Making the Butter Come (Co. Clare)

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making butter come

Fairies haunted the well of Tobesheefra, while even at the holy well of the powerful and vengeful St. Mochulla at Fortanne milk was once offered to them. The butter had refused to ‘come,’ and the mistress of the house, (a Protestant woman of good birth and fair education), as she told me herself about 1878, took some of the refractory milk to the well, made the sign of the cross over it, said the Lord’s Prayer, dug a hole in the mud at the well with her left heel, and went away without looking back. As might have been expected, the butter had ‘come’ by the time she had got home again, and she used to quote the case as ‘proof positive.’ Westropp ‘Clare’ 195-196

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