosts, Anthony Delaney and Maddie Pelling. And if you would like after dark myths, misdeeds and the paranormal ad free and get early access, sign up to History Hit. With a History Hit subscription, you can also watch hundreds of hours of original documentaries with top history presenters and enjoy a new release every week. Sign up now by visiting historyhit.com forward slash subscribe. discussion on fabulous jewellery heists and whether the royals actually have magical powers. Then there's Bad Blind Dates and Royal Terror Plots. Yes, Season 2 is live now. Follow Queens, Kings and dastardly things wherever you get your podcasts to make sure you never miss an episode. Where dips the rocky highland of sleuth wood in the lake,

There lies a leafy island where flapping herons wake the drowsy water rats. There we've hid our fairy vats, full of berries and of reddish stolen cherries. Come away, oh human child, to the waters and the wild with a fairy, hand in hand, for the world's more full of weeping than you can understand. So begins W.B. Yates's famous poem The Stolen Child, an ode to the oral tradition of the changeling whose stories have been passed down through generations in Ireland, something Bridget Boland, or Bridget Cleary, to use her married name, knew all too well.

Bridget had always stood out. At the end of the 19th century, she was a woman of means, she was literate and an accomplished dressmaker. However, after eight years of marriage to Mr. Michael Cleary, the couple had not yet conceived a child. In this perceived absence, Bridget's family grew suspicious and it wasn't long until they began to cast about for someone or something to blame. Soon, Brigid's family believed they found the culprits, the Tuathedannan, the Faerie folk. Beliefs amongst some in rural Irish communities dictated that Faeries, or changelings, often swapped themselves with young women because they had trouble producing children on their own, so a mortal woman could be taken to further their family line.

Brigid, her family believed, was one such changeling. Her husband was convinced of it, and her family turned violently against her. What followed was a violent, inhumane exorcism of sorts, which included force-feeding Brigid grotesque concoctions and covering her in urine. Are you Bridget Boland, the wife of Michael Cleary, in the name of God? Michael, her husband, cried while her family restrained her. She replied in God's name that she was. Michael, however, remained unconvinced. His belief that she was a changeling,

an evil fairy, prevailed. And within 24 hours, he would After Dark. I'm Maddie. And I'm Anthony. And you just heard there a snippet from a story of a changeling murder in 1895. It's a dark and fascinating history and one that I have a little bit of an inkling about but don't know much more besides that. Now our guest to remedy that today is Cecily Gilligan. She's the author of Cures of Ireland, a treasury of Irish Folk Remedies. Cecily, welcome to After Dark. Cecily Gilligan Thank you, Maddie and Anthony. Thank you for having me on your episode. Maddie Eilish

You're very welcome. Now, let's get straight into it and talk about what exactly changelings are, because I have a feeling from my limited knowledge of them that in Irish folklore they have quite a specific function and specific characteristics. So what is a changeling in Irish culture? that a human is stolen or is taken by the fairies. And when we say taken, I mean, people would have believed that the fairies took the human and they brought them into the fairy fort. We have thousands of fairy forts, you know them as ring forts across Ireland, and they were the fairy people we believe live.

So that was a very strong belief that the person was taken and then they were brought to the fairy fort. But they didn't just the fairy fort. But they didn't just leave a vacuum. The human was left behind, but it was a weak fairy version of the real human. So for example, if they took your baby, it looked like your baby, but rather than being the bonny, healthy baby that you had, it was suddenly this sick, unwell child that was failing and could potentially die. And the fairies were very well known for, in particular, as you mentioned, taking babies and children. The fairy women were believed

to be unable to have healthy babies or to suckle them, to nurse them. So they would steal maybe young women to breastfeed them. They also were always interested in other healthy little human babies are young children. And on the Aran Islands, for example, for many years into the even into the early 1900s, the fairies were believed to be more interested in boy children. The boy children were dressed as girls, they would have worn a dress. And they tried to fool the fairies that was a girl and the child was more protected in that way. Again, they took the women and sometimes, I think Anthony said, in relation to a fairy bride and sometimes they took men, less so, especially if they were musicians. The fairies are well known for loving music and dance and banqueting and a good musician would be

a target potentially. But I suppose if we look at it, that was the folklore, the tradition, but the reality of the situation, so we're talking say 1800s, quite recent history and late 1800s, which at Cleary's event was 1895. So Ireland is a very poor country, we were a peasant country, people had very, very little, there was no medical care. So in a way, the changeling was a way to understand or to soften maybe the blow of people who were sick or people who died. Infront mortality was really high, maternal mortality, there was no childhood vaccinations, malnutrition, TB was widespread. So when people started to wane or to lose their good health, maybe a beautiful young woman, and she started to lose her health, possibly because of TB, Bridget Cleary was probably had pneumonia at his thought. But when they started to fade, the people said, oh, the fairies have taken

her and they've left the changeling behind. And they would have to try and drive the changeling out. Cecily, the other thing that struck me as I was preparing for this episode, and obviously I'm aware of this history, Bridget's history, and then I'm also aware of the folklore adjacent to it. But one of the things that struck me immediately was the ways in which, in this case, in Bridget's case particularly, the ways in which religion intersects, organised religion, Catholic religion in this case, intersects with these folkloric beliefs in this particular moment in time, in the late 18th century, early 19th century in Ireland. Can you tell us a little bit about that? Because I don't know much

about that relationship, how these two things sit side by side. I'm imagining uncomfortably, but that might not necessarily be the case. Well, the Catholic Church was hugely powerful in Irish society in the 19th century and into the 20th century, and it dominated all of life. It's actually interesting because the Christian and the pre-Christian beliefs were side by side. They coexisted. People had this pre-Christian belief or this mythical belief of fairies, but they also had a very strong belief in the Catholic Church and in the God. So sometimes there was animosity and difficulties there. And sometimes then you see it very clearly in the Holy Wells. The Holy Wells were pre-Christian, but they were Christianised and the Church was very aware that the best way to go about this was to sort of let

everybody mosey along together as the two approaches coexist. But sometimes conflict did exist, for example, in relation to wise women and persecution of wise women. So in the past, my book and what I've researched was the traditional cures in Ireland, the ones that continue to survive, but they've come from a very old tradition, you know, hundreds, thousands of years old. And the wise women, there was wise women in every community, people who had knowledge, often a woman, they had a lot of knowledge of cures and of the plants to use. And midwives, they would have helped women with childbirth. Sometimes they coexisted with the church and

then sometimes the church, we didn't have witchcraft in Ireland or witch trials that exist in other parts of Europe, but sometimes the Church stood up to these women and thought that their knowledge was coming from a difficult source or a bad source, so conflict would have existed there. And one of the most famous wise women we would have had in the 1800s in Ireland was Biddy Airely in East Clare, very well known for decades. Thousands of people were coming to her, the rich and famous, the poor and the penniless, everybody went to her. and it was Biddy Airely in East Clare, very well known for decades. Thousands of people were coming to her, the rich and famous, the poor and the penniless, everybody went to her. And she would have believed to have got her knowledge from the fairies. And she also had huge herbal knowledge that she would have acquired from her mother and within her community.

But the Catholic Church was not fond of her and they were not happy with her. She would have been excommunicated from the church and she would have been denounced from the public. But it didn't deter the people because the people stepped coming to her. She was supposed to have spent time with the fairies. She had a special bottle that she could see the future in and she could diagnose illness. And there's a story that on her deathbed in the late 1800s, a priest came to her house and he took the bottle, the magic bottle, and he threw it into the lake below her house and below her cottage. And it's never been recovered and people are looking for it ever since. The balance between patriarchal society through

the centuries, and particularly thinking here about Ireland in the 19th century, and folk tradition which often incorporates ideas of female power within it to varying extents. That balance is so interesting to me and the ways in which they are allowed to coexist and those moments, as you say, of tension or friction. So often, I think, when we talk about folklore and folk tales, we maybe imagine something that's quite light, that's quite vague, that is potentially fun and mischievous and something to be sort of indulged in from our modern perspective. But actually, in so much of this history where folklore exists in the past alongside people living their lives under institutional control and societal organization.

These ideas, these folkloric ideas can turn people's behavior into quite sinister avenues. Actually, there is a lot of darkness here as well as a lot of lightness. I want to come back to the case in particular of Bridget Cleary and to talk about what happens to her because it is a really brutal end for a woman who is suspected of being a changeling. I suppose it shows the tangibility of these beliefs, the effect that they can have and the outcome in some cases that they can have. It's incredibly dark, isn't it? What happens to Brigid? husband wasn't questioned. So that existed and that was a complication or a difficulty within the family, within the marriage. And then she became sick, most likely with pneumonia. And then it was a number of days, her condition deteriorated. But I suppose, as Anthony was saying there, she possibly was, this was a kind of a route or a scapegoat, a way to justify

what happened to her. So she was ultimately, she was tortured by our family and our whole family apparently colluded in it because there was a trial, but it was primarily our husband. So as Anthony had said, they sourced herbs from her from the local herb doctor. They beat her, they shout at her, they poured urine on her. These were all things that was thought would drive the fairy out of the body and then the real woman would come back. Her husband said that she told him, go to the fairy fort on a moonlit night and I'll ride out of the fairy fort on a white horse. So these were quite common beliefs and was probably a mixture of maybe

him actually genuinely believing this and also unhappiness in his marriage. But ultimately he said, so it was very brutal because he set the woman on fire. She was a very sick woman. And within a few days, he actually set her on fire because fire was recognized as one of the ways to deter fairies. A ring of fire, you might put a ring of fire around a baby. Iron was another thing people could deter fairies with. He put an iron tongs across the baby's cradle. Holy water, we talked about the coexistence of the pre-Christian and the Christian. People used holy water, which is obviously a Christian

symbol to protect people from being taken as changelings. But in Bridget's case, ultimately, it was too late and she was set on fire primarily by her husband and she died as a result of that. And then she was buried in a shallow grave to the rear of the farm as my understanding it happened in Tipperary in the south of Ireland. But people knew she was missing and there was follow up and it subsequently led to arrests and to a court case. I think nine people were tried for the event of different charges. Her husband had been charged with murder, but he ultimately was convicted of manslaughter. He served 15 years. I understand he disappeared to Canada.

So no doubt there are descendants of this man somewhere in Canada. If anybody would like to know more about this particular case, Angela Burke has written a really interesting book detailing the case. It's one of those cases, isn't it, Cecily, that has kind of marked itself in the Irish psyche to a great extent. We live with it in a, I suppose, a very present tense sense in many ways. A lot of people know who Brigid Cle of clear is they know what her name evokes and it's a very still a very emotive case when her name comes up and rightly so because the humanity meet on her is actually unbelievable. Cures of Ireland. I'm just intrigued as to what some of the, we may not know the definite ones, but just from your own knowledge, what kind of cures were people trying to use to heal people from fairy possession or from these kind of folkloric illnesses, I suppose. Was there a set thing that people were after? You mentioned urine there, but was there other things that people used

specifically in these cases? Well, I think the fire and the iron, and I think in many cases disease or illness or death were inexplicable. So a lot of things got laid down to supernatural activities, in particular the fairies. So I think what people did was they consulted with the herbal women, the wise women, the people with that specialist knowledge in their communities. Or they might actually, in many cases, they also would have consulted a clergy, the priests. This is in the 18th century going into the 20th century. Priests would believe to have curing powers, protective powers and healing powers. And probably very much in relation to mental illness, things people couldn't understand. But in general, what I found and what has survived is the herbal cures have survived

to an extent, although we've lost a lot of our herbal knowledge, but also faith cures are very important and continue to be very important in the Irish folk healing tradition. And by that I mean the recitation of prayers and the laying on of hands and various combinations. And all these cures involved lots of ritual. So different ways in which people would have dealt with the fairies, but until even maybe say 50 years ago, the belief in fairies and the presence of fairies in the Irish countryside has been very strong and very powerful. And actually it's been very positive in that it's actually protected. Our ring forts are all national monuments and people in the past and even today continue to be very wary of touching a ring fort. You would never bring in a bulldozer and damage a ring fort because

you know you're guaranteed to have bad luck come upon yourself. The bad luck could be death or illness or a terrible accident. The same would have applied to fairy trees. So people gave them a white berth. That's often a fairy tree that's an isolated Hawthorn, for example, and people would never touch them. And even as recent as about 1999 in County Clare, not very far from Shannon Airport, there was a new dual carriageway, a large road being constructed and a fairy tree, hawthorn tree, had to be removed as part of this construction. But a folklorist said, you know, you can't do that, you'll bring the wrath of the fairies down on the highway and on the people. So the highway,

the road was actually diverted by Clare County Council, which is quite incredible. So that's like only 25 years ago. So the belief in the fairies still exists and it's still out there. I'm Robert Hardman. And I'm Professor Kate Williams. We're the historians who love a bit of royal mischief and our podcast Queen's Kings and Dastardly Things is back for another season. We've got murders, scandal and sex. I'm looking forward to our discussion on fabulous

jewellery heists and whether the royals actually have magical powers. Then there's Bad Blind Apes and Royal Terror Plots. Yes, season two is live now. Follow Queens, Kings and dastardly things wherever you get your podcasts to make sure you never miss an episode. Something that comes up again and again in our conversations about folklore is that interesting relationship between storytelling and the landscape. I suppose the way that we allow our imaginations to populate those spaces and to bring them to life. I want to talk about another aspect of Irish landscape and folklore and the ways they intersect, and that's the cursing

stones Cecily, can you tell us something about them? What are they? CECILIA Okay, so yes, I would have investigated a number of stones that are used today primarily for healing. So we call them often they're called balone stones. Balone is an Irish word and it means a stone that has a hollow carved out of it, often a cup-shaped hollow, and then sometimes another stone is placed very snugly into that. You can imagine like an egg cup and an egg. So they're across Ireland and many of them are used for healing.

For example, there's one not too far from me where I am in Sligo, Northwest Ireland. The water that collects in it would be used as a cure for warts. So you go there, you rub the water from the stone and you rub it onto your warts. Also, many of them were used for eye problems. But I came across some cursing stones and they've never been known for healing, for curing, only for cursing. So there's quite well known cursing stones and they're in Northern Cavern, which is right on the border with Northern Ireland and County Fermanagh, beside Loch Macnean. And basically, these stones are known as St. Bridges. So again, it's that mixture of they're definitely pre-Christian, but St. Bridges is obviously Christian. And there's a ruined church in a field and then you walk through the fields

behind the church and in the corner of the field, there's this set of stones and it would be a large flat stone, a low stone. So when I went to see it, there's the low stone and honestly there were 10 stones. So it's very deliberately placed there, very, very old. One central round, like a big egg-shaped stone or a stone you would get from the beach. And we're very far from the beach here in North Cavern. And then there was nine circular stones around that, nine balan stones. Again, the cup shape, but a perfectly fitting round stone within them. So those 10 stones are placed on one rock. And then adjacent to that, there

was two lower rocks with a further five stones. But I consulted with a man, a historian who lived local to there and he said the stones have always been cursing stones and he never knew them to be used for healing stones. And then to lay the curse basically, I'm not quite sure the ritual but you would turn the stones and you would lay your curse. But it is always said that you need to be very careful when you lay your curse. You curse somebody because if it's unwarranted, if it's not valid, if it's ill-gotten, if they don't deserve it, I suppose, basically, it will come back

upon you. So you be very careful. And then another place where there are cursing stones, again, not too far away, there's an island, Inishmere Island off the coast of Sligo here in northwest Ireland. There's an early Christian settlement there. There was a monastery there now ruined. They have very famous cursing stones there as well. So when you go to the island and to the ruined monastery, there was an outdoor altar. And on the altar there are about 50 stones of varying size, but again, mainly circular stones. Some would be inscribed with crosses or circles. And how the ritual was, how you laid the curse was

people would also use the same ritual for good, like as in a form of pilgrimage. So they would walk the route and maybe walk three times around that particular altar. And you always walked sunrise, you always walked clockwise. But to lay the curse, which people did very rarely, but when they did it, you walked against the sun, you walked anti-clockwise. So you would have walked three times around the altar and you would have lain your curse. But again, the proviso was be careful what you wish for because if it's not deserved, it will haunt you rather than the other person. So very interesting, the cursing stones.

And so many of these things, Cecily, are linked to fairy or fairy beliefs. For people who might not be as familiar, can you draw us a picture of how important the Faerie folk are or were, I suppose, in Irish mythology and folklore, but also how important they were and those beliefs were in forming a sense of Irish identity throughout the centuries. Yeah. The Faeries have been in the past are very dominant in Ireland and especially in rural Ireland. They've dominated much of life. And like I said, you know, they dominated farming, they dominated belief and activity. Obviously we're a more modernised society and lots of external influences. So the connection to

the fairies has waned, although I'm sure they're still out there if you want to look for them. But as you said, Anthony, the fairies are believed to the people the Tuath Dé Donnan. So they were an ancient, mythical, magical race of people that lived and ruled Ireland long, long time ago. And when the Malaysians came to Ireland, another tribe, they invaded Ireland, battle took place, and the Tuath Dé Donnan lost their supremacy of Ireland, and they opted to go into the fairy forts, into the Ring Forts and to live there. So ever since that time, they've had a very powerful effect and

been very close to the people and in all the activities of the people. For example, I know if somebody wanted to build a house, you know, could potentially be on a ferry path. So what they would have done is they would have laid out stones where they potentially were going to put the house, like a very early form of planning permission, and then you would leave them there for a few days. And if the ferries were unhappy with where you wanted to place your house or it was on a ferry path, the stones would be moved, and then you knew you had to move your house also. It's less so now the fairies, but they have been a very dominant force in Irish society. And that thing about, for example, the leprechaun. So the leprechaun was a character in Irish folklore, but it was definitely lesser known. And it could be that we had an old god,

his name was Lú, Lú, the god of the sun. And with the coming of Christianity, Lú and all the gods and the goddesses lost their power basically. So some people might say that Lú was demonised and made small and ridiculed and he's now what's known as the leprechaun, Lú Cúrbán, the little Lú of the little body. So that's an interesting take of it. When I was growing up, the fairies and the folklore, the banshee, the fairy woman were all very strong presences in Irish society. And you have to think like rural electrification came to Ireland in the 1930s. So some people didn't have electricity. They still lived their lives with the season and getting up and going to bed with dawn and dusk and candles until even the 40s and into the 50s. So you can imagine those situations, ghosts and banshees and fairies

still were very strong and still dominated the life of the people. history and how I suppose the stories that we might tell about a particular landscape or a particular belief rise up according to what's happening in society at that moment, and then sometimes die away based on other events and come back again, how it is cyclical. I'm curious, when you're talking about the stones for curing and for cursing, have you come across evidence of how far back these practices go? Do you have a sense of who was using the stones at various points in history? Are you able to trace it through the centuries or is this sort of oral history that's been passed down a little bit more in terms of oral history telling? Definitely the oral tradition is what's strong in Ireland and what has survived. And all the cures and all the stories and the music has all been passed on orally, so very little

was written down. So it's very hard to know how long. My understanding is the balone stones, the cursing stones, all these stones are definitely pre-Christian. And as I said earlier, Christianity Christianised all Muslims and allocated them to a saint, which is the same what happened at the Holy Wells. At the Holy Wells here, we still have thousands of Holy Wells, they're really important. And we have rag trees. So the rag tree again is a tree, could be a hawthorn tree or an ash tree. It's very, very interesting. People would go to the Holy Well, as it's called, holy, but it would be an old spring, pre-Christian spring, I mean there for thousands of years. And they would say their prayers, they would do the Christian rituals at the well. They

may drink the water, splash themselves with the water. But the pre-Christian angle on it is the rag tree. So at these rag trees, people would have tied a little bit of themselves to the tree. So it could be a scarf, a sock, a tissue, a hair bubble for a girl, whatever you happen to have with you. And the belief is that as the time passes and the material, for example, it's a little scarf, as that deteriorates, your illness will deteriorate with it. And also that you're transferring your illness or your problem, psychological, physical, you're transferring it and leaving it at the tree. And another interesting thing in relation to the belief in the fairies and the folklore

was the Pishog. I don't know if you're aware of the Pishog. The Pishog, that's an Irish word and it basically means a charm or a spell. So it's again that kind of concept of transference. If you wanted to inflict bad luck onto somebody, so you didn't like your neighbor and you'd had a falling out with them, what you did was you took something that was perishable, that would rot. So meat or eggs and you wrapped it up and you placed it somewhere close, maybe on your neighbor's lands or close to their house. And the belief was that as the Pishog disintegrated and disappeared, the look of the people would also go with it.

And if you had an animal that died, you could throw the animal, because that's obviously not good if your animal dies and animals are very important. People had very little, so every animal counted. If one of your animals died like a calf, you could throw it into your neighbor's field. And again, the belief was you'd be transferring the bad luck from them, taking it from yourself. The subtitle to your book Cures of Ireland is a treasury of Irish folk remedies. Now within that treasury, was there any particular remedy that stuck out to you? Have you used any of these yourself? What do you find the most effective or the most what's the one that appeals to you the most, the cure? As a child, I actually had jaundice and my father went to the pulpit and he came home

one night and he had a bottle that I had to drink. So it was a herbal cure for jaundice. And in Ireland, we would have had huge herbal knowledge. People had great knowledge of the plants and how to use them. Unfortunately, we've lost a lot of that and it's been disappearing for the last 150 years or more since the famine, certainly, in the mid 1800s. When I was in University Cork University in the 1980s, I started my research and then I had interviewed someone who had that cure, the man that had that cure. And then it was about 20 years later I followed it up again and he had passed the herbal cure to his nephew. And it was, well it was actually convolvulus, which is kind of like bindweed, and a few secret ingredients and some milk and some beer, and all mixed together to this drinkable mixture. And that was the cure. And it was interesting

because I had come across a reference to it. I think it was the 1830s in Northamptonshire, the Midlands of England, where a similar cure had been recorded. The bindweed was combined with beer and a cure for jaundice was created. So I suppose that just shows you how old these cures are and they keep going from decade and decade and century and century and they survive. And then another cure that I really like and I really enjoyed was the cure for the heart problems, which is still being made today, is basically the old man that I interviewed having this cure. You brought some pinhead oatmeal to him and then he performed quite a complicated ritual of prayers. But he took some of the oatmeal that you brought to him, he put it into a

glass, he covered it with a handkerchief, and then he placed the upturned glass with the oatmeal in it. He placed it at a number of points around your chest, around your body. He said his prayers and he placed his hands on your head. So quite a complex ritual. Maybe took 15 minutes. But then when he took away the glass from your body and he removed the covering, the handkerchief, if there was an indentation in the oatmeal, then he knew you had a problem with your heart. And you had to come to him for at least three visits. And every time he came to him, you would have the procedure repeated. And then a time would come he hoped when you remove the handkerchief and the pinhead

old man is unchanged. So that means that your heart is well. And the other interesting thing I found about that cure was when after your visit to him, he told you, take the oatmeal, you know, we make it into porridge, take it home with you and quickly as possible and cook it and eat it. So it's like you're also playing a part in the ritual, which I thought was quite fascinating. Cecily, you spoke there about how folkloric belief and practice, and particularly practice around cures, has diminished in the last 100, 150 years. In the conversations that we've had with our other guests in this series talking about folklore in Wales, in England and in Scotland, there's a real sense that

there's a folklore revival happening across the British Isles and Ireland. I wonder, do you feel that there is a place for folklore in modern day Ireland? Do you think it has a relevance and do you think there is a renewed interest folklore in modern day Ireland? Do you think it has a relevance and do you think there is a renewed interest in it today? Yes, I definitely feel there is and that's what I would have concluded in my book. Plus, I would always have asked the people who make the cures today or in the recent decade what they thought. Generally, a lot of cures, you're right, Maddy, have been lost, but still many of them survive, which is really interesting. Why do they continue to survive? So I believe

that they survive because they're part of a more holistic approach to healing. So we have our modern medicine, which is wonderful, but we also have the traditional medicine. And there's a revival of interest in lots of different types of medicines and alternative therapies. And I believe the traditional Irish cures in the Irish context are part of that kind of broad or more holistic approach to healing. And somebody might physically say a prayer for you or touch you or you might drink a herbal drink as I did, for example, with the dandus. But there's also I feel, there's a psychological and a spiritual component to the traditional cures. And I think that's part of their strength and why

they've managed to survive. So for example, the spiritual one, maybe that people say prayers or people go and they have an expectation and they say their prayers, your healing possibilities are maybe increased because of that. And people find solace and they find comfort in that. You know, religion is important to them or even the saying of prayers or thinking there's a higher power possibly helping you. And then also I would feel very much with the Irish traditional cures, there's a psychological component to it in that it's very much a human interaction. So Maddy, you guys have a cure, for example, shingles, and I'm looking for shingles cure and you make a herbal butter as a lovely young woman I met did that. So I call to you and then we have a chat. We might have a cup of tea. We talk about my problems and a nice human interaction takes place,

shown compassion and they're shown some support. That's very much part of the Helian tradition and generosity on behalf of the people who are giving the cures. So all of those things combined to make it more effective and longer lasting. Well, I think that is a perfect place to wrap this conversation up. Cecily, thank you so much for coming on After Dark. And if you've enjoyed this conversation, do remember that Cecily's book Cures of Ireland, A Treasury of Irish folk remedies, is available now. If you've enjoyed listening to this episode, please go back and listen

to our other episodes about the folk traditions across Britain and Ireland. We'll also find so many other episodes that you can listen to there. Leave us a five star review wherever you get your podcasts and until next time, happy listening. I'm Robert Hartman. And I'm Professor Kate Williams. We're the historians who love a bit of royal mischief and our podcast, Queen's Kings and Dastardly Things is back for another season. We've got murders, scandal and sex.

I'm looking forward to our discussion on fabulous jewelrywellery heists and whether the royals actually have magical powers. Then there's Bad Blind Dates and Royal Terror Plots. Yes, Season 2 is live now. Follow Queens, Kings and dastardly things wherever you get your podcasts to make sure you never miss an episode. you you you you you